What is the whole fuss about Fast Car. Has Chapman been the victim of something. Why the universal adulation following the performance.
I put Fast Car in the same category as Nothing Compares 2 U. Iconic songs of their age and always worth listening to again but I wouldn't want a new cover of either by any current artist.
According to the Washington Post, Tracy Chapman would have no chance of having a hit with it herself because she's a "queer Black woman", so the fact that it's been covered is evidence of cis-het white male supremacy, or something...
As Luke Combs's hit cover of Tracy Chapman's "Fast Car" dominates the country charts, it’s bringing up some complicated emotions in fans & singers who know that Chapman, as a queer Black woman, would have an almost zero chance at that achievement herself.
@talkofthecharts Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car” has reached #1 on US iTunes after a live performance with Luke Combs at the #GRAMMYs, nearly 36 years since release.
Ridiculous coverage too, I remember it being a smash hit when it was first released. My father got her album and we played it on loop all the way to a Snowdon climbing trip and back.
"Sorry" was the standout song on that album, although Fast Car was good too. I have a brilliant version of Sorry with Pavarotti on my playlist.
That is a great version
I never realised until about 2016 that I’d only really listened to side one of that album, having only had the tape! ‘For My Lover’ & ‘If Not Now’ are lovely songs too.
I am so old that I have that album on vinyl. "If not now" is a beautiful song.
What is truly remarkable is her articulation. In Fast Car she speaks so fast that it feels like I was drunk but you hear every word. Talkin about a Revolution is another good example.
Actually I meant ‘For You’ not ‘For my lover’
My mate always used to sing “rabbit run” at the end of ‘Don’t you know you better run, run,run…” in TBAR!
What is the whole fuss about Fast Car. Has Chapman been the victim of something. Why the universal adulation following the performance.
I put Fast Car in the same category as Nothing Compares 2 U. Iconic songs of their age and always worth listening to again but I wouldn't want a new cover of either by any current artist.
According to the Washington Post, Tracy Chapman would have no chance of having a hit with it herself because she's a "queer Black woman", so the fact that it's been covered is evidence of cis-het white male supremacy, or something...
As Luke Combs's hit cover of Tracy Chapman's "Fast Car" dominates the country charts, it’s bringing up some complicated emotions in fans & singers who know that Chapman, as a queer Black woman, would have an almost zero chance at that achievement herself.
Within the world of US country music that is undoubtedly true. Black musicians have always struggled within the genre, it is well documented.
Charley Pride succeeded in the 1960s, but seemed to be a one-off.
EDIT: My sincerest apologies, this link should have included a trigger warning as the video clearly shows Taylor Swift singing along to every word...
The discourse around Fast Car becoming a hit again last year was seriously bizarre. People were acting as if she was some unknown "black queer" artist who had been exploited by some white guy making a cover a hit, rather than the reality that she was a major star at the time and he brought her to the attention of a new generation.
It's such a pointless cover though, brings nothing new to the song, just a worse version of the original. I'm sure Chapman doesn't mind the royalties, mind.
It was of course the second such cover in the last few years, the dance version round (I think) 2019 being a bit of a banger.
I like covers, unless they're simply Westlife-style karaoke efforts. At best they cast a whole new light on an old song, at worst they're an interesting variation on the original theme.
Best cover ever being in my view Nothing Compares 2U but there are plenty of others to choose from.
There are some great Dylan covers. His vocals are, after all, something of an acquired taste.
I only found out relatively recently that ‘It Must Be Love’ by Madness was a cover of a Labi Siffre song
What is the whole fuss about Fast Car. Has Chapman been the victim of something. Why the universal adulation following the performance.
I put Fast Car in the same category as Nothing Compares 2 U. Iconic songs of their age and always worth listening to again but I wouldn't want a new cover of either by any current artist.
According to the Washington Post, Tracy Chapman would have no chance of having a hit with it herself because she's a "queer Black woman", so the fact that it's been covered is evidence of cis-het white male supremacy, or something...
As Luke Combs's hit cover of Tracy Chapman's "Fast Car" dominates the country charts, it’s bringing up some complicated emotions in fans & singers who know that Chapman, as a queer Black woman, would have an almost zero chance at that achievement herself.
You're missing a word. Would have no chance of having a country hit.
But it was a hit. The genre debate is entirely artificial.
k.d. lang succeeded in the country genre despite being much more openly 'queer', and Tracy Chapman succeeded as a folk singer despite her colour.
Interesting point on the Assange extradition case (made by a liberal journalist).
Virtually every so-called journalistic defense of Julian Assange ignores the hacking conspiracy AND ALSO that at least for the state cables, he could be convicted JUST on the files he shared with Belarus so it could crack down on pro-western dissidents. https://twitter.com/emptywheel/status/1754512515613012416
I'm guessing I wasn't the only one who believed Sgt Wilson really was Pike's uncle?
You were the only one. Everyone else surmised correctly that Wilson was Pike's father, or thought he was just Mrs Pike's lover. It was common to call unrelated friends of your parents "uncle".
What is the whole fuss about Fast Car. Has Chapman been the victim of something. Why the universal adulation following the performance.
I put Fast Car in the same category as Nothing Compares 2 U. Iconic songs of their age and always worth listening to again but I wouldn't want a new cover of either by any current artist.
According to the Washington Post, Tracy Chapman would have no chance of having a hit with it herself because she's a "queer Black woman", so the fact that it's been covered is evidence of cis-het white male supremacy, or something...
As Luke Combs's hit cover of Tracy Chapman's "Fast Car" dominates the country charts, it’s bringing up some complicated emotions in fans & singers who know that Chapman, as a queer Black woman, would have an almost zero chance at that achievement herself.
You're missing a word. Would have no chance of having a country hit.
But it was a hit. The genre debate is entirely artificial.
k.d. lang succeeded in the country genre despite being much more openly 'queer', and Tracy Chapman succeeded as a folk singer despite her colour.
The genre debate isn't artificial, there does appear to be a barrier to black artists trying to make it within the Country genre, it has been widely remarked upon and analysed.
When are Gogoro electric scooters coming to the UK ? Battery swapping for such small vehicles makes a lot of sense, and gets rid of any charging issues.
https://electrek.co/2022/11/07/first-ride-gogoro-s2-abs-electric-scooter-battery-swap-tel-aviv-israel/ ...Swapping is amazingly simple. There’s no membership card, no NFC key, no nothing. I simply roll up to swap station, slide my used batteries in the dock, and the machine spits out two freshly charged batteries. I then pop them back into my Gogoro S2 ABS scooter and ride off. The entire thing takes perhaps 45 seconds, including parking and leaving. It’s that simple because the batteries are smart enough to know whose scooter they were in, and they communicate all of that info back to Gogoro’s home base. When I pop the batteries into the dock, the GoStation knows they came out of my scooter. It then decides which batteries to give me based on how I ride. A higher-performance rider will likely get newer, fresher batteries while a granny rider might be given batteries that are a few years old and still work fine, but would drain faster at full power. At least that’s the way the system works in Taiwan. Here the batteries are all about a month old, so we’re all getting the good stuff...,/i>
E-scooters seem to have died out round here, or at least are far less common than a few years ago. E-bikes, on the other hand...
When are Gogoro electric scooters coming to the UK ? Battery swapping for such small vehicles makes a lot of sense, and gets rid of any charging issues.
https://electrek.co/2022/11/07/first-ride-gogoro-s2-abs-electric-scooter-battery-swap-tel-aviv-israel/ ...Swapping is amazingly simple. There’s no membership card, no NFC key, no nothing. I simply roll up to swap station, slide my used batteries in the dock, and the machine spits out two freshly charged batteries. I then pop them back into my Gogoro S2 ABS scooter and ride off. The entire thing takes perhaps 45 seconds, including parking and leaving. It’s that simple because the batteries are smart enough to know whose scooter they were in, and they communicate all of that info back to Gogoro’s home base. When I pop the batteries into the dock, the GoStation knows they came out of my scooter. It then decides which batteries to give me based on how I ride. A higher-performance rider will likely get newer, fresher batteries while a granny rider might be given batteries that are a few years old and still work fine, but would drain faster at full power. At least that’s the way the system works in Taiwan. Here the batteries are all about a month old, so we’re all getting the good stuff...,/i>
E-scooters seem to have died out round here, or at least are far less common than a few years ago. E-bikes, on the other hand...
They are talking about electric mopeds, in this case.
Yes, and it's ghastly and it's not just teenagers.
Noticeable uptick in shouty aggression on the Lizzie Line as well. Everyone is just fed up.
That's an important point. It is absolutely not just teenagers.
It's even more annoying in the coffee shop where you're trying to read a book.
Coffee shop? Really?
How come I’ve missed this phenomenon entirely. I know I’m away a lot but I’m still home 5-6 months of the year and I live in London
Anyway it is all the more reason to live inside an Apple Vision Pro. If the world is going to be antisocial, then…
I have had to change place of work from a coffee shop that has lots of people playing videos on phones to a much nicer hotel bar/lounge/library that is full of people also working, taking calls etc. It's only downside is that it is a bus-ride away from my home...
I feel like I encountered loudspeaker music on phones more in the 2000s than today, though admittedly I was taking more buses then*. But it's a thing that's been happening fifteen years or more. Honestly never once encountered the phenomenon in a coffee shop but there again I'm fastidious about my espresso.
TBH I would file under 'O tempora O mores' and move on.
*On the other hand, I get more trains now, but still never seem to see it any more.
Fortunately, I tend to be wearing my Apple Vision Pro with my noise cancelling earbuds*, so I don't even notice these people.
* I have the OnePlus knock offs (2Rs) of the iPod Pros, and they're 99.9% as good for half the price.
McDonalds, a target of boycotts like Starbucks, fails to hit its numbers and blames the current conflict.
"CEO Chris Kempczinski said in a letter posted to LinkedIn last month the “war and associated misinformation” was hurting the company’s performance in the Middle East, pointing to claims McDonalds is supporting Israeli soldiers despite having issued no statements of support. The "disheartening and ill-founded" claims were met with calls for boycotts of the restaurant's franchises in the region."
Having got used to Badenoch being the high flyer here, the only thing mildly interesting is, for me, Penny Mordaunt being such a good second. Someone here was quite passionately arguing for PM as leader the other day (apologies I forget who it was) and this somewhat endorses that view, though it's still Badenoch's to lose:
McDonalds, a target of boycotts like Starbucks, fails to hit its numbers and blames the current conflict.
"CEO Chris Kempczinski said in a letter posted to LinkedIn last month the “war and associated misinformation” was hurting the company’s performance in the Middle East, pointing to claims McDonalds is supporting Israeli soldiers despite having issued no statements of support. The "disheartening and ill-founded" claims were met with calls for boycotts of the restaurant's franchises in the region."
The issue is with the Israeli franchisee, no? Something that McDonalds totally has the ability to do something about if they're so concerned about this boycott.
The suggestion here, for example, is that McDonald's Israel made a statement of support and is giving free food to IDF soldiers:
As someone who has been known to bet a few quid on politics I just wonder if Rishi has thought the optics of this bet through. Collecting a £1,000 wad as shackled migrants are rendered to Rwanda might not be such a good look...
'Still not as great an artiste as Taylor Swift' opines PB.
When I first arrived in the US, almost seven years ago, I was dragged by my daughter (then 9 or 10 years old) to a Taylor Swift concert at the Rose Bowl (capacity 80,000 or so).
As we walked to our seats, a small child addressed me: you're [x]'s dad aren't you? Yep.. it turned out the girl who sat next to my son, was also at the concert.
Which, you might think, would tell you a lot about the demographic.
But, boy, did she put on a show. Not many people can do a decent stadium gig. And certainly not many people can sell the Rose Bowl out at $200 a ticket for five nights in succession. But she did.
And while my daughter is now also int artists like Olivia Rodrigo*, she still absolutely loves Taylor Swift, even as she has dropped every other artist she liked at that age.
Taylor Swift is a rare example of an artist who will still be played twenty years from now.
As someone who has been known to bet a few quid on politics I just wonder if Rishi has thought the optics of this bet through. Collecting a £1,000 wad as shackled migrants are rendered to Rwanda might not be such a good look...
As someone who has been known to bet a few quid on politics I just wonder if Rishi has thought the optics of this bet through. Collecting a £1,000 wad as shackled migrants are rendered to Rwanda might not be such a good look...
Making throwaway £1k bets also re-emphasises his wealth.
When are Gogoro electric scooters coming to the UK ? Battery swapping for such small vehicles makes a lot of sense, and gets rid of any charging issues.
https://electrek.co/2022/11/07/first-ride-gogoro-s2-abs-electric-scooter-battery-swap-tel-aviv-israel/ ...Swapping is amazingly simple. There’s no membership card, no NFC key, no nothing. I simply roll up to swap station, slide my used batteries in the dock, and the machine spits out two freshly charged batteries. I then pop them back into my Gogoro S2 ABS scooter and ride off. The entire thing takes perhaps 45 seconds, including parking and leaving. It’s that simple because the batteries are smart enough to know whose scooter they were in, and they communicate all of that info back to Gogoro’s home base. When I pop the batteries into the dock, the GoStation knows they came out of my scooter. It then decides which batteries to give me based on how I ride. A higher-performance rider will likely get newer, fresher batteries while a granny rider might be given batteries that are a few years old and still work fine, but would drain faster at full power. At least that’s the way the system works in Taiwan. Here the batteries are all about a month old, so we’re all getting the good stuff...,/i>
E-scooters seem to have died out round here, or at least are far less common than a few years ago. E-bikes, on the other hand...
I have the electric Brompton. It was not cheap, but oh my goodness, it's AMAZING. Folds into the smallest of spaces in pretty much any apartment. If it starts raining you can chuck it in the back of an Uber. No problems taking it on the train up to Bedford.
And for getting around London quickly, I doubt there will ever be a better way.
I was at a meeting in Borough and at the end, everyone headed to dinner near Euston. Some people jumped on the tube. My CFO had a call, so he took a cab. And I went on the Brompton.
I arrived in 20 minutes. Around ten minutes later the tube people got there. And another fifteen minutes layer, the taxi taker got there.
As someone who has been known to bet a few quid on politics I just wonder if Rishi has thought the optics of this bet through. Collecting a £1,000 wad as shackled migrants are rendered to Rwanda might not be such a good look...
Making throwaway £1k bets also re-emphasises his wealth.
Labour have picked up on that.
“Not a lot of people facing rising mortgages, bills and food prices are casually dropping £1,000 bets. It just shows that Rishi Sunak is totally out of touch with working people.”
Having got used to Badenoch being the high flyer here, the only thing mildly interesting is, for me, Penny Mordaunt being such a good second. Someone here was quite passionately arguing for PM as leader the other day (apologies I forget who it was) and this somewhat endorses that view, though it's still Badenoch's to lose:
When are Gogoro electric scooters coming to the UK ? Battery swapping for such small vehicles makes a lot of sense, and gets rid of any charging issues.
https://electrek.co/2022/11/07/first-ride-gogoro-s2-abs-electric-scooter-battery-swap-tel-aviv-israel/ ...Swapping is amazingly simple. There’s no membership card, no NFC key, no nothing. I simply roll up to swap station, slide my used batteries in the dock, and the machine spits out two freshly charged batteries. I then pop them back into my Gogoro S2 ABS scooter and ride off. The entire thing takes perhaps 45 seconds, including parking and leaving. It’s that simple because the batteries are smart enough to know whose scooter they were in, and they communicate all of that info back to Gogoro’s home base. When I pop the batteries into the dock, the GoStation knows they came out of my scooter. It then decides which batteries to give me based on how I ride. A higher-performance rider will likely get newer, fresher batteries while a granny rider might be given batteries that are a few years old and still work fine, but would drain faster at full power. At least that’s the way the system works in Taiwan. Here the batteries are all about a month old, so we’re all getting the good stuff...,/i>
Kudos to these guys for trying, but I struggle to see this scheme being a success outside of some very dense urban areas. Recharge time is only one of the many problems with electric scooters. A 40-50 mile range means you realistically can't go more than about 20 miles from a battery station, quite possibly much less in areas colder and less flat than downtown Tel Aviv or Taipei.
The space required for the batteries means electrics have much less under-seat storage than a petrol scooter, which removes much of their flexibility as a useful vehicle rather than strictly personal transport.
And $37 a month isn't particularly cheap. I use my petrol scooter extensively and don't pay that much in fuel, even with UK petrol prices. Filling the tank costs less than £9 and gives an endurance of around 160-200 miles.
Even with battery swaps, electric scooters make sense in a particular environment - short trips in cities - already well served by e-bikes that are cheaper and don't require training, safety gear, insurance, etc.
Having got used to Badenoch being the high flyer here, the only thing mildly interesting is, for me, Penny Mordaunt being such a good second. Someone here was quite passionately arguing for PM as leader the other day (apologies I forget who it was) and this somewhat endorses that view, though it's still Badenoch's to lose:
The problem the Tories have right now is you cannot fix the issues facing the country now with Tory policy - cutting taxes and shrinking the state will not help anyone (not that it ever does, but at times it gives the illusion of being good or the political environment is persuadable to that position). After austerity and Brexit and Covid people know that public services can be and should be better, that necessary work should be better paid and that it really isn't immigrants that are gumming up the system with their vast numbers because the system is just being defunded or outsourced.
Mordaunt or Badenoch would quickly become as unpopular as Sunak once leading government. I think the only way to not would be a) immediately announce policy u-turns and start spending money or b) immediately call a GE and promise to start spending money and paint SKS as the one who wants to continue austerity measures. And by spending money I don't mean wracking up more debt by lowering taxes on everyone / the highest earners - I mean giving local councils the funding they need, doing big budget infrastructure spending, doing a proper jobs and social housing programme - etc. etc.
The above is why I also don't think SKS will be particularly popular if / when he become PM. He is also seemingly signed up to continue Osbornomics with Reeves, and that is deeply unpopular. He is just riding the fact that the Tories are more shit and the current government.
As someone who has been known to bet a few quid on politics I just wonder if Rishi has thought the optics of this bet through. Collecting a £1,000 wad as shackled migrants are rendered to Rwanda might not be such a good look...
Making throwaway £1k bets also re-emphasises his wealth.
Labour have picked up on that.
“Not a lot of people facing rising mortgages, bills and food prices are casually dropping £1,000 bets. It just shows that Rishi Sunak is totally out of touch with working people.”
Yeah this never worked for Cameron or Boris and it won’t work here. People are grownups and understand he is considerably richer than them.
His lot are probably quite happy if the message gets repeated because he’s clearly fishing for the type of voter who supports the policy.
This guy is surely right. This isn’t a new and better version of VR and AR - this is the future of all interaction with screens. You will put on sleek trendy glasses and you will have virtual keyboards you can type on, virtual computers to show your work PLUS all the apps and movies and games (and real time lip synch translation) - actual hardware from TVs to phones to laptops will be redundant. You won’t need them. Anyone who makes any of that hardware should be worried
And they won’t be clunky oculus/fighter pilot helmets, they will be like cool Raybans
Even it it worked perfectly, the experience depends on you being the only person weaing one. If everyone is wearing them then it destroys the illusion.
What illusion ? Replacing a TV, laptop, or tablet isn't an 'illusion', but a real thing. It's only the case of mobile phones - where you lock the world out when using them in any case - that's slightly more problematic. And even that's just down to the technology improving. I spend half the year wearing sunglasses anyway, because of my eyesight.
What mass uptake would do to social interaction is more concerning.
"Augmented reality" needs reality as well as augmentation.
If you're the only person wearing one, then you can have normal reality augmented by your device, but if everyone is wearing one, it changes the environment too in a much more fundamental way than smartphones do.
1) virtual keyboards sound awful. You need some sort of physical feedback, as the ZX81 demonstrated. Perhaps some sort of gloves with little sensors which clicked the fingers would do the trick, though you'd look a berk extravagantly preparing for a spot of typing.
2) as with all new technologies, this will definitely be used for p*rn to a surprisingly large degree. People (not all people, obvs) will be walking around in a constant state of arousal.
If we can get close to Artificial General Intelligence I’m pretty sure we can create “satisfying virtual keyboard clicky sounds”
It's got to have the feel of pressing a button too. Just mashing your fingers into empty air feels ridiculous. Try it now. Most unsatisfying, clicks or not. I'm sure it can be done. But it's not obvious how. But meanwhile it's very obvious that human interaction may become very odd, and that, say, if you are, for example, a barrista, of those customers in their snazzy AI glasses, an uncomfortably high proportion of them will be seeing you portrayed naked, or dressed in a manner of their choosing which is almost certainly not a manner of your choosing, or actually with someone else's face entirely.
Maybe - or maybe not
Imagine everytime you press the virtual key - say the letter "c" - to commence typing the sentence "Cookie isn't thinking very hard" - then when you hit the right key a massive C explodes for a millisecond in your face, with a brilliantly clicky noise, then O then O then K, the reflexive stimulation might easily be enough to compensate for the lack of tangible sensation in your fingertips
In other words, we will get over it, so much cool technology feels bizarre and unrealistic before it happens. eg Imagine how people reacted to the first telephones. Talking into a weird bakelite mouth-cup thingy, to the disembodied voice of someone a hundred miles away? - no, that's unnatural, won't work, you need to have someone in front of you so you can properly converse, read their faces etc etc
And of course for this tech to replace all screens it doesn't need to be perfect, just good enough that this is the only screen you need and then you can junk all the others and save a lot of time, money and space
TV is a poser. People like watching TV socially. Yet these personal screens will give a vastly better TV experience
Hard to know which will win, in that instance
Well, maybe. As I suggested, the thing which first came to mind was the unsatisfactory nature of the ZX81 keyboard. But you may be right. I think Scott's suggestion downthread (the name for which I've already forgotten - 'haptic gloves'?) is better though. I do realise I'm in the role here if pointing out tiny flaws in massive concepts. It's an issue to be overcome, rather than something rendering the whole enterprise pointless.
That said, I do cleave to my position that, broadly, all technology since about 2005 is stupid and pointless and that the world was completely fine then and that I was completely satisfied with everything I could do then and that none of the things I can do with any new technology is worth the effort of learning to do so. *pauses for breath for a moment*
On telephones, I'm reminded of the people you sometimes see who feel that the way to use a phone is to hold it directly in front of them, end on, turning the volume up massively to compensate for the fact that the earpiece is not next to their ear. You'd think this would be a habit of some doddery old bird who'd only just come across the telephone, but it's mainly young people. Must be one of those things which is cool despite the impracticality, like ridiculously low slung trousers.
Do people watch TV socially any more? Increasingly in my house its an atomised activity. Watching TV socially was borne out of a lack of TVs and indeed a lack of TV programmes, which led to generalist TV for a mass audience. That seems to be withering in favour of everyone watching their own thing on their own devices.
There's a well researched phenomenon describing the age at which we see all new tech as "pointless frippery".
Having got used to Badenoch being the high flyer here, the only thing mildly interesting is, for me, Penny Mordaunt being such a good second. Someone here was quite passionately arguing for PM as leader the other day (apologies I forget who it was) and this somewhat endorses that view, though it's still Badenoch's to lose:
The problem the Tories have right now is you cannot fix the issues facing the country now with Tory policy - cutting taxes and shrinking the state will not help anyone (not that it ever does, but at times it gives the illusion of being good or the political environment is persuadable to that position). After austerity and Brexit and Covid people know that public services can be and should be better, that necessary work should be better paid and that it really isn't immigrants that are gumming up the system with their vast numbers because the system is just being defunded or outsourced.
Mordaunt or Badenoch would quickly become as unpopular as Sunak once leading government. I think the only way to not would be a) immediately announce policy u-turns and start spending money or b) immediately call a GE and promise to start spending money and paint SKS as the one who wants to continue austerity measures. And by spending money I don't mean wracking up more debt by lowering taxes on everyone / the highest earners - I mean giving local councils the funding they need, doing big budget infrastructure spending, doing a proper jobs and social housing programme - etc. etc.
The above is why I also don't think SKS will be particularly popular if / when he become PM. He is also seemingly signed up to continue Osbornomics with Reeves, and that is deeply unpopular. He is just riding the fact that the Tories are more shit and the current government.
I'm afraid your argument fails in the first sentence. 'not that it ever does' implies that the state can never be too large nor taxes too high. That is a statement so patently absurd that surely even you should be able to look at it and see it for the brainfart it is.
Tax and spend is at an all time high. At the same time, public sector productivity is down by 7%. Even SKS has said that that taxes are too high and that public services need reform rather than being hosed with money. I'm not sure if that's a popular/ist platform but it is sure as shit a necessary one, even an urgent one. And I think if people see policies, perhaps small policies, that help with the process of earning and making money (so we can actually pay for these public services we need) being delivered, they will respect that.
I'm still not sure Mordaunt is the one to do it though. She has a sort of small like-minded fan-club, the centrist Brexiteers, people like Angela Leadsom, but I'm not sure it's enough to get anything done that she can fight an election on. But at this point she deserves a chance.
'Still not as great an artiste as Taylor Swift' opines PB.
When I first arrived in the US, almost seven years ago, I was dragged by my daughter (then 9 or 10 years old) to a Taylor Swift concert at the Rose Bowl (capacity 80,000 or so).
As we walked to our seats, a small child addressed me: you're [x]'s dad aren't you? Yep.. it turned out the girl who sat next to my son, was also at the concert.
Which, you might think, would tell you a lot about the demographic.
But, boy, did she put on a show. Not many people can do a decent stadium gig. And certainly not many people can sell the Rose Bowl out at $200 a ticket for five nights in succession. But she did.
And while my daughter is now also int artists like Olivia Rodrigo*, she still absolutely loves Taylor Swift, even as she has dropped every other artist she liked at that age.
Taylor Swift is a rare example of an artist who will still be played twenty years from now.
* Who is excellent, by the way
My daughter claims not to be a massive Taylor Swift fan but I pointed out to her that her 17th birthday party playlist had more songs by her than any other artist... Other top ranking artists in the playlist were Little Simz and Joy Crooks, and ABBA.
This guy is surely right. This isn’t a new and better version of VR and AR - this is the future of all interaction with screens. You will put on sleek trendy glasses and you will have virtual keyboards you can type on, virtual computers to show your work PLUS all the apps and movies and games (and real time lip synch translation) - actual hardware from TVs to phones to laptops will be redundant. You won’t need them. Anyone who makes any of that hardware should be worried
And they won’t be clunky oculus/fighter pilot helmets, they will be like cool Raybans
Even it it worked perfectly, the experience depends on you being the only person weaing one. If everyone is wearing them then it destroys the illusion.
What illusion ? Replacing a TV, laptop, or tablet isn't an 'illusion', but a real thing. It's only the case of mobile phones - where you lock the world out when using them in any case - that's slightly more problematic. And even that's just down to the technology improving. I spend half the year wearing sunglasses anyway, because of my eyesight.
What mass uptake would do to social interaction is more concerning.
"Augmented reality" needs reality as well as augmentation.
If you're the only person wearing one, then you can have normal reality augmented by your device, but if everyone is wearing one, it changes the environment too in a much more fundamental way than smartphones do.
1) virtual keyboards sound awful. You need some sort of physical feedback, as the ZX81 demonstrated. Perhaps some sort of gloves with little sensors which clicked the fingers would do the trick, though you'd look a berk extravagantly preparing for a spot of typing.
2) as with all new technologies, this will definitely be used for p*rn to a surprisingly large degree. People (not all people, obvs) will be walking around in a constant state of arousal.
If we can get close to Artificial General Intelligence I’m pretty sure we can create “satisfying virtual keyboard clicky sounds”
It's got to have the feel of pressing a button too. Just mashing your fingers into empty air feels ridiculous. Try it now. Most unsatisfying, clicks or not. I'm sure it can be done. But it's not obvious how. But meanwhile it's very obvious that human interaction may become very odd, and that, say, if you are, for example, a barrista, of those customers in their snazzy AI glasses, an uncomfortably high proportion of them will be seeing you portrayed naked, or dressed in a manner of their choosing which is almost certainly not a manner of your choosing, or actually with someone else's face entirely.
Maybe - or maybe not
Imagine everytime you press the virtual key - say the letter "c" - to commence typing the sentence "Cookie isn't thinking very hard" - then when you hit the right key a massive C explodes for a millisecond in your face, with a brilliantly clicky noise, then O then O then K, the reflexive stimulation might easily be enough to compensate for the lack of tangible sensation in your fingertips
In other words, we will get over it, so much cool technology feels bizarre and unrealistic before it happens. eg Imagine how people reacted to the first telephones. Talking into a weird bakelite mouth-cup thingy, to the disembodied voice of someone a hundred miles away? - no, that's unnatural, won't work, you need to have someone in front of you so you can properly converse, read their faces etc etc
And of course for this tech to replace all screens it doesn't need to be perfect, just good enough that this is the only screen you need and then you can junk all the others and save a lot of time, money and space
TV is a poser. People like watching TV socially. Yet these personal screens will give a vastly better TV experience
Hard to know which will win, in that instance
Well, maybe. As I suggested, the thing which first came to mind was the unsatisfactory nature of the ZX81 keyboard. But you may be right. I think Scott's suggestion downthread (the name for which I've already forgotten - 'haptic gloves'?) is better though. I do realise I'm in the role here if pointing out tiny flaws in massive concepts. It's an issue to be overcome, rather than something rendering the whole enterprise pointless.
That said, I do cleave to my position that, broadly, all technology since about 2005 is stupid and pointless and that the world was completely fine then and that I was completely satisfied with everything I could do then and that none of the things I can do with any new technology is worth the effort of learning to do so. *pauses for breath for a moment*
On telephones, I'm reminded of the people you sometimes see who feel that the way to use a phone is to hold it directly in front of them, end on, turning the volume up massively to compensate for the fact that the earpiece is not next to their ear. You'd think this would be a habit of some doddery old bird who'd only just come across the telephone, but it's mainly young people. Must be one of those things which is cool despite the impracticality, like ridiculously low slung trousers.
Do people watch TV socially any more? Increasingly in my house its an atomised activity. Watching TV socially was borne out of a lack of TVs and indeed a lack of TV programmes, which led to generalist TV for a mass audience. That seems to be withering in favour of everyone watching their own thing on their own devices.
There's a well researched phenomenon describing the age at which we see all new tech as "pointless frippery".
That shouldn't be used as an ad hominen argument against criticism from people with experience. Steve Jobs didn't oppose the stylus as an input device because he was past it.
What do we think of this? It actually came up separately when my partner & I were talking yesterday. A boy at my sons nursery is a 2yo vegan as is his 5yo brother. I think it’s fair enough if their parents are vegans that they bring they’d children up the same, but we have other friends who are vegetarians & vegans that happily cook meat for their kids
Sir Keir didn’t allow his children to eat meat until they were 10. I thought if the children were given meat then decided to go veggie, they might hold it against their parents for forcing meat on them.
As someone who has been known to bet a few quid on politics I just wonder if Rishi has thought the optics of this bet through. Collecting a £1,000 wad as shackled migrants are rendered to Rwanda might not be such a good look...
Making throwaway £1k bets also re-emphasises his wealth.
Labour have picked up on that.
“Not a lot of people facing rising mortgages, bills and food prices are casually dropping £1,000 bets. It just shows that Rishi Sunak is totally out of touch with working people.”
Yeah this never worked for Cameron or Boris and it won’t work here. People are grownups and understand he is considerably richer than them.
His lot are probably quite happy if the message gets repeated because he’s clearly fishing for the type of voter who supports the policy.
Difference is that people gave Dave and Boris the benefit of the doubt, at least in the early days.
(It's also why Bring Back Boris doesn't work. Enough people gave 2019 Boris the BotD. Enough of them don't any more. Probably something similar goes for 2019 Jez vs 2017 Jez.)
It is a bugger of a question to answer, though. Turn the bet down, and you open up "don't you think it will work?". And Rishi doesn't have the heft to close the question down with a "You know, that's not a sensible way to think about this. The real issue is..."
But if you tie yourself to a silly policy and do an interview with Piers Morgan on a tiny TV channel, you deserve everything you get.
Yes, a few minutes after Vanilla said we ought to be, but I don't know if that is something @rcs1000 can look at or if it just means Vanilla was a tad premature.
This guy is surely right. This isn’t a new and better version of VR and AR - this is the future of all interaction with screens. You will put on sleek trendy glasses and you will have virtual keyboards you can type on, virtual computers to show your work PLUS all the apps and movies and games (and real time lip synch translation) - actual hardware from TVs to phones to laptops will be redundant. You won’t need them. Anyone who makes any of that hardware should be worried
And they won’t be clunky oculus/fighter pilot helmets, they will be like cool Raybans
Even it it worked perfectly, the experience depends on you being the only person weaing one. If everyone is wearing them then it destroys the illusion.
What illusion ? Replacing a TV, laptop, or tablet isn't an 'illusion', but a real thing. It's only the case of mobile phones - where you lock the world out when using them in any case - that's slightly more problematic. And even that's just down to the technology improving. I spend half the year wearing sunglasses anyway, because of my eyesight.
What mass uptake would do to social interaction is more concerning.
"Augmented reality" needs reality as well as augmentation.
If you're the only person wearing one, then you can have normal reality augmented by your device, but if everyone is wearing one, it changes the environment too in a much more fundamental way than smartphones do.
1) virtual keyboards sound awful. You need some sort of physical feedback, as the ZX81 demonstrated. Perhaps some sort of gloves with little sensors which clicked the fingers would do the trick, though you'd look a berk extravagantly preparing for a spot of typing.
2) as with all new technologies, this will definitely be used for p*rn to a surprisingly large degree. People (not all people, obvs) will be walking around in a constant state of arousal.
If we can get close to Artificial General Intelligence I’m pretty sure we can create “satisfying virtual keyboard clicky sounds”
It's got to have the feel of pressing a button too. Just mashing your fingers into empty air feels ridiculous. Try it now. Most unsatisfying, clicks or not. I'm sure it can be done. But it's not obvious how. But meanwhile it's very obvious that human interaction may become very odd, and that, say, if you are, for example, a barrista, of those customers in their snazzy AI glasses, an uncomfortably high proportion of them will be seeing you portrayed naked, or dressed in a manner of their choosing which is almost certainly not a manner of your choosing, or actually with someone else's face entirely.
Maybe - or maybe not
Imagine everytime you press the virtual key - say the letter "c" - to commence typing the sentence "Cookie isn't thinking very hard" - then when you hit the right key a massive C explodes for a millisecond in your face, with a brilliantly clicky noise, then O then O then K, the reflexive stimulation might easily be enough to compensate for the lack of tangible sensation in your fingertips
In other words, we will get over it, so much cool technology feels bizarre and unrealistic before it happens. eg Imagine how people reacted to the first telephones. Talking into a weird bakelite mouth-cup thingy, to the disembodied voice of someone a hundred miles away? - no, that's unnatural, won't work, you need to have someone in front of you so you can properly converse, read their faces etc etc
And of course for this tech to replace all screens it doesn't need to be perfect, just good enough that this is the only screen you need and then you can junk all the others and save a lot of time, money and space
TV is a poser. People like watching TV socially. Yet these personal screens will give a vastly better TV experience
Hard to know which will win, in that instance
Well, maybe. As I suggested, the thing which first came to mind was the unsatisfactory nature of the ZX81 keyboard. But you may be right. I think Scott's suggestion downthread (the name for which I've already forgotten - 'haptic gloves'?) is better though. I do realise I'm in the role here if pointing out tiny flaws in massive concepts. It's an issue to be overcome, rather than something rendering the whole enterprise pointless.
That said, I do cleave to my position that, broadly, all technology since about 2005 is stupid and pointless and that the world was completely fine then and that I was completely satisfied with everything I could do then and that none of the things I can do with any new technology is worth the effort of learning to do so. *pauses for breath for a moment*
On telephones, I'm reminded of the people you sometimes see who feel that the way to use a phone is to hold it directly in front of them, end on, turning the volume up massively to compensate for the fact that the earpiece is not next to their ear. You'd think this would be a habit of some doddery old bird who'd only just come across the telephone, but it's mainly young people. Must be one of those things which is cool despite the impracticality, like ridiculously low slung trousers.
Do people watch TV socially any more? Increasingly in my house its an atomised activity. Watching TV socially was borne out of a lack of TVs and indeed a lack of TV programmes, which led to generalist TV for a mass audience. That seems to be withering in favour of everyone watching their own thing on their own devices.
There's a well researched phenomenon describing the age at which we see all new tech as "pointless frippery".
That shouldn't be used as an ad hominen argument against criticism from people with experience. Steve Jobs didn't oppose the stylus as an input device because he was past it.
Quite right. These new fangled copper hatchets are just toys for the lazy rich. Real people will stick with flint.
@theSNP has reported Rishi Sunak over a potential breach of the ministerial code by accepting a £1,000 bet that the first plane to #Rwanda will leave before the next election.
As someone who has been known to bet a few quid on politics I just wonder if Rishi has thought the optics of this bet through. Collecting a £1,000 wad as shackled migrants are rendered to Rwanda might not be such a good look...
Making throwaway £1k bets also re-emphasises his wealth.
Labour have picked up on that.
“Not a lot of people facing rising mortgages, bills and food prices are casually dropping £1,000 bets. It just shows that Rishi Sunak is totally out of touch with working people.”
Yeah this never worked for Cameron or Boris and it won’t work here. People are grownups and understand he is considerably richer than them.
His lot are probably quite happy if the message gets repeated because he’s clearly fishing for the type of voter who supports the policy.
Difference is that people gave Dave and Boris the benefit of the doubt, at least in the early days.
(It's also why Bring Back Boris doesn't work. Enough people gave 2019 Boris the BotD. Enough of them don't any more. Probably something similar goes for 2019 Jez vs 2017 Jez.)
It is a bugger of a question to answer, though. Turn the bet down, and you open up "don't you think it will work?". And Rishi doesn't have the heft to close the question down with a "You know, that's not a sensible way to think about this. The real issue is..."
But if you tie yourself to a silly policy and do an interview with Piers Morgan on a tiny TV channel, you deserve everything you get.
Also, it's a complete breach of the most basic public sector ethics and conduct. The money will go to the PM if he wins - he has disposal of how it is spent.
As someone who has been known to bet a few quid on politics I just wonder if Rishi has thought the optics of this bet through. Collecting a £1,000 wad as shackled migrants are rendered to Rwanda might not be such a good look...
Making throwaway £1k bets also re-emphasises his wealth.
Labour have picked up on that.
“Not a lot of people facing rising mortgages, bills and food prices are casually dropping £1,000 bets. It just shows that Rishi Sunak is totally out of touch with working people.”
Yeah this never worked for Cameron or Boris and it won’t work here. People are grownups and understand he is considerably richer than them.
His lot are probably quite happy if the message gets repeated because he’s clearly fishing for the type of voter who supports the policy.
Difference is that people gave Dave and Boris the benefit of the doubt, at least in the early days.
(It's also why Bring Back Boris doesn't work. Enough people gave 2019 Boris the BotD. Enough of them don't any more. Probably something similar goes for 2019 Jez vs 2017 Jez.)
It is a bugger of a question to answer, though. Turn the bet down, and you open up "don't you think it will work?". And Rishi doesn't have the heft to close the question down with a "You know, that's not a sensible way to think about this. The real issue is..."
But if you tie yourself to a silly policy and do an interview with Piers Morgan on a tiny TV channel, you deserve everything you get.
Also, it's a complete breach of the most basic public sector ethics and conduct. The money will go to the PM if he wins - he has disposal of how it is spent.
Surely he will nominate a charity that it will be donated to?
As someone who has been known to bet a few quid on politics I just wonder if Rishi has thought the optics of this bet through. Collecting a £1,000 wad as shackled migrants are rendered to Rwanda might not be such a good look...
Making throwaway £1k bets also re-emphasises his wealth.
Labour have picked up on that.
“Not a lot of people facing rising mortgages, bills and food prices are casually dropping £1,000 bets. It just shows that Rishi Sunak is totally out of touch with working people.”
Yeah this never worked for Cameron or Boris and it won’t work here. People are grownups and understand he is considerably richer than them.
His lot are probably quite happy if the message gets repeated because he’s clearly fishing for the type of voter who supports the policy.
Difference is that people gave Dave and Boris the benefit of the doubt, at least in the early days.
(It's also why Bring Back Boris doesn't work. Enough people gave 2019 Boris the BotD. Enough of them don't any more. Probably something similar goes for 2019 Jez vs 2017 Jez.)
It is a bugger of a question to answer, though. Turn the bet down, and you open up "don't you think it will work?". And Rishi doesn't have the heft to close the question down with a "You know, that's not a sensible way to think about this. The real issue is..."
But if you tie yourself to a silly policy and do an interview with Piers Morgan on a tiny TV channel, you deserve everything you get.
Also, it's a complete breach of the most basic public sector ethics and conduct. The money will go to the PM if he wins - he has disposal of how it is spent.
Surely he will nominate a charity that it will be donated to?
No good. He gets the money in the most basic sense. He's got the disposal of it, as I said.
Having got used to Badenoch being the high flyer here, the only thing mildly interesting is, for me, Penny Mordaunt being such a good second. Someone here was quite passionately arguing for PM as leader the other day (apologies I forget who it was) and this somewhat endorses that view, though it's still Badenoch's to lose:
The problem the Tories have right now is you cannot fix the issues facing the country now with Tory policy - cutting taxes and shrinking the state will not help anyone (not that it ever does, but at times it gives the illusion of being good or the political environment is persuadable to that position). After austerity and Brexit and Covid people know that public services can be and should be better, that necessary work should be better paid and that it really isn't immigrants that are gumming up the system with their vast numbers because the system is just being defunded or outsourced.
Mordaunt or Badenoch would quickly become as unpopular as Sunak once leading government. I think the only way to not would be a) immediately announce policy u-turns and start spending money or b) immediately call a GE and promise to start spending money and paint SKS as the one who wants to continue austerity measures. And by spending money I don't mean wracking up more debt by lowering taxes on everyone / the highest earners - I mean giving local councils the funding they need, doing big budget infrastructure spending, doing a proper jobs and social housing programme - etc. etc.
The above is why I also don't think SKS will be particularly popular if / when he become PM. He is also seemingly signed up to continue Osbornomics with Reeves, and that is deeply unpopular. He is just riding the fact that the Tories are more shit and the current government.
This analysis leaves out the difficult part. We are currently borrowing over £100 bn per annum, with tax also at record levels, while everyone complains that nothing works, and every part of the state needs more expenditure just to maintain normality; the context being a debt of £2 tn, the interest payments on which are already impoverishing us.
So the difficult bit is this: How much more spending? How funded and from whom? How much more borrowed? How do you plan to pay it back? If you leave all that out or are vague about it the rest of the plan means nothing.
This guy is surely right. This isn’t a new and better version of VR and AR - this is the future of all interaction with screens. You will put on sleek trendy glasses and you will have virtual keyboards you can type on, virtual computers to show your work PLUS all the apps and movies and games (and real time lip synch translation) - actual hardware from TVs to phones to laptops will be redundant. You won’t need them. Anyone who makes any of that hardware should be worried
And they won’t be clunky oculus/fighter pilot helmets, they will be like cool Raybans
Even it it worked perfectly, the experience depends on you being the only person weaing one. If everyone is wearing them then it destroys the illusion.
What illusion ? Replacing a TV, laptop, or tablet isn't an 'illusion', but a real thing. It's only the case of mobile phones - where you lock the world out when using them in any case - that's slightly more problematic. And even that's just down to the technology improving. I spend half the year wearing sunglasses anyway, because of my eyesight.
What mass uptake would do to social interaction is more concerning.
"Augmented reality" needs reality as well as augmentation.
If you're the only person wearing one, then you can have normal reality augmented by your device, but if everyone is wearing one, it changes the environment too in a much more fundamental way than smartphones do.
1) virtual keyboards sound awful. You need some sort of physical feedback, as the ZX81 demonstrated. Perhaps some sort of gloves with little sensors which clicked the fingers would do the trick, though you'd look a berk extravagantly preparing for a spot of typing.
2) as with all new technologies, this will definitely be used for p*rn to a surprisingly large degree. People (not all people, obvs) will be walking around in a constant state of arousal.
If we can get close to Artificial General Intelligence I’m pretty sure we can create “satisfying virtual keyboard clicky sounds”
It's got to have the feel of pressing a button too. Just mashing your fingers into empty air feels ridiculous. Try it now. Most unsatisfying, clicks or not. I'm sure it can be done. But it's not obvious how. But meanwhile it's very obvious that human interaction may become very odd, and that, say, if you are, for example, a barrista, of those customers in their snazzy AI glasses, an uncomfortably high proportion of them will be seeing you portrayed naked, or dressed in a manner of their choosing which is almost certainly not a manner of your choosing, or actually with someone else's face entirely.
Maybe - or maybe not
Imagine everytime you press the virtual key - say the letter "c" - to commence typing the sentence "Cookie isn't thinking very hard" - then when you hit the right key a massive C explodes for a millisecond in your face, with a brilliantly clicky noise, then O then O then K, the reflexive stimulation might easily be enough to compensate for the lack of tangible sensation in your fingertips
In other words, we will get over it, so much cool technology feels bizarre and unrealistic before it happens. eg Imagine how people reacted to the first telephones. Talking into a weird bakelite mouth-cup thingy, to the disembodied voice of someone a hundred miles away? - no, that's unnatural, won't work, you need to have someone in front of you so you can properly converse, read their faces etc etc
And of course for this tech to replace all screens it doesn't need to be perfect, just good enough that this is the only screen you need and then you can junk all the others and save a lot of time, money and space
TV is a poser. People like watching TV socially. Yet these personal screens will give a vastly better TV experience
Hard to know which will win, in that instance
Well, maybe. As I suggested, the thing which first came to mind was the unsatisfactory nature of the ZX81 keyboard. But you may be right. I think Scott's suggestion downthread (the name for which I've already forgotten - 'haptic gloves'?) is better though. I do realise I'm in the role here if pointing out tiny flaws in massive concepts. It's an issue to be overcome, rather than something rendering the whole enterprise pointless.
That said, I do cleave to my position that, broadly, all technology since about 2005 is stupid and pointless and that the world was completely fine then and that I was completely satisfied with everything I could do then and that none of the things I can do with any new technology is worth the effort of learning to do so. *pauses for breath for a moment*
On telephones, I'm reminded of the people you sometimes see who feel that the way to use a phone is to hold it directly in front of them, end on, turning the volume up massively to compensate for the fact that the earpiece is not next to their ear. You'd think this would be a habit of some doddery old bird who'd only just come across the telephone, but it's mainly young people. Must be one of those things which is cool despite the impracticality, like ridiculously low slung trousers.
Do people watch TV socially any more? Increasingly in my house its an atomised activity. Watching TV socially was borne out of a lack of TVs and indeed a lack of TV programmes, which led to generalist TV for a mass audience. That seems to be withering in favour of everyone watching their own thing on their own devices.
There's a well researched phenomenon describing the age at which we see all new tech as "pointless frippery".
That shouldn't be used as an ad hominen argument against criticism from people with experience. Steve Jobs didn't oppose the stylus as an input device because he was past it.
As someone who has been known to bet a few quid on politics I just wonder if Rishi has thought the optics of this bet through. Collecting a £1,000 wad as shackled migrants are rendered to Rwanda might not be such a good look...
Making throwaway £1k bets also re-emphasises his wealth.
Labour have picked up on that.
“Not a lot of people facing rising mortgages, bills and food prices are casually dropping £1,000 bets. It just shows that Rishi Sunak is totally out of touch with working people.”
Yeah this never worked for Cameron or Boris and it won’t work here. People are grownups and understand he is considerably richer than them.
His lot are probably quite happy if the message gets repeated because he’s clearly fishing for the type of voter who supports the policy.
Difference is that people gave Dave and Boris the benefit of the doubt, at least in the early days.
(It's also why Bring Back Boris doesn't work. Enough people gave 2019 Boris the BotD. Enough of them don't any more. Probably something similar goes for 2019 Jez vs 2017 Jez.)
It is a bugger of a question to answer, though. Turn the bet down, and you open up "don't you think it will work?". And Rishi doesn't have the heft to close the question down with a "You know, that's not a sensible way to think about this. The real issue is..."
But if you tie yourself to a silly policy and do an interview with Piers Morgan on a tiny TV channel, you deserve everything you get.
Also, it's a complete breach of the most basic public sector ethics and conduct. The money will go to the PM if he wins - he has disposal of how it is spent.
Surely he will nominate a charity that it will be donated to?
No good. He gets the money in the most basic sense. He's got the disposal of it, as I said.
And no charity in their right mind will touch it.
Much as I think Rishi's a cock for getting involved in Piers' publicity stunt, I can't see the voter on the Clapham omnibus imagining for a moment Rishi can be bribed with a single bag of sand, or that it's relevant for a policy he is foolishly pursuing come what may. The SNP have complained because that's their job but I doubt their heart is in it.
Starmer leads Sunak on ALL 17 leadership characteristics polled, including:
Represents change (49% | 22%) Understands the problems afflicting the UK (44% | 26%) Is a strong leader (40% | 27%) Can build a strong economy (40% | 31%)
@theSNP has reported Rishi Sunak over a potential breach of the ministerial code by accepting a £1,000 bet that the first plane to #Rwanda will leave before the next election.
What do we think of this? It actually came up separately when my partner & I were talking yesterday. A boy at my sons nursery is a 2yo vegan as is his 5yo brother. I think it’s fair enough if their parents are vegans that they bring they’d children up the same, but we have other friends who are vegetarians & vegans that happily cook meat for their kids
Sir Keir didn’t allow his children to eat meat until they were 10. I thought if the children were given meat then decided to go veggie, they might hold it against their parents for forcing meat on them.
As someone who has been known to bet a few quid on politics I just wonder if Rishi has thought the optics of this bet through. Collecting a £1,000 wad as shackled migrants are rendered to Rwanda might not be such a good look...
Making throwaway £1k bets also re-emphasises his wealth.
Labour have picked up on that.
“Not a lot of people facing rising mortgages, bills and food prices are casually dropping £1,000 bets. It just shows that Rishi Sunak is totally out of touch with working people.”
Yeah this never worked for Cameron or Boris and it won’t work here. People are grownups and understand he is considerably richer than them.
His lot are probably quite happy if the message gets repeated because he’s clearly fishing for the type of voter who supports the policy.
Difference is that people gave Dave and Boris the benefit of the doubt, at least in the early days.
(It's also why Bring Back Boris doesn't work. Enough people gave 2019 Boris the BotD. Enough of them don't any more. Probably something similar goes for 2019 Jez vs 2017 Jez.)
It is a bugger of a question to answer, though. Turn the bet down, and you open up "don't you think it will work?". And Rishi doesn't have the heft to close the question down with a "You know, that's not a sensible way to think about this. The real issue is..."
But if you tie yourself to a silly policy and do an interview with Piers Morgan on a tiny TV channel, you deserve everything you get.
Also, it's a complete breach of the most basic public sector ethics and conduct. The money will go to the PM if he wins - he has disposal of how it is spent.
Surely he will nominate a charity that it will be donated to?
No good. He gets the money in the most basic sense. He's got the disposal of it, as I said.
And no charity in their right mind will touch it.
It won't amount to anything in the grand scheme of things, but it shows how poor Sunak is at this sort of thing. And to fall into a trap by Piers Morgan of all people
As someone who has been known to bet a few quid on politics I just wonder if Rishi has thought the optics of this bet through. Collecting a £1,000 wad as shackled migrants are rendered to Rwanda might not be such a good look...
Making throwaway £1k bets also re-emphasises his wealth.
Labour have picked up on that.
“Not a lot of people facing rising mortgages, bills and food prices are casually dropping £1,000 bets. It just shows that Rishi Sunak is totally out of touch with working people.”
Yeah this never worked for Cameron or Boris and it won’t work here. People are grownups and understand he is considerably richer than them.
His lot are probably quite happy if the message gets repeated because he’s clearly fishing for the type of voter who supports the policy.
Difference is that people gave Dave and Boris the benefit of the doubt, at least in the early days.
(It's also why Bring Back Boris doesn't work. Enough people gave 2019 Boris the BotD. Enough of them don't any more. Probably something similar goes for 2019 Jez vs 2017 Jez.)
It is a bugger of a question to answer, though. Turn the bet down, and you open up "don't you think it will work?". And Rishi doesn't have the heft to close the question down with a "You know, that's not a sensible way to think about this. The real issue is..."
But if you tie yourself to a silly policy and do an interview with Piers Morgan on a tiny TV channel, you deserve everything you get.
Also, it's a complete breach of the most basic public sector ethics and conduct. The money will go to the PM if he wins - he has disposal of how it is spent.
Surely he will nominate a charity that it will be donated to?
No good. He gets the money in the most basic sense. He's got the disposal of it, as I said.
And no charity in their right mind will touch it.
Much as I think Rishi's a cock for getting involved in Piers' publicity stunt, I can't see the voter on the Clapham omnibus imagining for a moment Rishi can be bribed with a single bag of sand, or that it's relevant for a policy he is foolishly pursuing anyway. The SNP have complained because that's their job but I doubt their heart is in it.
£1000 is worth a lot more than that, unless your Homebase is a lot more expensive than my builder's merchants.
But really it's the basic principle that you just don't trade public business for gain (in this case, statistically integrated as the £1000 multiplied by your view of the chances).
He could have promised to donate direct without a bet. But even that isn't the right thing to do, IMV.
Having got used to Badenoch being the high flyer here, the only thing mildly interesting is, for me, Penny Mordaunt being such a good second. Someone here was quite passionately arguing for PM as leader the other day (apologies I forget who it was) and this somewhat endorses that view, though it's still Badenoch's to lose:
The problem the Tories have right now is you cannot fix the issues facing the country now with Tory policy - cutting taxes and shrinking the state will not help anyone (not that it ever does, but at times it gives the illusion of being good or the political environment is persuadable to that position). After austerity and Brexit and Covid people know that public services can be and should be better, that necessary work should be better paid and that it really isn't immigrants that are gumming up the system with their vast numbers because the system is just being defunded or outsourced.
Mordaunt or Badenoch would quickly become as unpopular as Sunak once leading government. I think the only way to not would be a) immediately announce policy u-turns and start spending money or b) immediately call a GE and promise to start spending money and paint SKS as the one who wants to continue austerity measures. And by spending money I don't mean wracking up more debt by lowering taxes on everyone / the highest earners - I mean giving local councils the funding they need, doing big budget infrastructure spending, doing a proper jobs and social housing programme - etc. etc.
The above is why I also don't think SKS will be particularly popular if / when he become PM. He is also seemingly signed up to continue Osbornomics with Reeves, and that is deeply unpopular. He is just riding the fact that the Tories are more shit and the current government.
This analysis leaves out the difficult part. We are currently borrowing over £100 bn per annum, with tax also at record levels, while everyone complains that nothing works, and every part of the state needs more expenditure just to maintain normality; the context being a debt of £2 tn, the interest payments on which are already impoverishing us.
So the difficult bit is this: How much more spending? How funded and from whom? How much more borrowed? How do you plan to pay it back? If you leave all that out or are vague about it the rest of the plan means nothing.
The bit that no-one is talking about - what should be the scope of government, which has expanded out of all proportion in recent decades? Yes, public sector inefficiency is a significant part of the issue, but it’s all small fry when there’s still £100bn a year in borrowing, and a huge hole in defence and infrastructure. Government simply needs to do less than it does now.
When are Gogoro electric scooters coming to the UK ? Battery swapping for such small vehicles makes a lot of sense, and gets rid of any charging issues.
https://electrek.co/2022/11/07/first-ride-gogoro-s2-abs-electric-scooter-battery-swap-tel-aviv-israel/ ...Swapping is amazingly simple. There’s no membership card, no NFC key, no nothing. I simply roll up to swap station, slide my used batteries in the dock, and the machine spits out two freshly charged batteries. I then pop them back into my Gogoro S2 ABS scooter and ride off. The entire thing takes perhaps 45 seconds, including parking and leaving. It’s that simple because the batteries are smart enough to know whose scooter they were in, and they communicate all of that info back to Gogoro’s home base. When I pop the batteries into the dock, the GoStation knows they came out of my scooter. It then decides which batteries to give me based on how I ride. A higher-performance rider will likely get newer, fresher batteries while a granny rider might be given batteries that are a few years old and still work fine, but would drain faster at full power. At least that’s the way the system works in Taiwan. Here the batteries are all about a month old, so we’re all getting the good stuff...,/i>
Kudos to these guys for trying, but I struggle to see this scheme being a success outside of some very dense urban areas. Recharge time is only one of the many problems with electric scooters. A 40-50 mile range means you realistically can't go more than about 20 miles from a battery station, quite possibly much less in areas colder and less flat than downtown Tel Aviv or Taipei.
The space required for the batteries means electrics have much less under-seat storage than a petrol scooter, which removes much of their flexibility as a useful vehicle rather than strictly personal transport.
And $37 a month isn't particularly cheap. I use my petrol scooter extensively and don't pay that much in fuel, even with UK petrol prices. Filling the tank costs less than £9 and gives an endurance of around 160-200 miles.
Even with battery swaps, electric scooters make sense in a particular environment - short trips in cities - already well served by e-bikes that are cheaper and don't require training, safety gear, insurance, etc.
The better way to look at this is surely that people who want to ride scooters (and I had to double take to realise this isn’t the scooter as in the flat bottomed stand-on e-scooter now so popular in big cities but the Vespa style mini motorbike beloved of teenagers in the Med) will have an option once ICE engines are phased out that doesn’t require plugging in and waiting for an hour.
Petrol scooters are generally only used for shortish journeys in relatively built up areas anyway. So this is an evolution of the scooter market, rather than an alternative for EV cars or e-bikes.
Though those teenagers in Mediterranean towns aren’t going to be happy at not being able to deafen the locals every evening at passegiata time.
This guy is surely right. This isn’t a new and better version of VR and AR - this is the future of all interaction with screens. You will put on sleek trendy glasses and you will have virtual keyboards you can type on, virtual computers to show your work PLUS all the apps and movies and games (and real time lip synch translation) - actual hardware from TVs to phones to laptops will be redundant. You won’t need them. Anyone who makes any of that hardware should be worried
And they won’t be clunky oculus/fighter pilot helmets, they will be like cool Raybans
Even it it worked perfectly, the experience depends on you being the only person weaing one. If everyone is wearing them then it destroys the illusion.
What illusion ? Replacing a TV, laptop, or tablet isn't an 'illusion', but a real thing. It's only the case of mobile phones - where you lock the world out when using them in any case - that's slightly more problematic. And even that's just down to the technology improving. I spend half the year wearing sunglasses anyway, because of my eyesight.
What mass uptake would do to social interaction is more concerning.
"Augmented reality" needs reality as well as augmentation.
If you're the only person wearing one, then you can have normal reality augmented by your device, but if everyone is wearing one, it changes the environment too in a much more fundamental way than smartphones do.
1) virtual keyboards sound awful. You need some sort of physical feedback, as the ZX81 demonstrated. Perhaps some sort of gloves with little sensors which clicked the fingers would do the trick, though you'd look a berk extravagantly preparing for a spot of typing.
2) as with all new technologies, this will definitely be used for p*rn to a surprisingly large degree. People (not all people, obvs) will be walking around in a constant state of arousal.
If we can get close to Artificial General Intelligence I’m pretty sure we can create “satisfying virtual keyboard clicky sounds”
It's got to have the feel of pressing a button too. Just mashing your fingers into empty air feels ridiculous. Try it now. Most unsatisfying, clicks or not. I'm sure it can be done. But it's not obvious how. But meanwhile it's very obvious that human interaction may become very odd, and that, say, if you are, for example, a barrista, of those customers in their snazzy AI glasses, an uncomfortably high proportion of them will be seeing you portrayed naked, or dressed in a manner of their choosing which is almost certainly not a manner of your choosing, or actually with someone else's face entirely.
Maybe - or maybe not
Imagine everytime you press the virtual key - say the letter "c" - to commence typing the sentence "Cookie isn't thinking very hard" - then when you hit the right key a massive C explodes for a millisecond in your face, with a brilliantly clicky noise, then O then O then K, the reflexive stimulation might easily be enough to compensate for the lack of tangible sensation in your fingertips
In other words, we will get over it, so much cool technology feels bizarre and unrealistic before it happens. eg Imagine how people reacted to the first telephones. Talking into a weird bakelite mouth-cup thingy, to the disembodied voice of someone a hundred miles away? - no, that's unnatural, won't work, you need to have someone in front of you so you can properly converse, read their faces etc etc
And of course for this tech to replace all screens it doesn't need to be perfect, just good enough that this is the only screen you need and then you can junk all the others and save a lot of time, money and space
TV is a poser. People like watching TV socially. Yet these personal screens will give a vastly better TV experience
Hard to know which will win, in that instance
Well, maybe. As I suggested, the thing which first came to mind was the unsatisfactory nature of the ZX81 keyboard. But you may be right. I think Scott's suggestion downthread (the name for which I've already forgotten - 'haptic gloves'?) is better though. I do realise I'm in the role here if pointing out tiny flaws in massive concepts. It's an issue to be overcome, rather than something rendering the whole enterprise pointless.
That said, I do cleave to my position that, broadly, all technology since about 2005 is stupid and pointless and that the world was completely fine then and that I was completely satisfied with everything I could do then and that none of the things I can do with any new technology is worth the effort of learning to do so. *pauses for breath for a moment*
On telephones, I'm reminded of the people you sometimes see who feel that the way to use a phone is to hold it directly in front of them, end on, turning the volume up massively to compensate for the fact that the earpiece is not next to their ear. You'd think this would be a habit of some doddery old bird who'd only just come across the telephone, but it's mainly young people. Must be one of those things which is cool despite the impracticality, like ridiculously low slung trousers.
Do people watch TV socially any more? Increasingly in my house its an atomised activity. Watching TV socially was borne out of a lack of TVs and indeed a lack of TV programmes, which led to generalist TV for a mass audience. That seems to be withering in favour of everyone watching their own thing on their own devices.
There's a well researched phenomenon describing the age at which we see all new tech as "pointless frippery".
That shouldn't be used as an ad hominen argument against criticism from people with experience. Steve Jobs didn't oppose the stylus as an input device because he was past it.
As someone who has been known to bet a few quid on politics I just wonder if Rishi has thought the optics of this bet through. Collecting a £1,000 wad as shackled migrants are rendered to Rwanda might not be such a good look...
Making throwaway £1k bets also re-emphasises his wealth.
Labour have picked up on that.
“Not a lot of people facing rising mortgages, bills and food prices are casually dropping £1,000 bets. It just shows that Rishi Sunak is totally out of touch with working people.”
Yeah this never worked for Cameron or Boris and it won’t work here. People are grownups and understand he is considerably richer than them.
His lot are probably quite happy if the message gets repeated because he’s clearly fishing for the type of voter who supports the policy.
Difference is that people gave Dave and Boris the benefit of the doubt, at least in the early days.
(It's also why Bring Back Boris doesn't work. Enough people gave 2019 Boris the BotD. Enough of them don't any more. Probably something similar goes for 2019 Jez vs 2017 Jez.)
It is a bugger of a question to answer, though. Turn the bet down, and you open up "don't you think it will work?". And Rishi doesn't have the heft to close the question down with a "You know, that's not a sensible way to think about this. The real issue is..."
But if you tie yourself to a silly policy and do an interview with Piers Morgan on a tiny TV channel, you deserve everything you get.
Also, it's a complete breach of the most basic public sector ethics and conduct. The money will go to the PM if he wins - he has disposal of how it is spent.
Surely he will nominate a charity that it will be donated to?
No good. He gets the money in the most basic sense. He's got the disposal of it, as I said.
And no charity in their right mind will touch it.
Interesting question that. Which charity would take it? I’m guessing some local home for sick animals or something might be tempted. Or a beleaguered private school facing having to charge unaffordable VAT on its fees. I suppose the Conservative Party is a registered charity so that’s one option.
Having got used to Badenoch being the high flyer here, the only thing mildly interesting is, for me, Penny Mordaunt being such a good second. Someone here was quite passionately arguing for PM as leader the other day (apologies I forget who it was) and this somewhat endorses that view, though it's still Badenoch's to lose:
I suggested Penny Mordaunt is the only plausible replacement for Rishi Sunak who might improve Conservative prospects before the next election.
She is the only potential leadership candidate not in a safe seat and likely to lose currently, so has nothing to lose by putting herself at the head of a putsch.
On the other hand I still don't see how she is an improvement on Sunak. She is less experienced, hasn't really run a significant department, and didn't cover herself in glory in the last leadership contest. There may be a honeymoon bounce, but equally the Tories might just look ridiculous changing leader again. It is the Tories that are hated, not Sunak personally.
(I think that's what I was going to say when my comment fell into a black hole!)
Having got used to Badenoch being the high flyer here, the only thing mildly interesting is, for me, Penny Mordaunt being such a good second. Someone here was quite passionately arguing for PM as leader the other day (apologies I forget who it was) and this somewhat endorses that view, though it's still Badenoch's to lose:
The problem the Tories have right now is you cannot fix the issues facing the country now with Tory policy - cutting taxes and shrinking the state will not help anyone (not that it ever does, but at times it gives the illusion of being good or the political environment is persuadable to that position). After austerity and Brexit and Covid people know that public services can be and should be better, that necessary work should be better paid and that it really isn't immigrants that are gumming up the system with their vast numbers because the system is just being defunded or outsourced.
Mordaunt or Badenoch would quickly become as unpopular as Sunak once leading government. I think the only way to not would be a) immediately announce policy u-turns and start spending money or b) immediately call a GE and promise to start spending money and paint SKS as the one who wants to continue austerity measures. And by spending money I don't mean wracking up more debt by lowering taxes on everyone / the highest earners - I mean giving local councils the funding they need, doing big budget infrastructure spending, doing a proper jobs and social housing programme - etc. etc.
The above is why I also don't think SKS will be particularly popular if / when he become PM. He is also seemingly signed up to continue Osbornomics with Reeves, and that is deeply unpopular. He is just riding the fact that the Tories are more shit and the current government.
This analysis leaves out the difficult part. We are currently borrowing over £100 bn per annum, with tax also at record levels, while everyone complains that nothing works, and every part of the state needs more expenditure just to maintain normality; the context being a debt of £2 tn, the interest payments on which are already impoverishing us.
So the difficult bit is this: How much more spending? How funded and from whom? How much more borrowed? How do you plan to pay it back? If you leave all that out or are vague about it the rest of the plan means nothing.
The bit that no-one is talking about - what should be the scope of government, which has expanded out of all proportion in recent decades? Yes, public sector inefficiency is a significant part of the issue, but it’s all small fry when there’s still £100bn a year in borrowing, and a huge hole in defence and infrastructure. Government simply needs to do less than it does now.
Government hasn't 'expanded out of all proportion' though. It is doing less directly than it did 20 years ago. What it does have is growing liabilities due to an ageing population, and bailing out crises when the alternative was politically unpalatable due to pre-existing weaknesses. Plus revenue which hasn't grown as much as it did in the past to match that due to economic mismanagement, shabby and inefficient investment, and flatlining real incomes over the past 15 or so years.
This guy is surely right. This isn’t a new and better version of VR and AR - this is the future of all interaction with screens. You will put on sleek trendy glasses and you will have virtual keyboards you can type on, virtual computers to show your work PLUS all the apps and movies and games (and real time lip synch translation) - actual hardware from TVs to phones to laptops will be redundant. You won’t need them. Anyone who makes any of that hardware should be worried
And they won’t be clunky oculus/fighter pilot helmets, they will be like cool Raybans
Even it it worked perfectly, the experience depends on you being the only person weaing one. If everyone is wearing them then it destroys the illusion.
What illusion ? Replacing a TV, laptop, or tablet isn't an 'illusion', but a real thing. It's only the case of mobile phones - where you lock the world out when using them in any case - that's slightly more problematic. And even that's just down to the technology improving. I spend half the year wearing sunglasses anyway, because of my eyesight.
What mass uptake would do to social interaction is more concerning.
"Augmented reality" needs reality as well as augmentation.
If you're the only person wearing one, then you can have normal reality augmented by your device, but if everyone is wearing one, it changes the environment too in a much more fundamental way than smartphones do.
1) virtual keyboards sound awful. You need some sort of physical feedback, as the ZX81 demonstrated. Perhaps some sort of gloves with little sensors which clicked the fingers would do the trick, though you'd look a berk extravagantly preparing for a spot of typing.
2) as with all new technologies, this will definitely be used for p*rn to a surprisingly large degree. People (not all people, obvs) will be walking around in a constant state of arousal.
If we can get close to Artificial General Intelligence I’m pretty sure we can create “satisfying virtual keyboard clicky sounds”
It's got to have the feel of pressing a button too. Just mashing your fingers into empty air feels ridiculous. Try it now. Most unsatisfying, clicks or not. I'm sure it can be done. But it's not obvious how. But meanwhile it's very obvious that human interaction may become very odd, and that, say, if you are, for example, a barrista, of those customers in their snazzy AI glasses, an uncomfortably high proportion of them will be seeing you portrayed naked, or dressed in a manner of their choosing which is almost certainly not a manner of your choosing, or actually with someone else's face entirely.
Maybe - or maybe not
Imagine everytime you press the virtual key - say the letter "c" - to commence typing the sentence "Cookie isn't thinking very hard" - then when you hit the right key a massive C explodes for a millisecond in your face, with a brilliantly clicky noise, then O then O then K, the reflexive stimulation might easily be enough to compensate for the lack of tangible sensation in your fingertips
In other words, we will get over it, so much cool technology feels bizarre and unrealistic before it happens. eg Imagine how people reacted to the first telephones. Talking into a weird bakelite mouth-cup thingy, to the disembodied voice of someone a hundred miles away? - no, that's unnatural, won't work, you need to have someone in front of you so you can properly converse, read their faces etc etc
And of course for this tech to replace all screens it doesn't need to be perfect, just good enough that this is the only screen you need and then you can junk all the others and save a lot of time, money and space
TV is a poser. People like watching TV socially. Yet these personal screens will give a vastly better TV experience
Hard to know which will win, in that instance
Well, maybe. As I suggested, the thing which first came to mind was the unsatisfactory nature of the ZX81 keyboard. But you may be right. I think Scott's suggestion downthread (the name for which I've already forgotten - 'haptic gloves'?) is better though. I do realise I'm in the role here if pointing out tiny flaws in massive concepts. It's an issue to be overcome, rather than something rendering the whole enterprise pointless.
That said, I do cleave to my position that, broadly, all technology since about 2005 is stupid and pointless and that the world was completely fine then and that I was completely satisfied with everything I could do then and that none of the things I can do with any new technology is worth the effort of learning to do so. *pauses for breath for a moment*
On telephones, I'm reminded of the people you sometimes see who feel that the way to use a phone is to hold it directly in front of them, end on, turning the volume up massively to compensate for the fact that the earpiece is not next to their ear. You'd think this would be a habit of some doddery old bird who'd only just come across the telephone, but it's mainly young people. Must be one of those things which is cool despite the impracticality, like ridiculously low slung trousers.
Do people watch TV socially any more? Increasingly in my house its an atomised activity. Watching TV socially was borne out of a lack of TVs and indeed a lack of TV programmes, which led to generalist TV for a mass audience. That seems to be withering in favour of everyone watching their own thing on their own devices.
There's a well researched phenomenon describing the age at which we see all new tech as "pointless frippery".
That shouldn't be used as an ad hominen argument against criticism from people with experience. Steve Jobs didn't oppose the stylus as an input device because he was past it.
The Apple Pencil waves hello.
A notorious failure with incompatible versions and poor adoption. Apple introduced it over Jobs' dead body, and he was right.
As someone who has been known to bet a few quid on politics I just wonder if Rishi has thought the optics of this bet through. Collecting a £1,000 wad as shackled migrants are rendered to Rwanda might not be such a good look...
Making throwaway £1k bets also re-emphasises his wealth.
Labour have picked up on that.
“Not a lot of people facing rising mortgages, bills and food prices are casually dropping £1,000 bets. It just shows that Rishi Sunak is totally out of touch with working people.”
Yeah this never worked for Cameron or Boris and it won’t work here. People are grownups and understand he is considerably richer than them.
His lot are probably quite happy if the message gets repeated because he’s clearly fishing for the type of voter who supports the policy.
Difference is that people gave Dave and Boris the benefit of the doubt, at least in the early days.
(It's also why Bring Back Boris doesn't work. Enough people gave 2019 Boris the BotD. Enough of them don't any more. Probably something similar goes for 2019 Jez vs 2017 Jez.)
It is a bugger of a question to answer, though. Turn the bet down, and you open up "don't you think it will work?". And Rishi doesn't have the heft to close the question down with a "You know, that's not a sensible way to think about this. The real issue is..."
But if you tie yourself to a silly policy and do an interview with Piers Morgan on a tiny TV channel, you deserve everything you get.
Also, it's a complete breach of the most basic public sector ethics and conduct. The money will go to the PM if he wins - he has disposal of how it is spent.
Surely he will nominate a charity that it will be donated to?
No good. He gets the money in the most basic sense. He's got the disposal of it, as I said.
And no charity in their right mind will touch it.
Interesting question that. Which charity would take it? I’m guessing some local home for sick animals or something might be tempted. Or a beleaguered private school facing having to charge unaffordable VAT on its fees. I suppose the Conservative Party is a registered charity so that’s one option.
Maybe you are thinking of the CP Foundation, of course, which is a charity. It's only in wills that political parties get treated like charities, I believe?
Interesting, though, that so many people on here are meh about it. It just seems so ill-judged to me - and I haven't even made the point that betting doesn't normally involve the sportsperson (etc) involved. I'm thinking more of the public service principle, but maybe nobody gives a shit any more?
When are Gogoro electric scooters coming to the UK ? Battery swapping for such small vehicles makes a lot of sense, and gets rid of any charging issues.
https://electrek.co/2022/11/07/first-ride-gogoro-s2-abs-electric-scooter-battery-swap-tel-aviv-israel/ ...Swapping is amazingly simple. There’s no membership card, no NFC key, no nothing. I simply roll up to swap station, slide my used batteries in the dock, and the machine spits out two freshly charged batteries. I then pop them back into my Gogoro S2 ABS scooter and ride off. The entire thing takes perhaps 45 seconds, including parking and leaving. It’s that simple because the batteries are smart enough to know whose scooter they were in, and they communicate all of that info back to Gogoro’s home base. When I pop the batteries into the dock, the GoStation knows they came out of my scooter. It then decides which batteries to give me based on how I ride. A higher-performance rider will likely get newer, fresher batteries while a granny rider might be given batteries that are a few years old and still work fine, but would drain faster at full power. At least that’s the way the system works in Taiwan. Here the batteries are all about a month old, so we’re all getting the good stuff...,/i>
Kudos to these guys for trying, but I struggle to see this scheme being a success outside of some very dense urban areas. Recharge time is only one of the many problems with electric scooters. A 40-50 mile range means you realistically can't go more than about 20 miles from a battery station, quite possibly much less in areas colder and less flat than downtown Tel Aviv or Taipei.
The space required for the batteries means electrics have much less under-seat storage than a petrol scooter, which removes much of their flexibility as a useful vehicle rather than strictly personal transport.
And $37 a month isn't particularly cheap. I use my petrol scooter extensively and don't pay that much in fuel, even with UK petrol prices. Filling the tank costs less than £9 and gives an endurance of around 160-200 miles.
Even with battery swaps, electric scooters make sense in a particular environment - short trips in cities - already well served by e-bikes that are cheaper and don't require training, safety gear, insurance, etc.
The better way to look at this is surely that people who want to ride scooters (and I had to double take to realise this isn’t the scooter as in the flat bottomed stand-on e-scooter now so popular in big cities but the Vespa style mini motorbike beloved of teenagers in the Med) will have an option once ICE engines are phased out that doesn’t require plugging in and waiting for an hour.
Petrol scooters are generally only used for shortish journeys in relatively built up areas anyway. So this is an evolution of the scooter market, rather than an alternative for EV cars or e-bikes.
Though those teenagers in Mediterranean towns aren’t going to be happy at not being able to deafen the locals every evening at passegiata time.
Another thought on urban vehicles: these are probably most likely to be affected and sooner by regulations to phase out ICE transportation. While countries will take their time and possibly fudge things with hybrids for some time to come, some city administrations may well forge ahead more quickly on the basis of air quality as opposed to carbon emissions.
As someone who has been known to bet a few quid on politics I just wonder if Rishi has thought the optics of this bet through. Collecting a £1,000 wad as shackled migrants are rendered to Rwanda might not be such a good look...
Making throwaway £1k bets also re-emphasises his wealth.
Labour have picked up on that.
“Not a lot of people facing rising mortgages, bills and food prices are casually dropping £1,000 bets. It just shows that Rishi Sunak is totally out of touch with working people.”
Yeah this never worked for Cameron or Boris and it won’t work here. People are grownups and understand he is considerably richer than them.
His lot are probably quite happy if the message gets repeated because he’s clearly fishing for the type of voter who supports the policy.
Difference is that people gave Dave and Boris the benefit of the doubt, at least in the early days.
(It's also why Bring Back Boris doesn't work. Enough people gave 2019 Boris the BotD. Enough of them don't any more. Probably something similar goes for 2019 Jez vs 2017 Jez.)
It is a bugger of a question to answer, though. Turn the bet down, and you open up "don't you think it will work?". And Rishi doesn't have the heft to close the question down with a "You know, that's not a sensible way to think about this. The real issue is..."
But if you tie yourself to a silly policy and do an interview with Piers Morgan on a tiny TV channel, you deserve everything you get.
Also, it's a complete breach of the most basic public sector ethics and conduct. The money will go to the PM if he wins - he has disposal of how it is spent.
Surely he will nominate a charity that it will be donated to?
No good. He gets the money in the most basic sense. He's got the disposal of it, as I said.
And no charity in their right mind will touch it.
Much as I think Rishi's a cock for getting involved in Piers' publicity stunt, I can't see the voter on the Clapham omnibus imagining for a moment Rishi can be bribed with a single bag of sand, or that it's relevant for a policy he is foolishly pursuing anyway. The SNP have complained because that's their job but I doubt their heart is in it.
£1000 is worth a lot more than that, unless your Homebase is a lot more expensive than my builder's merchants.
But really it's the basic principle that you just don't trade public business for gain (in this case, statistically integrated as the £1000 multiplied by your view of the chances).
He could have promised to donate direct without a bet. But even that isn't the right thing to do, IMV.
(Bag of sand = grand = £1,000.)
It's a stupid thing to do but the idea a man sitting on the best part of a billion quid will sell his soul for a mere thousand is laughable, and he's committed to Rwanda anyway.
Having got used to Badenoch being the high flyer here, the only thing mildly interesting is, for me, Penny Mordaunt being such a good second. Someone here was quite passionately arguing for PM as leader the other day (apologies I forget who it was) and this somewhat endorses that view, though it's still Badenoch's to lose:
The problem the Tories have right now is you cannot fix the issues facing the country now with Tory policy - cutting taxes and shrinking the state will not help anyone (not that it ever does, but at times it gives the illusion of being good or the political environment is persuadable to that position). After austerity and Brexit and Covid people know that public services can be and should be better, that necessary work should be better paid and that it really isn't immigrants that are gumming up the system with their vast numbers because the system is just being defunded or outsourced.
Mordaunt or Badenoch would quickly become as unpopular as Sunak once leading government. I think the only way to not would be a) immediately announce policy u-turns and start spending money or b) immediately call a GE and promise to start spending money and paint SKS as the one who wants to continue austerity measures. And by spending money I don't mean wracking up more debt by lowering taxes on everyone / the highest earners - I mean giving local councils the funding they need, doing big budget infrastructure spending, doing a proper jobs and social housing programme - etc. etc.
The above is why I also don't think SKS will be particularly popular if / when he become PM. He is also seemingly signed up to continue Osbornomics with Reeves, and that is deeply unpopular. He is just riding the fact that the Tories are more shit and the current government.
This analysis leaves out the difficult part. We are currently borrowing over £100 bn per annum, with tax also at record levels, while everyone complains that nothing works, and every part of the state needs more expenditure just to maintain normality; the context being a debt of £2 tn, the interest payments on which are already impoverishing us.
So the difficult bit is this: How much more spending? How funded and from whom? How much more borrowed? How do you plan to pay it back? If you leave all that out or are vague about it the rest of the plan means nothing.
The bit that no-one is talking about - what should be the scope of government, which has expanded out of all proportion in recent decades? Yes, public sector inefficiency is a significant part of the issue, but it’s all small fry when there’s still £100bn a year in borrowing, and a huge hole in defence and infrastructure. Government simply needs to do less than it does now.
Government hasn't 'expanded out of all proportion' though. It is doing less directly than it did 20 years ago. What it does have is growing liabilities due to an ageing population, and bailing out crises when the alternative was politically unpalatable due to pre-existing weaknesses. Plus revenue which hasn't grown as much as it did in the past to match that due to economic mismanagement, shabby and inefficient investment, and flatlining real incomes over the past 15 or so years.
And that's the problem. A fair chunk of our apparent prosperity in recent decades was pixie gold; spending one-off windfalls from the North Sea and privatisation as if they were recurring income, and spending the gains from having the baby boom generation as they progressed through the workplace, ignoring the pension liabilities they were building up.
Short of developing a time machine that can go back to the 1980s-2000s and making better choices, we are where we are. No, it's not going to be pretty.
Having got used to Badenoch being the high flyer here, the only thing mildly interesting is, for me, Penny Mordaunt being such a good second. Someone here was quite passionately arguing for PM as leader the other day (apologies I forget who it was) and this somewhat endorses that view, though it's still Badenoch's to lose:
The problem the Tories have right now is you cannot fix the issues facing the country now with Tory policy - cutting taxes and shrinking the state will not help anyone (not that it ever does, but at times it gives the illusion of being good or the political environment is persuadable to that position). After austerity and Brexit and Covid people know that public services can be and should be better, that necessary work should be better paid and that it really isn't immigrants that are gumming up the system with their vast numbers because the system is just being defunded or outsourced.
Mordaunt or Badenoch would quickly become as unpopular as Sunak once leading government. I think the only way to not would be a) immediately announce policy u-turns and start spending money or b) immediately call a GE and promise to start spending money and paint SKS as the one who wants to continue austerity measures. And by spending money I don't mean wracking up more debt by lowering taxes on everyone / the highest earners - I mean giving local councils the funding they need, doing big budget infrastructure spending, doing a proper jobs and social housing programme - etc. etc.
The above is why I also don't think SKS will be particularly popular if / when he become PM. He is also seemingly signed up to continue Osbornomics with Reeves, and that is deeply unpopular. He is just riding the fact that the Tories are more shit and the current government.
I'm afraid your argument fails in the first sentence. 'not that it ever does' implies that the state can never be too large nor taxes too high. That is a statement so patently absurd that surely even you should be able to look at it and see it for the brainfart it is.
Tax and spend is at an all time high. At the same time, public sector productivity is down by 7%. Even SKS has said that that taxes are too high and that public services need reform rather than being hosed with money. I'm not sure if that's a popular/ist platform but it is sure as shit a necessary one, even an urgent one. And I think if people see policies, perhaps small policies, that help with the process of earning and making money (so we can actually pay for these public services we need) being delivered, they will respect that.
I'm still not sure Mordaunt is the one to do it though. She has a sort of small like-minded fan-club, the centrist Brexiteers, people like Angela Leadsom, but I'm not sure it's enough to get anything done that she can fight an election on. But at this point she deserves a chance.
Spending is not at an all time high: during the Second World War, it got to well over 60% of GDP.
However, I will grant you that for a non-war period, it is at an all time high.
And yet, it is at an all time high despite the fact that - at a departmental level - most departments' spending has dropped (often significantly) as a percentage of GDP.
As someone who has been known to bet a few quid on politics I just wonder if Rishi has thought the optics of this bet through. Collecting a £1,000 wad as shackled migrants are rendered to Rwanda might not be such a good look...
Making throwaway £1k bets also re-emphasises his wealth.
Labour have picked up on that.
“Not a lot of people facing rising mortgages, bills and food prices are casually dropping £1,000 bets. It just shows that Rishi Sunak is totally out of touch with working people.”
Yeah this never worked for Cameron or Boris and it won’t work here. People are grownups and understand he is considerably richer than them.
His lot are probably quite happy if the message gets repeated because he’s clearly fishing for the type of voter who supports the policy.
Difference is that people gave Dave and Boris the benefit of the doubt, at least in the early days.
(It's also why Bring Back Boris doesn't work. Enough people gave 2019 Boris the BotD. Enough of them don't any more. Probably something similar goes for 2019 Jez vs 2017 Jez.)
It is a bugger of a question to answer, though. Turn the bet down, and you open up "don't you think it will work?". And Rishi doesn't have the heft to close the question down with a "You know, that's not a sensible way to think about this. The real issue is..."
But if you tie yourself to a silly policy and do an interview with Piers Morgan on a tiny TV channel, you deserve everything you get.
Also, it's a complete breach of the most basic public sector ethics and conduct. The money will go to the PM if he wins - he has disposal of how it is spent.
Surely he will nominate a charity that it will be donated to?
No good. He gets the money in the most basic sense. He's got the disposal of it, as I said.
And no charity in their right mind will touch it.
Much as I think Rishi's a cock for getting involved in Piers' publicity stunt, I can't see the voter on the Clapham omnibus imagining for a moment Rishi can be bribed with a single bag of sand, or that it's relevant for a policy he is foolishly pursuing anyway. The SNP have complained because that's their job but I doubt their heart is in it.
£1000 is worth a lot more than that, unless your Homebase is a lot more expensive than my builder's merchants.
But really it's the basic principle that you just don't trade public business for gain (in this case, statistically integrated as the £1000 multiplied by your view of the chances).
He could have promised to donate direct without a bet. But even that isn't the right thing to do, IMV.
It's just another example of him looking like a complete berk who fundamentally isn't up to the job due to a gilded existence that's seen him go from the Westminster/City Toryboy milieu to the top job too fast to learn good political judgment. Should be insignificant of and in itself, but it's such a silly thing to do it'll stick in the mind.
FWIW people don't mind if politicians are rich and/or posh. In their own ways, Blair, Cameron, and Boris were all good at defusing their privileged backgrounds. They do mind if said wealth and privilege makes you continually behave like a weird dope under the delusion we're incredibly lucky to have you.
This guy is surely right. This isn’t a new and better version of VR and AR - this is the future of all interaction with screens. You will put on sleek trendy glasses and you will have virtual keyboards you can type on, virtual computers to show your work PLUS all the apps and movies and games (and real time lip synch translation) - actual hardware from TVs to phones to laptops will be redundant. You won’t need them. Anyone who makes any of that hardware should be worried
And they won’t be clunky oculus/fighter pilot helmets, they will be like cool Raybans
Even it it worked perfectly, the experience depends on you being the only person weaing one. If everyone is wearing them then it destroys the illusion.
What illusion ? Replacing a TV, laptop, or tablet isn't an 'illusion', but a real thing. It's only the case of mobile phones - where you lock the world out when using them in any case - that's slightly more problematic. And even that's just down to the technology improving. I spend half the year wearing sunglasses anyway, because of my eyesight.
What mass uptake would do to social interaction is more concerning.
"Augmented reality" needs reality as well as augmentation.
If you're the only person wearing one, then you can have normal reality augmented by your device, but if everyone is wearing one, it changes the environment too in a much more fundamental way than smartphones do.
1) virtual keyboards sound awful. You need some sort of physical feedback, as the ZX81 demonstrated. Perhaps some sort of gloves with little sensors which clicked the fingers would do the trick, though you'd look a berk extravagantly preparing for a spot of typing.
2) as with all new technologies, this will definitely be used for p*rn to a surprisingly large degree. People (not all people, obvs) will be walking around in a constant state of arousal.
If we can get close to Artificial General Intelligence I’m pretty sure we can create “satisfying virtual keyboard clicky sounds”
It's got to have the feel of pressing a button too. Just mashing your fingers into empty air feels ridiculous. Try it now. Most unsatisfying, clicks or not. I'm sure it can be done. But it's not obvious how. But meanwhile it's very obvious that human interaction may become very odd, and that, say, if you are, for example, a barrista, of those customers in their snazzy AI glasses, an uncomfortably high proportion of them will be seeing you portrayed naked, or dressed in a manner of their choosing which is almost certainly not a manner of your choosing, or actually with someone else's face entirely.
Maybe - or maybe not
Imagine everytime you press the virtual key - say the letter "c" - to commence typing the sentence "Cookie isn't thinking very hard" - then when you hit the right key a massive C explodes for a millisecond in your face, with a brilliantly clicky noise, then O then O then K, the reflexive stimulation might easily be enough to compensate for the lack of tangible sensation in your fingertips
In other words, we will get over it, so much cool technology feels bizarre and unrealistic before it happens. eg Imagine how people reacted to the first telephones. Talking into a weird bakelite mouth-cup thingy, to the disembodied voice of someone a hundred miles away? - no, that's unnatural, won't work, you need to have someone in front of you so you can properly converse, read their faces etc etc
And of course for this tech to replace all screens it doesn't need to be perfect, just good enough that this is the only screen you need and then you can junk all the others and save a lot of time, money and space
TV is a poser. People like watching TV socially. Yet these personal screens will give a vastly better TV experience
Hard to know which will win, in that instance
Well, maybe. As I suggested, the thing which first came to mind was the unsatisfactory nature of the ZX81 keyboard. But you may be right. I think Scott's suggestion downthread (the name for which I've already forgotten - 'haptic gloves'?) is better though. I do realise I'm in the role here if pointing out tiny flaws in massive concepts. It's an issue to be overcome, rather than something rendering the whole enterprise pointless.
That said, I do cleave to my position that, broadly, all technology since about 2005 is stupid and pointless and that the world was completely fine then and that I was completely satisfied with everything I could do then and that none of the things I can do with any new technology is worth the effort of learning to do so. *pauses for breath for a moment*
On telephones, I'm reminded of the people you sometimes see who feel that the way to use a phone is to hold it directly in front of them, end on, turning the volume up massively to compensate for the fact that the earpiece is not next to their ear. You'd think this would be a habit of some doddery old bird who'd only just come across the telephone, but it's mainly young people. Must be one of those things which is cool despite the impracticality, like ridiculously low slung trousers.
Do people watch TV socially any more? Increasingly in my house its an atomised activity. Watching TV socially was borne out of a lack of TVs and indeed a lack of TV programmes, which led to generalist TV for a mass audience. That seems to be withering in favour of everyone watching their own thing on their own devices.
There's a well researched phenomenon describing the age at which we see all new tech as "pointless frippery".
That shouldn't be used as an ad hominen argument against criticism from people with experience. Steve Jobs didn't oppose the stylus as an input device because he was past it.
The Apple Pencil waves hello.
A notorious failure with incompatible versions and poor adoption. Apple introduced it over Jobs' dead body, and he was right.
Ummm: I challenge you to go to any design studio and not find near universal usage of the Apple Pencil.
Having got used to Badenoch being the high flyer here, the only thing mildly interesting is, for me, Penny Mordaunt being such a good second. Someone here was quite passionately arguing for PM as leader the other day (apologies I forget who it was) and this somewhat endorses that view, though it's still Badenoch's to lose:
The problem the Tories have right now is you cannot fix the issues facing the country now with Tory policy - cutting taxes and shrinking the state will not help anyone (not that it ever does, but at times it gives the illusion of being good or the political environment is persuadable to that position). After austerity and Brexit and Covid people know that public services can be and should be better, that necessary work should be better paid and that it really isn't immigrants that are gumming up the system with their vast numbers because the system is just being defunded or outsourced.
Mordaunt or Badenoch would quickly become as unpopular as Sunak once leading government. I think the only way to not would be a) immediately announce policy u-turns and start spending money or b) immediately call a GE and promise to start spending money and paint SKS as the one who wants to continue austerity measures. And by spending money I don't mean wracking up more debt by lowering taxes on everyone / the highest earners - I mean giving local councils the funding they need, doing big budget infrastructure spending, doing a proper jobs and social housing programme - etc. etc.
The above is why I also don't think SKS will be particularly popular if / when he become PM. He is also seemingly signed up to continue Osbornomics with Reeves, and that is deeply unpopular. He is just riding the fact that the Tories are more shit and the current government.
This analysis leaves out the difficult part. We are currently borrowing over £100 bn per annum, with tax also at record levels, while everyone complains that nothing works, and every part of the state needs more expenditure just to maintain normality; the context being a debt of £2 tn, the interest payments on which are already impoverishing us.
So the difficult bit is this: How much more spending? How funded and from whom? How much more borrowed? How do you plan to pay it back? If you leave all that out or are vague about it the rest of the plan means nothing.
The bit that no-one is talking about - what should be the scope of government, which has expanded out of all proportion in recent decades? Yes, public sector inefficiency is a significant part of the issue, but it’s all small fry when there’s still £100bn a year in borrowing, and a huge hole in defence and infrastructure. Government simply needs to do less than it does now.
Government hasn't 'expanded out of all proportion' though. It is doing less directly than it did 20 years ago. What it does have is growing liabilities due to an ageing population, and bailing out crises when the alternative was politically unpalatable due to pre-existing weaknesses. Plus revenue which hasn't grown as much as it did in the past to match that due to economic mismanagement, shabby and inefficient investment, and flatlining real incomes over the past 15 or so years.
If you look at the bail-outs for the GFC then Covid then energy, at least the latter and possibly the last two were devised by the B-team after the grown-ups had been purged from Downing Street.
Petrol scooters are generally only used for shortish journeys in relatively built up areas anyway. So this is an evolution of the scooter market, rather than an alternative for EV cars or e-bikes.
Not to be offensive or anything, but you talk like someone who's idea of scooters is rooted in 1960s Rome. Outside of delivery riders, which is its own unique use, scooters are increasingly being bought by people using them for longer trips. Fuel tank sizes have been steadily creeping up to deal with this - 250 miles plus in range is not unusual now, particularly for larger engine sizes.
This is a major reason why sales of electric scooters are tepid, to put it generously, and the motorcycle industry has been pushing for the ICE phaseout to be delayed. 40-50 mile range just isn't enough for many riders now and battery swapping won't help much unless the swap stations are scattered around like confetti, which isn't remotely feasible from a financial standpoint.
Rough old time for the royals. At this rate we might end up with… King Andrew
😶
We've got William and his children first but is Harry (and his brood) still in the line of succession or did he give that up along with his Royal duties?
What do we think of this? It actually came up separately when my partner & I were talking yesterday. A boy at my sons nursery is a 2yo vegan as is his 5yo brother. I think it’s fair enough if their parents are vegans that they bring they’d children up the same, but we have other friends who are vegetarians & vegans that happily cook meat for their kids
Sir Keir didn’t allow his children to eat meat until they were 10. I thought if the children were given meat then decided to go veggie, they might hold it against their parents for forcing meat on them.
What do we think of this? It actually came up separately when my partner & I were talking yesterday. A boy at my sons nursery is a 2yo vegan as is his 5yo brother. I think it’s fair enough if their parents are vegans that they bring they’d children up the same, but we have other friends who are vegetarians & vegans that happily cook meat for their kids
Sir Keir didn’t allow his children to eat meat until they were 10. I thought if the children were given meat then decided to go veggie, they might hold it against their parents for forcing meat on them.
It's not really fair enough bringing ones' children up as vegan in my opinion. Vegetariansim (a la the Starmers) is fine - the 'no meat' rule sounds a bit stupid to me, but vegetarian diets can be nourishing diets, due to the possibility of including nutrient-dense foods like eggs, cheese, yohurt etc. Veganism is very different, and it's always been an ethical decision - one that carries severe nutritional consequences. Doing that to an infant is tantamount to neglect.
Not uncommon at his age but hopefully they have caught it quickly enough to remove it all
It’s NOT prostate. It sounds a little more ominous than that
Hmm
The wording of "a form of cancer" suggests to me something haematological, perhaps blood or lymphoma, particularly if straight to non surgical treatment.
Often these respond very well to treatment, and generally the press release is fairly upbeat.
Rough old time for the royals. At this rate we might end up with… King Andrew
😶
We've got William and his children first but is Harry (and his brood) still in the line of succession or did he give that up along with his Royal duties?
Oh no, he wanted to give up the work, not the titles or his place in the LoS. He remains a CoS as well.
Not uncommon at his age but hopefully they have caught it quickly enough to remove it all
It’s NOT prostate. It sounds a little more ominous than that
Hmm
The wording of "a form of cancer" suggests to me something haematological, perhaps blood or lymphoma, particularly if straight to non surgical treatment.
Often these respond very well to treatment, and generally the press release is fairly upbeat.
Breaking news on BBC just flashed up that Harry will be visiting him in the coming days.....
Not uncommon at his age but hopefully they have caught it quickly enough to remove it all
It’s NOT prostate. It sounds a little more ominous than that
Hmm
The wording of "a form of cancer" suggests to me something haematological, perhaps blood or lymphoma, particularly if straight to non surgical treatment.
Often these respond very well to treatment, and generally the press release is fairly upbeat.
Breaking news on BBC just flashed up that Harry will be visiting him in the coming days.....
Rough old time for the royals. At this rate we might end up with… King Andrew
😶
We've got William and his children first but is Harry (and his brood) still in the line of succession or did he give that up along with his Royal duties?
Oh no, he wanted to give up the work, not the titles or his place in the LoS. He remains a CoS as well.
To be fair, isn't he now 5th in line, down from 3rd pre William's marriage?
Comments
My mate always used to sing “rabbit run” at the end of ‘Don’t you know you better run, run,run…” in TBAR!
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2020/dec/15/charley-pride-obituary
k.d. lang succeeded in the country genre despite being much more openly 'queer', and Tracy Chapman succeeded as a folk singer despite her colour.
Virtually every so-called journalistic defense of Julian Assange ignores the hacking conspiracy AND ALSO that at least for the state cables, he could be convicted JUST on the files he shared with Belarus so it could crack down on pro-western dissidents.
https://twitter.com/emptywheel/status/1754512515613012416
£100m, and it might be interesting.
Though taken at face value, it probably rules out a May 2 General Election.
* I have the OnePlus knock offs (2Rs) of the iPod Pros, and they're 99.9% as good for half the price.
Anyone here running a book on the date of the first flight to Rwanda and how many deportees are on it?
"CEO Chris Kempczinski said in a letter posted to LinkedIn last month the “war and associated misinformation” was hurting the company’s performance in the Middle East, pointing to claims McDonalds is supporting Israeli soldiers despite having issued no statements of support. The "disheartening and ill-founded" claims were met with calls for boycotts of the restaurant's franchises in the region."
https://www.forbes.com/sites/maryroeloffs/2024/02/05/mcdonalds-a-target-of-boycotts-like-starbucks-sees-stock-drop-earnings-hit-over-israel-hamas-war/?utm_medium=browser_notifications&utm_source=pushly&utm_campaign=4181167
https://conservativehome.com/2024/02/05/cabinet-league-table-heaton-harris-is-up-to-fourth-in-this-months-survey/
Having got used to Badenoch being the high flyer here, the only thing mildly interesting is, for me, Penny Mordaunt being such a good second. Someone here was quite passionately arguing for PM as leader the other day (apologies I forget who it was) and this somewhat endorses that view, though it's still Badenoch's to lose:
https://conservativehome.com/2024/02/05/cabinet-league-table-heaton-harris-is-up-to-fourth-in-this-months-survey/
The suggestion here, for example, is that McDonald's Israel made a statement of support and is giving free food to IDF soldiers:
https://bdsmovement.net/Boycott-McDonalds
McDonalds Israel also says it is the largest food chain in Israel.
So it seems like it would make sense for it to be boycotted when money made in Israel goes to McDonald's parent company.
@GuidoFawkes
As someone who has been known to bet a few quid on politics I just wonder if Rishi has thought the optics of this bet through. Collecting a £1,000 wad as shackled migrants are rendered to Rwanda might not be such a good look...
As we walked to our seats, a small child addressed me: you're [x]'s dad aren't you? Yep.. it turned out the girl who sat next to my son, was also at the concert.
Which, you might think, would tell you a lot about the demographic.
But, boy, did she put on a show. Not many people can do a decent stadium gig. And certainly not many people can sell the Rose Bowl out at $200 a ticket for five nights in succession. But she did.
And while my daughter is now also int artists like Olivia Rodrigo*, she still absolutely loves Taylor Swift, even as she has dropped every other artist she liked at that age.
Taylor Swift is a rare example of an artist who will still be played twenty years from now.
* Who is excellent, by the way
(One pattern I have noticed in the Grammys: Leftist political hacks win more often than one would expect, just based on talent.)
And for getting around London quickly, I doubt there will ever be a better way.
I was at a meeting in Borough and at the end, everyone headed to dinner near Euston. Some people jumped on the tube. My CFO had a call, so he took a cab. And I went on the Brompton.
I arrived in 20 minutes. Around ten minutes later the tube people got there. And another fifteen minutes layer, the taxi taker got there.
“Not a lot of people facing rising mortgages, bills and food prices are casually dropping £1,000 bets. It just shows that Rishi Sunak is totally out of touch with working people.”
The space required for the batteries means electrics have much less under-seat storage than a petrol scooter, which removes much of their flexibility as a useful vehicle rather than strictly personal transport.
And $37 a month isn't particularly cheap. I use my petrol scooter extensively and don't pay that much in fuel, even with UK petrol prices. Filling the tank costs less than £9 and gives an endurance of around 160-200 miles.
Even with battery swaps, electric scooters make sense in a particular environment - short trips in cities - already well served by e-bikes that are cheaper and don't require training, safety gear, insurance, etc.
Mordaunt or Badenoch would quickly become as unpopular as Sunak once leading government. I think the only way to not would be a) immediately announce policy u-turns and start spending money or b) immediately call a GE and promise to start spending money and paint SKS as the one who wants to continue austerity measures. And by spending money I don't mean wracking up more debt by lowering taxes on everyone / the highest earners - I mean giving local councils the funding they need, doing big budget infrastructure spending, doing a proper jobs and social housing programme - etc. etc.
The above is why I also don't think SKS will be particularly popular if / when he become PM. He is also seemingly signed up to continue Osbornomics with Reeves, and that is deeply unpopular. He is just riding the fact that the Tories are more shit and the current government.
His lot are probably quite happy if the message gets repeated because he’s clearly fishing for the type of voter who supports the policy.
Tax and spend is at an all time high. At the same time, public sector productivity is down by 7%. Even SKS has said that that taxes are too high and that public services need reform rather than being hosed with money. I'm not sure if that's a popular/ist platform but it is sure as shit a necessary one, even an urgent one. And I think if people see policies, perhaps small policies, that help with the process of earning and making money (so we can actually pay for these public services we need) being delivered, they will respect that.
I'm still not sure Mordaunt is the one to do it though. She has a sort of small like-minded fan-club, the centrist Brexiteers, people like Angela Leadsom, but I'm not sure it's enough to get anything done that she can fight an election on. But at this point she deserves a chance.
Sir Keir didn’t allow his children to eat meat until they were 10. I thought if the children were given meat then decided to go veggie, they might hold it against their parents for forcing meat on them.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12343523/Keir-Starmer-reveals-didnt-let-children-eat-meat-10-years-old.html
(It's also why Bring Back Boris doesn't work. Enough people gave 2019 Boris the BotD. Enough of them don't any more. Probably something similar goes for 2019 Jez vs 2017 Jez.)
It is a bugger of a question to answer, though. Turn the bet down, and you open up "don't you think it will work?". And Rishi doesn't have the heft to close the question down with a "You know, that's not a sensible way to think about this. The real issue is..."
But if you tie yourself to a silly policy and do an interview with Piers Morgan on a tiny TV channel, you deserve everything you get.
@theSNP
has reported Rishi Sunak over a potential breach of the ministerial code by accepting a £1,000 bet that the first plane to #Rwanda will leave before the next election.
And no charity in their right mind will touch it.
So the difficult bit is this: How much more spending? How funded and from whom? How much more borrowed? How do you plan to pay it back? If you leave all that out or are vague about it the rest of the plan means nothing.
The Apple Pencil waves hello.
Starmer vs Sunak (4 February):
Starmer leads Sunak on ALL 17 leadership characteristics polled, including:
Represents change (49% | 22%)
Understands the problems afflicting the UK (44% | 26%)
Is a strong leader (40% | 27%)
Can build a strong economy (40% | 31%)
Oh don't worry, they'll tell you.
Show me a man who's a vegan, and I'll show you a man who's trying to shag a vegan.
But really it's the basic principle that you just don't trade public business for gain (in this case, statistically integrated as the £1000 multiplied by your view of the chances).
He could have promised to donate direct without a bet. But even that isn't the right thing to do, IMV.
Petrol scooters are generally only used for shortish journeys in relatively built up areas anyway. So this is an evolution of the scooter market, rather than an alternative for EV cars or e-bikes.
Though those teenagers in Mediterranean towns aren’t going to be happy at not being able to deafen the locals every evening at passegiata time.
On the other hand I still don't see how she is an improvement on Sunak. She is less experienced, hasn't really run a significant department, and didn't cover herself in glory in the last leadership contest. There may be a honeymoon bounce, but equally the Tories might just look ridiculous changing leader again. It is the Tories that are hated, not Sunak personally.
(I think that's what I was going to say when my comment fell into a black hole!)
Interesting, though, that so many people on here are meh about it. It just seems so ill-judged to me - and I haven't even made the point that betting doesn't normally involve the sportsperson (etc) involved. I'm thinking more of the public service principle, but maybe nobody gives a shit any more?
Not prostate.
It's a stupid thing to do but the idea a man sitting on the best part of a billion quid will sell his soul for a mere thousand is laughable, and he's committed to Rwanda anyway.
Short of developing a time machine that can go back to the 1980s-2000s and making better choices, we are where we are. No, it's not going to be pretty.
However, I will grant you that for a non-war period, it is at an all time high.
And yet, it is at an all time high despite the fact that - at a departmental level - most departments' spending has dropped (often significantly) as a percentage of GDP.
Why?
Old people: pensions, social care, and the NHS.
FWIW people don't mind if politicians are rich and/or posh. In their own ways, Blair, Cameron, and Boris were all good at defusing their privileged backgrounds. They do mind if said wealth and privilege makes you continually behave like a weird dope under the delusion we're incredibly lucky to have you.
Sounds like it is planned for chemo and/or radiotherapy rather than surgery.
😶
This is a major reason why sales of electric scooters are tepid, to put it generously, and the motorcycle industry has been pushing for the ICE phaseout to be delayed. 40-50 mile range just isn't enough for many riders now and battery swapping won't help much unless the swap stations are scattered around like confetti, which isn't remotely feasible from a financial standpoint.
Hmm
Don't worry they'll soon tell you that shit 'joke' about vegans for the 50th time.
Often these respond very well to treatment, and generally the press release is fairly upbeat.
Seems a little ominous?