The right are no longer conservative. If you like pragmatic, “what matters is what works” policies you head to the left. If you want to take the world forward you also vote for the left or centre.
If you want the world to burn or more radical change you head to the neo right (or far lef)t, who want to turn the clock back to an illusion of childhood before the modern world took hold.
What utter shite. If you want pragmatic “what matters is what works” policies for an advanced economy, then you copy the Singaporean government
If you’re a poor country, you copy China. If you’re a poor country with terrible crime, you cope El Salvador
What works is all about consent, in the end. You need a broad buy-in of a broad direction of travel: the Nordics, Switzerland, Singapore, Uruguay (never gets a mention but compare it to Argentina and Brazil) etc. They go through ups and downs but generally plough forward. China has had an extraordinary 30 year spurt but now faces huge headwinds which are leading to ever-greater authoritarianism. That suggests consent is not readily available. There may be big trouble ahead.
What should perhaps concern us more is the End of Democracy altogether. Young people are staggeringly illiberal, and strikingly apathetic about democracy - they see it as not working for them, so why should they?
"Younger people more likely to doubt merits of democracy – global poll
International study reveals 42% of people aged 18 to 35 supportive of military rule, against 20% of older respondents"
This is a global trend, and we see it also in the UK
See also this paragraph:
"Many respondents believed China’s growing influence would be a force for good, with nearly twice as many respondents believing it would have a positive impact (45%) on their country as a negative one (25%)."
America is no longer the beacon, in many ways China supplants it (even as China faces problems). Out here in impoverished Phnom Penh - paradoxically surging with Chinese money - I can see why. Crime is low, food is good, life gets better, there is possibly less litter in central Phnom Penh than in Paris, London or NYC
The cost of anything is the cost of the labour required to produce it.
Things are cheap where the workers get paid bugger all.
Is it tho? Printing is just a machine
You feed the paper, press a button, it prints. Very little labour involved
Surely much of the cost is the paper, “ink”, electricity, machine usage
Getting 360 pages printed in London would cost me £20-30 at its cheapest?
So it’s ten times cheaper here to use a printer, paper, etc. I’m sure a clever economist can explain it - I am somewhat surprised
Most of what you pay in London is for the premises.
I bought two ink canisters for my hp printer in Ryman this week. £99. You cannot tell me that ink costs that much to make. The model is to sell you a cheap printer and milk you on the consumables.
Go for Epson Ecojet. Their business model is the opposite: more expensive printers, but cheap ink. And they *sip* the ink. They're blooming good if you do a fair amount of printng, and better than any HP or Lexmark inkjet I've ever had.
This is the sort of thing labour campaigners and MPs will be on the receiving end of more and more as the election campaign gets into full swing.
Wonder how this will impact labour in its inner city seats. Not just it’s Muslim vote that is very much against the slaughter in Gaza, and labours stance which is to the right of the govt, but the young in general too.
Fox jr2 says he won't vote Labour because of its stance on the Gaza conflict. He might vote Green.
How old is he ?
This is why I don’t think the Green vote share is overstated.
Early Twenties.
He is in a safe Labour seat in East London so I don't think it makes a difference.
I don't think he has a particularly deep understanding of the conflict, but is appalled by Israeli actions.
I don't think that either Netanyahu or Hamas give a toss about what foreign politicians think, except the USA for Israelis.
Yes, but isn't this just a social media trend thing? What's in-vogue?
As you say, I doubt many young people really have a particularly deep understanding of the conflict, or care that much either, its just a lot of noise is made about it as its seen to be totemic for left-wing values.
The cost of anything is the cost of the labour required to produce it.
Things are cheap where the workers get paid bugger all.
Is it tho? Printing is just a machine
You feed the paper, press a button, it prints. Very little labour involved
Surely much of the cost is the paper, “ink”, electricity, machine usage
Getting 360 pages printed in London would cost me £20-30 at its cheapest?
So it’s ten times cheaper here to use a printer, paper, etc. I’m sure a clever economist can explain it - I am somewhat surprised
Most of what you pay in London is for the premises.
I bought two ink canisters for my hp printer in Ryman this week. £99. You cannot tell me that ink costs that much to make. The model is to sell you a cheap printer and milk you on the consumables.
See also razor blades.
Yes. Its a hideous business model but it clearly works - for them - as if hasn’t changed for many years
I did a deep dive on it about a year ago when we were discussing the vileness of printers on pb. Apparently they make the machines deliberately crap and flimsy so you keep having to replace them
Even the cheapness of the machines is an illusion
I pay HP a measly sum every month and they send me new ink when I need it, checked remotely so I never run out , it arrives before you are done.
I was using HP. The printer broke. Of course. They always break
I believe I am the first PBer to admit that I am expressing a firm opinion which is based on literally zero information and no knowledge at all, rendering my opinion entirely valueless - nonetheless it is my firm opinion, and I demand to be heard
The cost of anything is the cost of the labour required to produce it.
Things are cheap where the workers get paid bugger all.
Is it tho? Printing is just a machine
You feed the paper, press a button, it prints. Very little labour involved
Surely much of the cost is the paper, “ink”, electricity, machine usage
Getting 360 pages printed in London would cost me £20-30 at its cheapest?
So it’s ten times cheaper here to use a printer, paper, etc. I’m sure a clever economist can explain it - I am somewhat surprised
Most of what you pay in London is for the premises.
I bought two ink canisters for my hp printer in Ryman this week. £99. You cannot tell me that ink costs that much to make. The model is to sell you a cheap printer and milk you on the consumables.
See also razor blades.
Yes. Its a hideous business model but it clearly works - for them - as if hasn’t changed for many years
I did a deep dive on it about a year ago when we were discussing the vileness of printers on pb. Apparently they make the machines deliberately crap and flimsy so you keep having to replace them
Even the cheapness of the machines is an illusion
I pay HP a measly sum every month and they send me new ink when I need it, checked remotely so I never run out , it arrives before you are done.
I was using HP. The printer broke. Of course. They always break
The cost of anything is the cost of the labour required to produce it.
Things are cheap where the workers get paid bugger all.
Is it tho? Printing is just a machine
You feed the paper, press a button, it prints. Very little labour involved
Surely much of the cost is the paper, “ink”, electricity, machine usage
Getting 360 pages printed in London would cost me £20-30 at its cheapest?
So it’s ten times cheaper here to use a printer, paper, etc. I’m sure a clever economist can explain it - I am somewhat surprised
Most of what you pay in London is for the premises.
I bought two ink canisters for my hp printer in Ryman this week. £99. You cannot tell me that ink costs that much to make. The model is to sell you a cheap printer and milk you on the consumables.
Go for Epson Ecojet. Their business model is the opposite: more expensive printers, but cheap ink. And they *sip* the ink. They're blooming good if you do a fair amount of printng, and better than any HP or Lexmark inkjet I've ever had.
Trouble is I generally don't do that much printing, and it is extremely sporadic (because I travel so much) - but then suddenly I will need 200 pages done in a day, then three weeks go by and I need 7 pages, next day 2, then another 4 weeks of nothing and then I need another 100 pages and my printer breaks. Again. GAH
It's infuriating
Also I have a small flat and my printer/scanner has to be tiny as possible
Yesterday @Cicero was claiming Putin would use nukes
I don´t think the FT article is that "scary", it is more or less a statement of facts.
The position I set out is that Putin is contemptuous of the West and has not been deterred by anything that we have said. The back channels and communications built up since the 1970s have now been systematically removed. There are very few ways to signal to the Kremlin that their actions cross NATO red lines. Equally, policy formation in the Kremlin is opaque and inconsistent, and it is exceptionally difficult to understand their policy limits.This collapse of deterrence removes any buffer, so that the risks of a direct attack on NATO become far higher. Indeed the military high commands of Denmark, Poland, Estonia, and Finland amongst others have issued specific and detailed warnings of likely Russian military attack.
Putin has consistently doubled down in every crisis and this is extremely reckless. Since every Russian ZAPAD exercise concluded with a nuclear strike against a NATO capital (Bucharest, Warsaw) or Stockholm, we therefore have to assume that the use of nuclear weapons against a NATO capital is mainstream Russian military doctrine.
No one can predict the future with detailed accuracy, but the risks of the use of nuclear weapons in Europe in the coming decade are clearly much higher than at any time since the era of detente began in the 1970s (the 1983 Able Archer near catastrophe, excepted).
So Putin is not just an existential threat to Ukraine, but also to NATO. That threat has included the long term use of bribery, subversion, blackmail and sophisticated hybrid attacks against Western Democracy and infrastructure.
We need to overcome this challenge, and that is what a lot of military and political thinking is being focussed on right now. Objectively the West is far stronger than Russia, and Putin knows this. However Putin thinks that he can Judo throw the West in order to restore the Soviet Imperium, including beyond the old cold war borders. I think he is reckless and deluded but we will not be able to contain him with words, so therefore we need to be prepared for more kinetic challenges from Russia in Europe.
Interesting, thankyou. Deserves more thought than my immediate reaction here, I will muse
I have been ridiculed on this site for freaking out about Putin Potentially Going Nuclear in late 2022 (I think it was then). I don't mind being ridiculed, I am sometimes ridiculous - HOWEVER in the last couple of days I have read several articles which say that Yes, this was a genuine and huge concern in DC (and elsewhere) at that time
The White House, Pentagon, CIA etc really thought Putin was inches away from launching a nuke (probably tactical) as his armies retreated
So my nuclear-themed "brace" was not so hyperbolic, after all. And that also suggests you might have a point in your graver concerns
"genuine concerns" - if the reporting is true - is not the same as 'real concerns'.
I'm a nuke-sceptic. Putin is not insane, or even mad. He is a gambler. The gamble to invade Ukraine in February 22 nearly paid off for him in the short term - it was a darned close thing. He is now gambling that Trump will win in November.
There are no practical benefits for Putin to use tactical *or* strategic nukes; only downsides. The only advantages of his nukes are as a threat that may cause people not to act against his aggression. And in that, they are working.
So the interesting thing that happened last year was that Ukraine managed to reopen shipping (without the grain agreement). Militarily Russia are perfectly capable of hitting enough civilian ships to prevent them sailing, but Ukraine also showed that they're now capable of hitting Russian ships. So it does seem like deterrence works against Russia, provided it's credible.
That said, an autocrat with nuclear weapons will always be dangerous, and externally you can't really tell how dangerous they'll be because so much depends on their state of mind, which could change at any time.
This is the sort of thing labour campaigners and MPs will be on the receiving end of more and more as the election campaign gets into full swing.
Wonder how this will impact labour in its inner city seats. Not just it’s Muslim vote that is very much against the slaughter in Gaza, and labours stance which is to the right of the govt, but the young in general too.
If SKS lets off even a tiny bit of slack on it then he'll be considered open to Labour not having properly dealt with their anti-semitism problem once more, which is where it hurts him more with floating voters.
For all the noise the minority make most people couldn't give a toss about Gaza and for the young in general (those who are activist on social media) it's just the latest fashionable political in-thing.
PP seems to have disappeared from the public consciousness. If she wants to be leader of the tories' Unternehmen Werwolf she needs to be spouting crap on GB News and in the DM on the reg. She is not acting as if she wants it.
That's a good point.
PP is a bit more visible locally nowadays. We’ve had at least two ‘newsletters’ in the constituency this year and several last, after quite a long interval. On a face-to-face basis she’s perfectly OK to talk to; her accent is typical of reasonably educated Outer London. No, I’m not going to vote for her!
I see SKS ordered Sue Grey to seize the personal phones of his staffers to find out who leaked the Green New Deal.
It turns out #TelAvivKeith was the nickname being used in e mails between said staffers.
Lol. SKS fans or should that be #TAK fans please explain
There is an article in the Guardian which I am not going to fetch because it would run down my monthly allowance of just 20 stories, suggesting that after Hartlepool, Starmer realised, along with the rest of us, that he was indeed the World's most incompetent dud and was on the cusp of resigning.
Sadly he didn't.
TelAviv Keith is a superb PT down. Rishi should use it at PMQs.
PP seems to have disappeared from the public consciousness. If she wants to be leader of the tories' Unternehmen Werwolf she needs to be spouting crap on GB News and in the DM on the reg. She is not acting as if she wants it.
That's a good point.
PP is a bit more visible locally nowadays. We’ve had at least two ‘newsletters’ in the constituency this year and several last, after quite a long interval. On a face-to-face basis she’s perfectly OK to talk to; her accent is typical of reasonably educated Outer London. No, I’m not going to vote for her!
My Mum lives in the constituency and she met Patel. She said Patel is as thick as pigshit. [*]
[*] My Mum's exact words were "she tries terribly hard" but I remember that euphemism from when she used to be a teacher.
This is the sort of thing labour campaigners and MPs will be on the receiving end of more and more as the election campaign gets into full swing.
Wonder how this will impact labour in its inner city seats. Not just it’s Muslim vote that is very much against the slaughter in Gaza, and labours stance which is to the right of the govt, but the young in general too.
If SKS lets off even a tiny bit of slack on it then he'll be considered open to Labour not having properly dealt with their anti-semitism problem once more, which is where it hurts him more with floating voters.
For all the noise the minority make most people couldn't give a toss about Gaza and for the young in general (those who are activist on social media) it's just the latest fashionable political in-thing.
Yes, the votes Starmer needs are those who voted Tory in 2019. The whole Palestine issue might be the favourite cause of the activist base, but it’s a massive turn-off to floating voters.
Top of the known unknowns that sees Sunak scrape over the line, is a Labour civil war over the Middle East.
The cost of anything is the cost of the labour required to produce it.
Things are cheap where the workers get paid bugger all.
Is it tho? Printing is just a machine
You feed the paper, press a button, it prints. Very little labour involved
Surely much of the cost is the paper, “ink”, electricity, machine usage
Getting 360 pages printed in London would cost me £20-30 at its cheapest?
So it’s ten times cheaper here to use a printer, paper, etc. I’m sure a clever economist can explain it - I am somewhat surprised
Most of what you pay in London is for the premises.
I bought two ink canisters for my hp printer in Ryman this week. £99. You cannot tell me that ink costs that much to make. The model is to sell you a cheap printer and milk you on the consumables.
See also razor blades.
Yes. Its a hideous business model but it clearly works - for them - as if hasn’t changed for many years
I did a deep dive on it about a year ago when we were discussing the vileness of printers on pb. Apparently they make the machines deliberately crap and flimsy so you keep having to replace them
Even the cheapness of the machines is an illusion
I pay HP a measly sum every month and they send me new ink when I need it, checked remotely so I never run out , it arrives before you are done.
I was using HP. The printer broke. Of course. They always break
'HP' stands for 'Horrible Product.'
They have some sauce, taking Malcolm's money every month.
I see SKS ordered Sue Grey to seize the personal phones of his staffers to find out who leaked the Green New Deal.
It turns out #TelAvivKeith was the nickname being used in e mails between said staffers.
Lol. SKS fans or should that be #TAK fans please explain
There is an article in the Guardian which I am not going to fetch because it would run down my monthly allowance of just 20 stories, suggesting that after Hartlepool, Starmer realised, along with the rest of us, that he was indeed the World's most incompetent dud and was on the cusp of resigning.
Sadly he didn't.
TelAviv Keith is a superb PT down. Rishi should use it at PMQs.
"TelAviv Keith is a superb PT down. Rishi should use it at PMQs."
Yeah, no, that's never going to happen, for obv reasons
British politicians are terrified of this issue, and with some justification
I have no doubt she wants the job, and David Gauke understands his former party better than me, but there are two factors working against Patel:
1. Allegations of bullying, which seem more severe than what Dominic Raab was sacked for. 2. She was the Home Secretary who conceived of the Rwanda policy, which I suspect most Conservative MPs now see as more of a nuisance than a solution to anything.
She is less unpopular than Baverman simply because she is currently less in the public eye. Anyone attempting to be a 'British Meloni' will not be popular.
I think a Badenoch/Tugendhat team-up is more plausible for the next Conservative leadership contest.
The cost of anything is the cost of the labour required to produce it.
Things are cheap where the workers get paid bugger all.
Is it tho? Printing is just a machine
You feed the paper, press a button, it prints. Very little labour involved
Surely much of the cost is the paper, “ink”, electricity, machine usage
Getting 360 pages printed in London would cost me £20-30 at its cheapest?
So it’s ten times cheaper here to use a printer, paper, etc. I’m sure a clever economist can explain it - I am somewhat surprised
Most of what you pay in London is for the premises.
I bought two ink canisters for my hp printer in Ryman this week. £99. You cannot tell me that ink costs that much to make. The model is to sell you a cheap printer and milk you on the consumables.
Go for Epson Ecojet. Their business model is the opposite: more expensive printers, but cheap ink. And they *sip* the ink. They're blooming good if you do a fair amount of printng, and better than any HP or Lexmark inkjet I've ever had.
Trouble is I generally don't do that much printing, and it is extremely sporadic (because I travel so much) - but then suddenly I will need 200 pages done in a day, then three weeks go by and I need 7 pages, next day 2, then another 4 weeks of nothing and then I need another 100 pages and my printer breaks. Again. GAH
It's infuriating
Also I have a small flat and my printer/scanner has to be tiny as possible
Same here - my printing comes in bursts: I tend to do nothing for a couple of weeks or a month, and then print hundreds of pages. And that meant my old HP would be gunked up, and I'd use loads of ink aligning heads to get acceptable print quality. I don't have that issue with the EcoJet. Even better: because it prints well without hassle, I use it more. If I'm going somewhere, I often print out a local map to backup my phone. As it's easy, I do it.
Yesterday @Cicero was claiming Putin would use nukes
I don´t think the FT article is that "scary", it is more or less a statement of facts.
The position I set out is that Putin is contemptuous of the West and has not been deterred by anything that we have said. The back channels and communications built up since the 1970s have now been systematically removed. There are very few ways to signal to the Kremlin that their actions cross NATO red lines. Equally, policy formation in the Kremlin is opaque and inconsistent, and it is exceptionally difficult to understand their policy limits.This collapse of deterrence removes any buffer, so that the risks of a direct attack on NATO become far higher. Indeed the military high commands of Denmark, Poland, Estonia, and Finland amongst others have issued specific and detailed warnings of likely Russian military attack.
Putin has consistently doubled down in every crisis and this is extremely reckless. Since every Russian ZAPAD exercise concluded with a nuclear strike against a NATO capital (Bucharest, Warsaw) or Stockholm, we therefore have to assume that the use of nuclear weapons against a NATO capital is mainstream Russian military doctrine.
No one can predict the future with detailed accuracy, but the risks of the use of nuclear weapons in Europe in the coming decade are clearly much higher than at any time since the era of detente began in the 1970s (the 1983 Able Archer near catastrophe, excepted).
So Putin is not just an existential threat to Ukraine, but also to NATO. That threat has included the long term use of bribery, subversion, blackmail and sophisticated hybrid attacks against Western Democracy and infrastructure.
We need to overcome this challenge, and that is what a lot of military and political thinking is being focussed on right now. Objectively the West is far stronger than Russia, and Putin knows this. However Putin thinks that he can Judo throw the West in order to restore the Soviet Imperium, including beyond the old cold war borders. I think he is reckless and deluded but we will not be able to contain him with words, so therefore we need to be prepared for more kinetic challenges from Russia in Europe.
Interesting, thankyou. Deserves more thought than my immediate reaction here, I will muse
I have been ridiculed on this site for freaking out about Putin Potentially Going Nuclear in late 2022 (I think it was then). I don't mind being ridiculed, I am sometimes ridiculous - HOWEVER in the last couple of days I have read several articles which say that Yes, this was a genuine and huge concern in DC (and elsewhere) at that time
The White House, Pentagon, CIA etc really thought Putin was inches away from launching a nuke (probably tactical) as his armies retreated
So my nuclear-themed "brace" was not so hyperbolic, after all. And that also suggests you might have a point in your graver concerns
"genuine concerns" - if the reporting is true - is not the same as 'real concerns'.
I'm a nuke-sceptic. Putin is not insane, or even mad. He is a gambler. The gamble to invade Ukraine in February 22 nearly paid off for him in the short term - it was a darned close thing. He is now gambling that Trump will win in November.
There are no practical benefits for Putin to use tactical *or* strategic nukes; only downsides. The only advantages of his nukes are as a threat that may cause people not to act against his aggression. And in that, they are working.
So the interesting thing that happened last year was that Ukraine managed to reopen shipping (without the grain agreement). Militarily Russia are perfectly capable of hitting enough civilian ships to prevent them sailing, but Ukraine also showed that they're now capable of hitting Russian ships. So it does seem like deterrence works against Russia, provided it's credible.
That said, an autocrat with nuclear weapons will always be dangerous, and externally you can't really tell how dangerous they'll be because so much depends on their state of mind, which could change at any time.
Russia has always looked more dangerous when winning, and confident, than when being knocked back or aggressively deterred. Not just since 2022 but since at least 2008.
Bully logic. The surest route to escalation is to sit back and give them space.
This is the sort of thing labour campaigners and MPs will be on the receiving end of more and more as the election campaign gets into full swing.
Wonder how this will impact labour in its inner city seats. Not just it’s Muslim vote that is very much against the slaughter in Gaza, and labours stance which is to the right of the govt, but the young in general too.
Having watched that in full now I genuinely feel sorry for Rachel Reeves.
If anyone comes at you from a campaign group with an iPhone pointed at your face on record, and shouting histrionically at you, they're not interested in a genuine conversation and you need to politely get out of there as fast as you can.
The right are no longer conservative. If you like pragmatic, “what matters is what works” policies you head to the left. If you want to take the world forward you also vote for the left or centre.
If you want the world to burn or more radical change you head to the neo right (or far lef)t, who want to turn the clock back to an illusion of childhood before the modern world took hold.
What utter shite. If you want pragmatic “what matters is what works” policies for an advanced economy, then you copy the Singaporean government
If you’re a poor country, you copy China. If you’re a poor country with terrible crime, you cope El Salvador
What works is all about consent, in the end. You need a broad buy-in of a broad direction of travel: the Nordics, Switzerland, Singapore, Uruguay (never gets a mention but compare it to Argentina and Brazil) etc. They go through ups and downs but generally plough forward. China has had an extraordinary 30 year spurt but now faces huge headwinds which are leading to ever-greater authoritarianism. That suggests consent is not readily available. There may be big trouble ahead.
What should perhaps concern us more is the End of Democracy altogether. Young people are staggeringly illiberal, and strikingly apathetic about democracy - they see it as not working for them, so why should they?
"Younger people more likely to doubt merits of democracy – global poll
International study reveals 42% of people aged 18 to 35 supportive of military rule, against 20% of older respondents"
This is a global trend, and we see it also in the UK
See also this paragraph:
"Many respondents believed China’s growing influence would be a force for good, with nearly twice as many respondents believing it would have a positive impact (45%) on their country as a negative one (25%)."
America is no longer the beacon, in many ways China supplants it (even as China faces problems). Out here in impoverished Phnom Penh - paradoxically surging with Chinese money - I can see why. Crime is low, food is good, life gets better, there is possibly less litter in central Phnom Penh than in Paris, London or NYC
How many benefits do they get if they don't work their socks off, no freebies in these countries. Our lazy arses wll get a shock when the cash runs out and free money is not splashed about and they need to slog day and night to survive.
I see SKS ordered Sue Grey to seize the personal phones of his staffers to find out who leaked the Green New Deal.
It turns out #TelAvivKeith was the nickname being used in e mails between said staffers.
Lol. SKS fans or should that be #TAK fans please explain
There is an article in the Guardian which I am not going to fetch because it would run down my monthly allowance of just 20 stories, suggesting that after Hartlepool, Starmer realised, along with the rest of us, that he was indeed the World's most incompetent dud and was on the cusp of resigning.
Sadly he didn't.
TelAviv Keith is a superb PT down. Rishi should use it at PMQs.
"TelAviv Keith is a superb PT down. Rishi should use it at PMQs."
Yeah, no, that's never going to happen, for obv reasons
British politicians are terrified of this issue, and with some justification
Blackford (I didn't realise he was still in the building) isn't. He said week that the SNP plan to humiliate TelAvivKeith with a ceasefire vote. The SNP are wonderfully Machiavellian.
The cost of anything is the cost of the labour required to produce it.
Things are cheap where the workers get paid bugger all.
Is it tho? Printing is just a machine
You feed the paper, press a button, it prints. Very little labour involved
Surely much of the cost is the paper, “ink”, electricity, machine usage
Getting 360 pages printed in London would cost me £20-30 at its cheapest?
So it’s ten times cheaper here to use a printer, paper, etc. I’m sure a clever economist can explain it - I am somewhat surprised
Most of what you pay in London is for the premises.
I bought two ink canisters for my hp printer in Ryman this week. £99. You cannot tell me that ink costs that much to make. The model is to sell you a cheap printer and milk you on the consumables.
Go for Epson Ecojet. Their business model is the opposite: more expensive printers, but cheap ink. And they *sip* the ink. They're blooming good if you do a fair amount of printng, and better than any HP or Lexmark inkjet I've ever had.
Trouble is I generally don't do that much printing, and it is extremely sporadic (because I travel so much) - but then suddenly I will need 200 pages done in a day, then three weeks go by and I need 7 pages, next day 2, then another 4 weeks of nothing and then I need another 100 pages and my printer breaks. Again. GAH
It's infuriating
Also I have a small flat and my printer/scanner has to be tiny as possible
Same here - my printing comes in bursts: I tend to do nothing for a couple of weeks or a month, and then print hundreds of pages. And that meant my old HP would be gunked up, and I'd use loads of ink aligning heads to get acceptable print quality. I don't have that issue with the EcoJet. Even better: because it prints well without hassle, I use it more. If I'm going somewhere, I often print out a local map to backup my phone. As it's easy, I do it.
Can't help with the flat size, though...
There might be money to be made renting one little room which contains several excellent business printers - where people can come and do their own printing. A bit like a laundrette, but for printers
That's actually not a bad idea, if you want to run a really boring business that makes modest profits
The cost of anything is the cost of the labour required to produce it.
Things are cheap where the workers get paid bugger all.
Is it tho? Printing is just a machine
You feed the paper, press a button, it prints. Very little labour involved
Surely much of the cost is the paper, “ink”, electricity, machine usage
Getting 360 pages printed in London would cost me £20-30 at its cheapest?
So it’s ten times cheaper here to use a printer, paper, etc. I’m sure a clever economist can explain it - I am somewhat surprised
Most of what you pay in London is for the premises.
I bought two ink canisters for my hp printer in Ryman this week. £99. You cannot tell me that ink costs that much to make. The model is to sell you a cheap printer and milk you on the consumables.
See also razor blades.
Yes. Its a hideous business model but it clearly works - for them - as if hasn’t changed for many years
I did a deep dive on it about a year ago when we were discussing the vileness of printers on pb. Apparently they make the machines deliberately crap and flimsy so you keep having to replace them
Even the cheapness of the machines is an illusion
I pay HP a measly sum every month and they send me new ink when I need it, checked remotely so I never run out , it arrives before you are done.
I was using HP. The printer broke. Of course. They always break
yes but at the price of them if you get a year or two out of them you are fine , they are cheap as chips as they want to make money of the ink.
This is the sort of thing labour campaigners and MPs will be on the receiving end of more and more as the election campaign gets into full swing.
Wonder how this will impact labour in its inner city seats. Not just it’s Muslim vote that is very much against the slaughter in Gaza, and labours stance which is to the right of the govt, but the young in general too.
Having watched that in full now I genuinely feel sorry for Rachel Reeves.
If anyone comes at you from a campaign group with an iPhone pointed at your face on record, and shouting histrionically at you, they're not interested in a genuine conversation and you need to politely get out of there as fast as you can.
Yes, I agree with this. At first she tried to engage but it was clear the activists just wanted to harangue her. Quite frankly her vote on a ceasefire would make no difference whatsoever so berating her for it is pointless.
Rachel Revves handled it very well as did Angela Rayner last week.
The right are no longer conservative. If you like pragmatic, “what matters is what works” policies you head to the left. If you want to take the world forward you also vote for the left or centre.
If you want the world to burn or more radical change you head to the neo right (or far lef)t, who want to turn the clock back to an illusion of childhood before the modern world took hold.
What utter shite. If you want pragmatic “what matters is what works” policies for an advanced economy, then you copy the Singaporean government
If you’re a poor country, you copy China. If you’re a poor country with terrible crime, you cope El Salvador
What works is all about consent, in the end. You need a broad buy-in of a broad direction of travel: the Nordics, Switzerland, Singapore, Uruguay (never gets a mention but compare it to Argentina and Brazil) etc. They go through ups and downs but generally plough forward. China has had an extraordinary 30 year spurt but now faces huge headwinds which are leading to ever-greater authoritarianism. That suggests consent is not readily available. There may be big trouble ahead.
What should perhaps concern us more is the End of Democracy altogether. Young people are staggeringly illiberal, and strikingly apathetic about democracy - they see it as not working for them, so why should they?
"Younger people more likely to doubt merits of democracy – global poll
International study reveals 42% of people aged 18 to 35 supportive of military rule, against 20% of older respondents"
This is a global trend, and we see it also in the UK
See also this paragraph:
"Many respondents believed China’s growing influence would be a force for good, with nearly twice as many respondents believing it would have a positive impact (45%) on their country as a negative one (25%)."
America is no longer the beacon, in many ways China supplants it (even as China faces problems). Out here in impoverished Phnom Penh - paradoxically surging with Chinese money - I can see why. Crime is low, food is good, life gets better, there is possibly less litter in central Phnom Penh than in Paris, London or NYC
Hong Kong is the canary in the coal mine. They cheered the Chinese in back in 1997. A generation later, before public demonstrations against Beijing were totally forbidden on pain of long-term incarceration or worse, they were waving the old colonial flag in mass street protests.
I see SKS ordered Sue Grey to seize the personal phones of his staffers to find out who leaked the Green New Deal.
It turns out #TelAvivKeith was the nickname being used in e mails between said staffers.
Lol. SKS fans or should that be #TAK fans please explain
There is an article in the Guardian which I am not going to fetch because it would run down my monthly allowance of just 20 stories, suggesting that after Hartlepool, Starmer realised, along with the rest of us, that he was indeed the World's most incompetent dud and was on the cusp of resigning.
Sadly he didn't.
TelAviv Keith is a superb PT down. Rishi should use it at PMQs.
"TelAviv Keith is a superb PT down. Rishi should use it at PMQs."
Yeah, no, that's never going to happen, for obv reasons
British politicians are terrified of this issue, and with some justification
Blackford (I didn't realise he was still in the building) isn't. He said week that the SNP plan to humiliate TelAvivKeith with a ceasefire vote. The SNP are wonderfully Machiavellian.
The right are no longer conservative. If you like pragmatic, “what matters is what works” policies you head to the left. If you want to take the world forward you also vote for the left or centre.
If you want the world to burn or more radical change you head to the neo right (or far lef)t, who want to turn the clock back to an illusion of childhood before the modern world took hold.
What utter shite. If you want pragmatic “what matters is what works” policies for an advanced economy, then you copy the Singaporean government
If you’re a poor country, you copy China. If you’re a poor country with terrible crime, you cope El Salvador
What works is all about consent, in the end. You need a broad buy-in of a broad direction of travel: the Nordics, Switzerland, Singapore, Uruguay (never gets a mention but compare it to Argentina and Brazil) etc. They go through ups and downs but generally plough forward. China has had an extraordinary 30 year spurt but now faces huge headwinds which are leading to ever-greater authoritarianism. That suggests consent is not readily available. There may be big trouble ahead.
What should perhaps concern us more is the End of Democracy altogether. Young people are staggeringly illiberal, and strikingly apathetic about democracy - they see it as not working for them, so why should they?
"Younger people more likely to doubt merits of democracy – global poll
International study reveals 42% of people aged 18 to 35 supportive of military rule, against 20% of older respondents"
This is a global trend, and we see it also in the UK
See also this paragraph:
"Many respondents believed China’s growing influence would be a force for good, with nearly twice as many respondents believing it would have a positive impact (45%) on their country as a negative one (25%)."
America is no longer the beacon, in many ways China supplants it (even as China faces problems). Out here in impoverished Phnom Penh - paradoxically surging with Chinese money - I can see why. Crime is low, food is good, life gets better, there is possibly less litter in central Phnom Penh than in Paris, London or NYC
How many benefits do they get if they don't work their socks off, no freebies in these countries. Our lazy arses wll get a shock when the cash runs out and free money is not splashed about and they need to slog day and night to survive.
Indeed
I remember thinking this 25-30 years ago in Bangkok when I realised how hard they all work, and how honest they are, and how intensely they commit to their jobs, and - back then - how they do it for such little money, and with virtually nothing in the way of benefits to rely on if it goes wrong
My thought was: if theyever get to compete directly with coddled western workers, we are fucked. The welfare state will be unsustainable. Might finally be coming true
When is the right wing going to learn that Boris really isn't one of them? They see Brexit and think he must some sort of fanatic, like them, and he just isn't. Boris never had any real problem with immigration. He likes public spending. He is relaxed about higher taxes. He doesn't believe in a small state. He wants to do things with public money, popular things. The evidence is there throughout his premiership. Look at what he did, not what he says.
The idea that bringing Boris back somehow unites the right is wrong. It just creates a whole new set of tensions. Maybe these won't matter too much in the next decade when it won't really matter what the Tories think about anything but eventually it will. The tension between the one nation Conservative types and the Singapore on Thames clique is a real dividing line in the party. You begin to wonder if even greed and the hunger for power can hold them together.
The right are no longer conservative. If you like pragmatic, “what matters is what works” policies you head to the left. If you want to take the world forward you also vote for the left or centre.
If you want the world to burn or more radical change you head to the neo right (or far lef)t, who want to turn the clock back to an illusion of childhood before the modern world took hold.
What utter shite. If you want pragmatic “what matters is what works” policies for an advanced economy, then you copy the Singaporean government
If you’re a poor country, you copy China. If you’re a poor country with terrible crime, you cope El Salvador
Farage and the U.K. right backward looking. All airfix kits of spitfires. Moribund.
Straw man. That wasn’t the argument
The fact you have to turn to the benevolent authoritarian as the model to follow is indicative of the lack of the ideas on the right. There is no radical, forward looking freedom entrepreneurial capitalist agenda. Just nostalgia driven pastiche delivered by Trump Farage and Truss.
El Salvador is hardly nostalgic pastiche. It’s radical right wing populism - and quite revolutionary - and the President has just won the greatest mandate in the history of democracy. 85% of the vote
Get out of your tedious little bubble
I’m talking about the west. It maybe a tedious little bubble to you, but it still matters.
On this Leon is right. Just because the west doesn’t currently ape El Salvador or Singapore, doesn’t mean we won’t.
And if you’re not bothered about human rights, treatment of minorities, equality, racism, the role of law, their policies ‘work’.
PP seems to have disappeared from the public consciousness. If she wants to be leader of the tories' Unternehmen Werwolf she needs to be spouting crap on GB News and in the DM on the reg. She is not acting as if she wants it.
That's a good point.
PP is a bit more visible locally nowadays. We’ve had at least two ‘newsletters’ in the constituency this year and several last, after quite a long interval. On a face-to-face basis she’s perfectly OK to talk to; her accent is typical of reasonably educated Outer London. No, I’m not going to vote for her!
My Mum lives in the constituency and she met Patel. She said Patel is as thick as pigshit. [*]
[*] My Mum's exact words were "she tries terribly hard" but I remember that euphemism from when she used to be a teacher.
She certainly doesn’t try to ‘lead’ local opinion. She follows it. As someone once posted about Johnson; sees which way the crowd is running, jumps in front and shouts “Follow me!”.
The right are no longer conservative. If you like pragmatic, “what matters is what works” policies you head to the left. If you want to take the world forward you also vote for the left or centre.
If you want the world to burn or more radical change you head to the neo right (or far lef)t, who want to turn the clock back to an illusion of childhood before the modern world took hold.
What utter shite. If you want pragmatic “what matters is what works” policies for an advanced economy, then you copy the Singaporean government
If you’re a poor country, you copy China. If you’re a poor country with terrible crime, you cope El Salvador
Farage and the U.K. right backward looking. All airfix kits of spitfires. Moribund.
Straw man. That wasn’t the argument
The fact you have to turn to the benevolent authoritarian as the model to follow is indicative of the lack of the ideas on the right. There is no radical, forward looking freedom entrepreneurial capitalist agenda. Just nostalgia driven pastiche delivered by Trump Farage and Truss.
El Salvador is hardly nostalgic pastiche. It’s radical right wing populism - and quite revolutionary - and the President has just won the greatest mandate in the history of democracy. 85% of the vote
Get out of your tedious little bubble
I’m talking about the west. It maybe a tedious little bubble to you, but it still matters.
On this Leon is right. Just because the west doesn’t currently ape El Salvador or Singapore, doesn’t mean we won’t.
And if you’re not bothered about human rights, treatment of minorities, equality, racism, the role of law, their policies ‘work’.
Also AI: it wil enable perpetual surveillance of every street and pavement, 24/7
It will, potentially, reduce crime to near-zero, via facial identification and all the other tech now coming on-stream
This will be a massive reduction in our liberties and "human rights", but as polls show, people increasingly care a lot less about all that fancy stuff - if you can deliver voters a zero crime society - like Singapore or Japan - they will jump at the chance. See also Salvador
The cost of anything is the cost of the labour required to produce it.
Things are cheap where the workers get paid bugger all.
Is it tho? Printing is just a machine
You feed the paper, press a button, it prints. Very little labour involved
Surely much of the cost is the paper, “ink”, electricity, machine usage
Getting 360 pages printed in London would cost me £20-30 at its cheapest?
So it’s ten times cheaper here to use a printer, paper, etc. I’m sure a clever economist can explain it - I am somewhat surprised
Most of what you pay in London is for the premises.
I bought two ink canisters for my hp printer in Ryman this week. £99. You cannot tell me that ink costs that much to make. The model is to sell you a cheap printer and milk you on the consumables.
Go for Epson Ecojet. Their business model is the opposite: more expensive printers, but cheap ink. And they *sip* the ink. They're blooming good if you do a fair amount of printng, and better than any HP or Lexmark inkjet I've ever had.
Trouble is I generally don't do that much printing, and it is extremely sporadic (because I travel so much) - but then suddenly I will need 200 pages done in a day, then three weeks go by and I need 7 pages, next day 2, then another 4 weeks of nothing and then I need another 100 pages and my printer breaks. Again. GAH
It's infuriating
Also I have a small flat and my printer/scanner has to be tiny as possible
Same here - my printing comes in bursts: I tend to do nothing for a couple of weeks or a month, and then print hundreds of pages. And that meant my old HP would be gunked up, and I'd use loads of ink aligning heads to get acceptable print quality. I don't have that issue with the EcoJet. Even better: because it prints well without hassle, I use it more. If I'm going somewhere, I often print out a local map to backup my phone. As it's easy, I do it.
Can't help with the flat size, though...
Just the words "print alignment" make me shudder with horror
When is the right wing going to learn that Boris really isn't one of them? They see Brexit and think he must some sort of fanatic, like them, and he just isn't. Boris never had any real problem with immigration. He likes public spending. He is relaxed about higher taxes. He doesn't believe in a small state. He wants to do things with public money, popular things. The evidence is there throughout his premiership. Look at what he did, not what he says.
The idea that bringing Boris back somehow unites the right is wrong. It just creates a whole new set of tensions. Maybe these won't matter too much in the next decade when it won't really matter what the Tories think about anything but eventually it will. The tension between the one nation Conservative types and the Singapore on Thames clique is a real dividing line in the party. You begin to wonder if even greed and the hunger for power can hold them together.
But "Boris" is a chameleon. If it takes him back up the greasy pole, he would be quite content to hang and flog foreigners, if that's what his enablers want, why not? Equally, if he thought wearing nothing but a Pride jockstrap at the Notting Hill Carnival would do the trick, that is what he would feel he needs to do.
The right are no longer conservative. If you like pragmatic, “what matters is what works” policies you head to the left. If you want to take the world forward you also vote for the left or centre.
If you want the world to burn or more radical change you head to the neo right (or far lef)t, who want to turn the clock back to an illusion of childhood before the modern world took hold.
What utter shite. If you want pragmatic “what matters is what works” policies for an advanced economy, then you copy the Singaporean government
If you’re a poor country, you copy China. If you’re a poor country with terrible crime, you cope El Salvador
What works is all about consent, in the end. You need a broad buy-in of a broad direction of travel: the Nordics, Switzerland, Singapore, Uruguay (never gets a mention but compare it to Argentina and Brazil) etc. They go through ups and downs but generally plough forward. China has had an extraordinary 30 year spurt but now faces huge headwinds which are leading to ever-greater authoritarianism. That suggests consent is not readily available. There may be big trouble ahead.
What should perhaps concern us more is the End of Democracy altogether. Young people are staggeringly illiberal, and strikingly apathetic about democracy - they see it as not working for them, so why should they?
"Younger people more likely to doubt merits of democracy – global poll
International study reveals 42% of people aged 18 to 35 supportive of military rule, against 20% of older respondents"
This is a global trend, and we see it also in the UK
See also this paragraph:
"Many respondents believed China’s growing influence would be a force for good, with nearly twice as many respondents believing it would have a positive impact (45%) on their country as a negative one (25%)."
America is no longer the beacon, in many ways China supplants it (even as China faces problems). Out here in impoverished Phnom Penh - paradoxically surging with Chinese money - I can see why. Crime is low, food is good, life gets better, there is possibly less litter in central Phnom Penh than in Paris, London or NYC
Hong Kong is the canary in the coal mine. They cheered the Chinese in back in 1997. A generation later, before public demonstrations against Beijing were totally forbidden on pain of long-term incarceration or worse, they were waving the old colonial flag in mass street protests.
They did not cheer the Chinese in back in 1997. Plenty, most, Hong Kong Chinese were terrified of the handover and remembered Tiananmen Square. They just kept their mouths shut. The ones you saw on the streets were the pro-Chinese minority.
If you'd taken a vote in 1997 you'd have got about 50% for ongoing British rule, 20% for some sort of independent microstate and only about 30% for reunion with China.
The right are no longer conservative. If you like pragmatic, “what matters is what works” policies you head to the left. If you want to take the world forward you also vote for the left or centre.
If you want the world to burn or more radical change you head to the neo right (or far lef)t, who want to turn the clock back to an illusion of childhood before the modern world took hold.
What utter shite. If you want pragmatic “what matters is what works” policies for an advanced economy, then you copy the Singaporean government
If you’re a poor country, you copy China. If you’re a poor country with terrible crime, you cope El Salvador
What works is all about consent, in the end. You need a broad buy-in of a broad direction of travel: the Nordics, Switzerland, Singapore, Uruguay (never gets a mention but compare it to Argentina and Brazil) etc. They go through ups and downs but generally plough forward. China has had an extraordinary 30 year spurt but now faces huge headwinds which are leading to ever-greater authoritarianism. That suggests consent is not readily available. There may be big trouble ahead.
What should perhaps concern us more is the End of Democracy altogether. Young people are staggeringly illiberal, and strikingly apathetic about democracy - they see it as not working for them, so why should they?
"Younger people more likely to doubt merits of democracy – global poll
International study reveals 42% of people aged 18 to 35 supportive of military rule, against 20% of older respondents"
This is a global trend, and we see it also in the UK
See also this paragraph:
"Many respondents believed China’s growing influence would be a force for good, with nearly twice as many respondents believing it would have a positive impact (45%) on their country as a negative one (25%)."
America is no longer the beacon, in many ways China supplants it (even as China faces problems). Out here in impoverished Phnom Penh - paradoxically surging with Chinese money - I can see why. Crime is low, food is good, life gets better, there is possibly less litter in central Phnom Penh than in Paris, London or NYC
Are we surprised?
They're all taught that Western nations and Western values are at the root of all evil in the world from the moment they're able to write.
The right are no longer conservative. If you like pragmatic, “what matters is what works” policies you head to the left. If you want to take the world forward you also vote for the left or centre.
If you want the world to burn or more radical change you head to the neo right (or far lef)t, who want to turn the clock back to an illusion of childhood before the modern world took hold.
What utter shite. If you want pragmatic “what matters is what works” policies for an advanced economy, then you copy the Singaporean government
If you’re a poor country, you copy China. If you’re a poor country with terrible crime, you cope El Salvador
What works is all about consent, in the end. You need a broad buy-in of a broad direction of travel: the Nordics, Switzerland, Singapore, Uruguay (never gets a mention but compare it to Argentina and Brazil) etc. They go through ups and downs but generally plough forward. China has had an extraordinary 30 year spurt but now faces huge headwinds which are leading to ever-greater authoritarianism. That suggests consent is not readily available. There may be big trouble ahead.
What should perhaps concern us more is the End of Democracy altogether. Young people are staggeringly illiberal, and strikingly apathetic about democracy - they see it as not working for them, so why should they?
"Younger people more likely to doubt merits of democracy – global poll
International study reveals 42% of people aged 18 to 35 supportive of military rule, against 20% of older respondents"
This is a global trend, and we see it also in the UK
See also this paragraph:
"Many respondents believed China’s growing influence would be a force for good, with nearly twice as many respondents believing it would have a positive impact (45%) on their country as a negative one (25%)."
America is no longer the beacon, in many ways China supplants it (even as China faces problems). Out here in impoverished Phnom Penh - paradoxically surging with Chinese money - I can see why. Crime is low, food is good, life gets better, there is possibly less litter in central Phnom Penh than in Paris, London or NYC
How many benefits do they get if they don't work their socks off, no freebies in these countries. Our lazy arses wll get a shock when the cash runs out and free money is not splashed about and they need to slog day and night to survive.
Indeed
I remember thinking this 25-30 years ago in Bangkok when I realised how hard they all work, and how honest they are, and how intensely they commit to their jobs, and - back then - how they do it for such little money, and with virtually nothing in the way of benefits to rely on if it goes wrong
My thought was: if theyever get to compete directly with coddled western workers, we are fucked. The welfare state will be unsustainable. Might finally be coming true
That’s part of the reason Thaksin was popular; he was starting to provide welfare. Our first half-Thai grandchild was born while he was PM and there was a parcel of useful ‘goodies’ for her. Even though her family was reasonably comfortable, even by UK standards, let alone Thai.
Has not the ship sailed for PP? Her profile is very low compared to others on the right of the party. In any event, there's no vacancy, and when Rishi ekes out a 20 seat majority in the face of recent reversals he's going to be unassailable.
The right are no longer conservative. If you like pragmatic, “what matters is what works” policies you head to the left. If you want to take the world forward you also vote for the left or centre.
If you want the world to burn or more radical change you head to the neo right (or far lef)t, who want to turn the clock back to an illusion of childhood before the modern world took hold.
What utter shite. If you want pragmatic “what matters is what works” policies for an advanced economy, then you copy the Singaporean government
If you’re a poor country, you copy China. If you’re a poor country with terrible crime, you cope El Salvador
What works is all about consent, in the end. You need a broad buy-in of a broad direction of travel: the Nordics, Switzerland, Singapore, Uruguay (never gets a mention but compare it to Argentina and Brazil) etc. They go through ups and downs but generally plough forward. China has had an extraordinary 30 year spurt but now faces huge headwinds which are leading to ever-greater authoritarianism. That suggests consent is not readily available. There may be big trouble ahead.
What should perhaps concern us more is the End of Democracy altogether. Young people are staggeringly illiberal, and strikingly apathetic about democracy - they see it as not working for them, so why should they?
"Younger people more likely to doubt merits of democracy – global poll
International study reveals 42% of people aged 18 to 35 supportive of military rule, against 20% of older respondents"
This is a global trend, and we see it also in the UK
See also this paragraph:
"Many respondents believed China’s growing influence would be a force for good, with nearly twice as many respondents believing it would have a positive impact (45%) on their country as a negative one (25%)."
America is no longer the beacon, in many ways China supplants it (even as China faces problems). Out here in impoverished Phnom Penh - paradoxically surging with Chinese money - I can see why. Crime is low, food is good, life gets better, there is possibly less litter in central Phnom Penh than in Paris, London or NYC
Hong Kong is the canary in the coal mine. They cheered the Chinese in back in 1997. A generation later, before public demonstrations against Beijing were totally forbidden on pain of long-term incarceration or worse, they were waving the old colonial flag in mass street protests.
They did not cheer the Chinese in back in 1997. Plenty, most, Hong Kong Chinese were terrified of the handover and remembered Tiananmen Square. They just kept their mouths shut. The ones you saw on the streets were the pro-Chinese minority.
If you'd taken a vote in 1997 you'd have got about 50% for ongoing British rule, 20% for some sort of independent microstate and only about 30% for reunion with China.
Yes, that is my memory, too
HK has a pro-Beijing minority but it was always a minority (probably even smaller now)
A very sad story, however there is probably not much Britain could have done differently. China is China
Last week's by-elections were a disaster for Rishi Sunak. But things are only going to get worse. He needs to call a May election, and make his final stand > Mail On Sunday >
Well if Dan Hodges is suggesting May, it’s nailed on to be in the autumn.
The thing is May is the better date but the current narrative (by election results, economy) make a May election impossible to call.
So the election will be in the Autumn and the Tory party will do disasterously because they won’t have the (remaining) troops to get he vote out.
Last week's by-elections were a disaster for Rishi Sunak. But things are only going to get worse. He needs to call a May election, and make his final stand > Mail On Sunday >
Well if Dan Hodges is suggesting May, it’s nailed on to be in the autumn.
The thing is May is the better date but the current narrative (by election results, economy) make a May election impossible to call.
So the election will be in the Autumn and the Tory party will do disasterously because they won’t have the (remaining) troops to get he vote out.
Better for who, though?
For the country, probably.
For the Conservatives given the task of rebuilding after the rout, certainly.
But the Conservatives stopped caring about the country or the future a while back.
The right are no longer conservative. If you like pragmatic, “what matters is what works” policies you head to the left. If you want to take the world forward you also vote for the left or centre.
If you want the world to burn or more radical change you head to the neo right (or far lef)t, who want to turn the clock back to an illusion of childhood before the modern world took hold.
What utter shite. If you want pragmatic “what matters is what works” policies for an advanced economy, then you copy the Singaporean government
If you’re a poor country, you copy China. If you’re a poor country with terrible crime, you cope El Salvador
Farage and the U.K. right backward looking. All airfix kits of spitfires. Moribund.
Straw man. That wasn’t the argument
The fact you have to turn to the benevolent authoritarian as the model to follow is indicative of the lack of the ideas on the right. There is no radical, forward looking freedom entrepreneurial capitalist agenda. Just nostalgia driven pastiche delivered by Trump Farage and Truss.
El Salvador is hardly nostalgic pastiche. It’s radical right wing populism - and quite revolutionary - and the President has just won the greatest mandate in the history of democracy. 85% of the vote
Get out of your tedious little bubble
I’m talking about the west. It maybe a tedious little bubble to you, but it still matters.
On this Leon is right. Just because the west doesn’t currently ape El Salvador or Singapore, doesn’t mean we won’t.
And if you’re not bothered about human rights, treatment of minorities, equality, racism, the role of law, their policies ‘work’.
Also AI: it wil enable perpetual surveillance of every street and pavement, 24/7
It will, potentially, reduce crime to near-zero, via facial identification and all the other tech now coming on-stream
This will be a massive reduction in our liberties and "human rights", but as polls show, people increasingly care a lot less about all that fancy stuff - if you can deliver voters a zero crime society - like Singapore or Japan - they will jump at the chance. See also Salvador
I was watching the two announcements from Google and OpenAI this week - partly thinking 'Wow!" and partly "Oh ... on the other hand...". The demo from Google of extracting information from a video stream (no transcript or audio) and the Sora demo :
(The first Sora video of the woman walking down the street really is quite impressive - especially the cut to the close-up. But I think it's the one further down 'shot' through the train window - the reflections of the passengers as the outside lighting changes is remarkable).
If it was just down to the membership then Patel would certainly have a chance, albeit Badenoch is probably still their first preference.
I can't see enough Tory MPs picking her though for her to get to the final 2. While popular with the Conservative core vote and Reform voters she is toxic with swing voters in polls and even the ERG is probably more likely to back Braverman or Badenoch as their preferred leadership candidate if Sunak resigned after a general election defeat than her
Last week's by-elections were a disaster for Rishi Sunak. But things are only going to get worse. He needs to call a May election, and make his final stand > Mail On Sunday >
Well if Dan Hodges is suggesting May, it’s nailed on to be in the autumn.
The thing is May is the better date but the current narrative (by election results, economy) make a May election impossible to call.
So the election will be in the Autumn and the Tory party will do disasterously because they won’t have the (remaining) troops to get he vote out.
By-election defeats are one thing, but if they lose 1,000 councillors that will change the narrative irretrievably for Sunak. You’re right that May is the best date, but that means calling the election in a fortnight, and it’s always easier to not take the decision.
The right are no longer conservative. If you like pragmatic, “what matters is what works” policies you head to the left. If you want to take the world forward you also vote for the left or centre.
If you want the world to burn or more radical change you head to the neo right (or far lef)t, who want to turn the clock back to an illusion of childhood before the modern world took hold.
What utter shite. If you want pragmatic “what matters is what works” policies for an advanced economy, then you copy the Singaporean government
If you’re a poor country, you copy China. If you’re a poor country with terrible crime, you cope El Salvador
What works is all about consent, in the end. You need a broad buy-in of a broad direction of travel: the Nordics, Switzerland, Singapore, Uruguay (never gets a mention but compare it to Argentina and Brazil) etc. They go through ups and downs but generally plough forward. China has had an extraordinary 30 year spurt but now faces huge headwinds which are leading to ever-greater authoritarianism. That suggests consent is not readily available. There may be big trouble ahead.
What should perhaps concern us more is the End of Democracy altogether. Young people are staggeringly illiberal, and strikingly apathetic about democracy - they see it as not working for them, so why should they?
"Younger people more likely to doubt merits of democracy – global poll
International study reveals 42% of people aged 18 to 35 supportive of military rule, against 20% of older respondents"
This is a global trend, and we see it also in the UK
See also this paragraph:
"Many respondents believed China’s growing influence would be a force for good, with nearly twice as many respondents believing it would have a positive impact (45%) on their country as a negative one (25%)."
America is no longer the beacon, in many ways China supplants it (even as China faces problems). Out here in impoverished Phnom Penh - paradoxically surging with Chinese money - I can see why. Crime is low, food is good, life gets better, there is possibly less litter in central Phnom Penh than in Paris, London or NYC
Albeit even on that poll '...57% of respondents aged 18 to 35 felt democracy was preferable to any other form of government.'
Support for China is also more a non Western trend 'Many respondents believed China’s growing influence would be a force for good, with nearly twice as many respondents believing it would have a positive impact (45%) on their country as a negative one (25%).
However, people in lower-income countries such as Pakistan (76%), Ethiopia (72%), and Egypt (71%) were markedly more enthusiastic than those in higher-income democracies such as Japan (3%), Germany (14%), the UK (16%) and the US (25%).'
This is the sort of thing labour campaigners and MPs will be on the receiving end of more and more as the election campaign gets into full swing.
Wonder how this will impact labour in its inner city seats. Not just it’s Muslim vote that is very much against the slaughter in Gaza, and labours stance which is to the right of the govt, but the young in general too.
If SKS lets off even a tiny bit of slack on it then he'll be considered open to Labour not having properly dealt with their anti-semitism problem once more, which is where it hurts him more with floating voters.
For all the noise the minority make most people couldn't give a toss about Gaza and for the young in general (those who are activist on social media) it's just the latest fashionable political in-thing.
One reason I'm sceptical it'll affect Labour too much in a GE is that absent the real prospect of a breakthrough, it's relatively likely to be squeezed in a General Election. It happened under Corbyn - when lots of people who thought he was awful came home to Labour because in a straight choice they believed less awful than hard Brexit Tories (Fewer obviously in 2019, worsening the defeat).
Obviously not all will be, and there's a real chance of strong results for the Greens in places they're already a force that are culturally advantageous. But there's a big difference between saying you might vote Green due to Gaza, and being presented with the chance to get rid of one of the most loathed governments in our history and refusing to do so as Keir Starmer didn't say some empty words about a conflict you have very little real understanding of.
Last week's by-elections were a disaster for Rishi Sunak. But things are only going to get worse. He needs to call a May election, and make his final stand > Mail On Sunday >
Well if Dan Hodges is suggesting May, it’s nailed on to be in the autumn.
If it was just down to the membership then Patel would certainly have a chance, albeit Badenoch is probably still their first preference.
I can't see enough Tory MPs picking her though for her to get to the final 2. While popular with the Conservative core vote and Reform voters she is toxic with swing voters in polls and even the ERG is probably more likely to back Braverman or Badenoch as their preferred leadership candidate if Sunak resigned after a general election defeat than her
Badenoch is certainly the lesser of a number of unpalatable evils. Newark going Labour (they won in 1997) at the next would be helpful for her.
Last week's by-elections were a disaster for Rishi Sunak. But things are only going to get worse. He needs to call a May election, and make his final stand > Mail On Sunday >
Well if Dan Hodges is suggesting May, it’s nailed on to be in the autumn.
When is the right wing going to learn that Boris really isn't one of them? They see Brexit and think he must some sort of fanatic, like them, and he just isn't. Boris never had any real problem with immigration. He likes public spending. He is relaxed about higher taxes. He doesn't believe in a small state. He wants to do things with public money, popular things. The evidence is there throughout his premiership. Look at what he did, not what he says.
The idea that bringing Boris back somehow unites the right is wrong. It just creates a whole new set of tensions. Maybe these won't matter too much in the next decade when it won't really matter what the Tories think about anything but eventually it will. The tension between the one nation Conservative types and the Singapore on Thames clique is a real dividing line in the party. You begin to wonder if even greed and the hunger for power can hold them together.
There is a tendency to ignore the impermanence of all things. Jeremy Corbyn was a man who could take away the Tories' majority. José Mourinho was the special one. Johnson was an electoral asset. All of those things were true. They're just not anymore. Tories craving the return of Johnson is like Labour craving the return of Blair or Arsenal thinking Wenger could reproduce the 2003/04 season.
What I'd the voting pattern leaves the parliamentary party total made up of centrists and the jacobins all ejected? Surely that will suggest to the tories that the future lay with reorienting conservativism away from the boomers, brexiteerism and toxit nostalgia and towards a new kind of electoral compact with the millenials. To me reform is in reality a failure of the ukips to complete their Trojan horse attack on the conservatives. It is a retreat after trying to take over the party. I expect the jacobin bookers will scuttle over there to shake.thwir fists at the sky. But in 5 years' time old age will ensure there will be even fewer of those voters left to do anything. And in 10 years the notion of brexiteerism will be but a memory. It will take the tories at least two terms to come up with a winning strategy as they look for some new platform as their key demographic since the 80s finally exhales. 🤷
There will always be a right wing party. Indeed the rest of the west is swinging right, Britain is the exception
So the question is will the Torres survive and evolve, or will a new populist right party supplant them? Given the extreme volatility of the times I’d say the second is surprisingly plausible
The problem for the radical jacobin right in britain is that it is ovrrwhelmingly associated with an old demographic with extremely limited shelf life: boomers. I just don't see it having the numbers going forward. Anybody with even an ounce of strategic insight will be looking at the trends in the electoral make up in 2029 and 2034 and concluding that that future world belongs to the millenials. If you want a winning conservative formula you have to find a way to appeal to them and the kind of nostalgia and economic incentives they will buy into. The radicals might try to regoup for 2029, but it won't work.... you can't fight gravity. After that last gasp they will come round to millenial oriented conservativism anyway. Brexiteerism is doomed. P.s. nobody gives a rats ass about gen x as we are a tiny generation.
I think there is a possibility of winning over Millenials to Conservatism. They are a consumerist and socially liberal generation, and marketisation of the economy is fine by them. Netflix vs the BBC as a symbolic beginning.
Very hard to ride 2 horses though and keep reactionary featherbedded pensioners on board.
Social liberalism is not Conservatism though is it, even if the current Conservative Party of Sunak and Cameron is relatively socially liberal.
Cameron of course is the only Tory leader since Thatcher's huge landslide in 1983 to win most 18-30 year olds votes, which he achieved in 2010. However that was as much a reflection of the deep unpopularity of Brown's Labour government with all age groups as his relatively social liberalism combined with his centre right economics
Last week's by-elections were a disaster for Rishi Sunak. But things are only going to get worse. He needs to call a May election, and make his final stand > Mail On Sunday >
Well if Dan Hodges is suggesting May, it’s nailed on to be in the autumn.
The thing is May is the better date but the current narrative (by election results, economy) make a May election impossible to call.
So the election will be in the Autumn and the Tory party will do disasterously because they won’t have the (remaining) troops to get he vote out.
By-election defeats are one thing, but if they lose 1,000 councillors that will change the narrative irretrievably for Sunak. You’re right that May is the best date, but that means calling the election in a fortnight, and it’s always easier to not take the decision.
Not a fortnight for May 2nd it needs to be called by March 26th - so just over a month but a quick decision after the budget would be required.
It also depends on how long an election campaign Rishi wants and I can't see him wanting more than the absolute minimum...
Last week's by-elections were a disaster for Rishi Sunak. But things are only going to get worse. He needs to call a May election, and make his final stand > Mail On Sunday >
Well if Dan Hodges is suggesting May, it’s nailed on to be in the autumn.
The thing is May is the better date but the current narrative (by election results, economy) make a May election impossible to call.
So the election will be in the Autumn and the Tory party will do disasterously because they won’t have the (remaining) troops to get he vote out.
By-election defeats are one thing, but if they lose 1,000 councillors that will change the narrative irretrievably for Sunak. You’re right that May is the best date, but that means calling the election in a fortnight, and it’s always easier to not take the decision.
Not a fortnight for May 2nd it needs to be called by March 26th - so just over a month but a quick decision after the budget would be required.
The right are no longer conservative. If you like pragmatic, “what matters is what works” policies you head to the left. If you want to take the world forward you also vote for the left or centre.
If you want the world to burn or more radical change you head to the neo right (or far lef)t, who want to turn the clock back to an illusion of childhood before the modern world took hold.
What utter shite. If you want pragmatic “what matters is what works” policies for an advanced economy, then you copy the Singaporean government
If you’re a poor country, you copy China. If you’re a poor country with terrible crime, you cope El Salvador
What works is all about consent, in the end. You need a broad buy-in of a broad direction of travel: the Nordics, Switzerland, Singapore, Uruguay (never gets a mention but compare it to Argentina and Brazil) etc. They go through ups and downs but generally plough forward. China has had an extraordinary 30 year spurt but now faces huge headwinds which are leading to ever-greater authoritarianism. That suggests consent is not readily available. There may be big trouble ahead.
What should perhaps concern us more is the End of Democracy altogether. Young people are staggeringly illiberal, and strikingly apathetic about democracy - they see it as not working for them, so why should they?
"Younger people more likely to doubt merits of democracy – global poll
International study reveals 42% of people aged 18 to 35 supportive of military rule, against 20% of older respondents"
This is a global trend, and we see it also in the UK
See also this paragraph:
"Many respondents believed China’s growing influence would be a force for good, with nearly twice as many respondents believing it would have a positive impact (45%) on their country as a negative one (25%)."
America is no longer the beacon, in many ways China supplants it (even as China faces problems). Out here in impoverished Phnom Penh - paradoxically surging with Chinese money - I can see why. Crime is low, food is good, life gets better, there is possibly less litter in central Phnom Penh than in Paris, London or NYC
Are we surprised?
They're all taught that Western nations and Western values are at the root of all evil in the world from the moment they're able to write.
Indeed. The problem with having the right in charge is that they routinely denigrate the tolerant liberal values that built our civilisation as being 'woke' rather than celebrate them. I may say that you are occasionally guilty of this. When you have Tory mouthpieces like the DM and the Tele screaming that the values that built us are somehow foreign, is it surprising that we are heading towards the rightist authoritarianism they crave?
PP seems to have disappeared from the public consciousness. If she wants to be leader of the tories' Unternehmen Werwolf she needs to be spouting crap on GB News and in the DM on the reg. She is not acting as if she wants it.
That's a good point.
PP is a bit more visible locally nowadays. We’ve had at least two ‘newsletters’ in the constituency this year and several last, after quite a long interval. On a face-to-face basis she’s perfectly OK to talk to; her accent is typical of reasonably educated Outer London. No, I’m not going to vote for her!
My Mum lives in the constituency and she met Patel. She said Patel is as thick as pigshit. [*]
[*] My Mum's exact words were "she tries terribly hard" but I remember that euphemism from when she used to be a teacher.
She certainly doesn’t try to ‘lead’ local opinion. She follows it. As someone once posted about Johnson; sees which way the crowd is running, jumps in front and shouts “Follow me!”.
I like the last comment, which makes me think of two things.
The right are no longer conservative. If you like pragmatic, “what matters is what works” policies you head to the left. If you want to take the world forward you also vote for the left or centre.
If you want the world to burn or more radical change you head to the neo right (or far lef)t, who want to turn the clock back to an illusion of childhood before the modern world took hold.
What utter shite. If you want pragmatic “what matters is what works” policies for an advanced economy, then you copy the Singaporean government
If you’re a poor country, you copy China. If you’re a poor country with terrible crime, you cope El Salvador
Farage and the U.K. right backward looking. All airfix kits of spitfires. Moribund.
Straw man. That wasn’t the argument
The fact you have to turn to the benevolent authoritarian as the model to follow is indicative of the lack of the ideas on the right. There is no radical, forward looking freedom entrepreneurial capitalist agenda. Just nostalgia driven pastiche delivered by Trump Farage and Truss.
El Salvador is hardly nostalgic pastiche. It’s radical right wing populism - and quite revolutionary - and the President has just won the greatest mandate in the history of democracy. 85% of the vote
Get out of your tedious little bubble
I’m talking about the west. It maybe a tedious little bubble to you, but it still matters.
On this Leon is right. Just because the west doesn’t currently ape El Salvador or Singapore, doesn’t mean we won’t.
And if you’re not bothered about human rights, treatment of minorities, equality, racism, the role of law, their policies ‘work’.
Also AI: it wil enable perpetual surveillance of every street and pavement, 24/7
It will, potentially, reduce crime to near-zero, via facial identification and all the other tech now coming on-stream
This will be a massive reduction in our liberties and "human rights", but as polls show, people increasingly care a lot less about all that fancy stuff - if you can deliver voters a zero crime society - like Singapore or Japan - they will jump at the chance. See also Salvador
I was watching the two announcements from Google and OpenAI this week - partly thinking 'Wow!" and partly "Oh ... on the other hand...". The demo from Google of extracting information from a video stream (no transcript or audio) and the Sora demo :
(The first Sora video of the woman walking down the street really is quite impressive - especially the cut to the close-up. But I think it's the one further down 'shot' through the train window - the reflections of the passengers as the outside lighting changes is remarkable).
Tories had fun trying to pin the thing on Davey. Its all his fault. What was Badenoch doing? Instructing the PO not to pay out compensation to limit the government's liability.
No point being appalled any more, is there. They can't stoop any lower.
He should call an election for May, because it’s clear the Tories are fundamentally incapable of resetting or even trying to reset the narrative so as to provide more fertile ground for a campaign in the autumn.
Their only hope for them now is actually in the short campaign. Labour will go into it as such overwhelming favourites that the spotlight will be constantly on Starmer and Labour, and the Tories will go negative. It means that we will finally put this “no enthusiasm for Labour” theory to the test.
One thing to be said for the Conservatives is they have their e-game up and running early. I get an Instagram video every day from Alun Cairns telling me how gorgeous he is and how Labour have destroyed the nation.
The right are no longer conservative. If you like pragmatic, “what matters is what works” policies you head to the left. If you want to take the world forward you also vote for the left or centre.
If you want the world to burn or more radical change you head to the neo right (or far lef)t, who want to turn the clock back to an illusion of childhood before the modern world took hold.
What utter shite. If you want pragmatic “what matters is what works” policies for an advanced economy, then you copy the Singaporean government
If you’re a poor country, you copy China. If you’re a poor country with terrible crime, you cope El Salvador
What works is all about consent, in the end. You need a broad buy-in of a broad direction of travel: the Nordics, Switzerland, Singapore, Uruguay (never gets a mention but compare it to Argentina and Brazil) etc. They go through ups and downs but generally plough forward. China has had an extraordinary 30 year spurt but now faces huge headwinds which are leading to ever-greater authoritarianism. That suggests consent is not readily available. There may be big trouble ahead.
What should perhaps concern us more is the End of Democracy altogether. Young people are staggeringly illiberal, and strikingly apathetic about democracy - they see it as not working for them, so why should they?
"Younger people more likely to doubt merits of democracy – global poll
International study reveals 42% of people aged 18 to 35 supportive of military rule, against 20% of older respondents"
This is a global trend, and we see it also in the UK
See also this paragraph:
"Many respondents believed China’s growing influence would be a force for good, with nearly twice as many respondents believing it would have a positive impact (45%) on their country as a negative one (25%)."
America is no longer the beacon, in many ways China supplants it (even as China faces problems). Out here in impoverished Phnom Penh - paradoxically surging with Chinese money - I can see why. Crime is low, food is good, life gets better, there is possibly less litter in central Phnom Penh than in Paris, London or NYC
Are we surprised?
They're all taught that Western nations and Western values are at the root of all evil in the world from the moment they're able to write.
I don't remember that bit in Standard Grade History. We did quite a bit on the causes of WWI though?
What's so heartening about the UK is that young people have responded to their "lived experience", not by rioting or supporting some of despot, but by simply responding to pollsters saying that they are going to vote Labour in overwhelming numbers. A Labour led by the most boring man imaginable.
Of course, that might change at the GE as 20-30 year olds propel a Farage-led Reform to power. Place your bets according.
This video is fake, it is made by Sora AI. I have just realised that Sora, inter alia, has killed the nature documentary. How will we know what is real footage, and what isn't? And the temptation to fake it, and get award winning "images", will be stupendous
Tories had fun trying to pin the thing on Davey. Its all his fault. What was Badenoch doing? Instructing the PO not to pay out compensation to limit the government's liability.
No point being appalled any more, is there. They can't stoop any lower.
So, you are a cabinet minister. Money is very tight and you are trying to identify savings. Someone comes to you and says that there is a group of people who have been poisoned by blood products or wrongly accused of theft as a result of utter incompetence (and a naff computer system) or have been sexually abused whilst under the care of the State.
its going to cost big money to fix it or acknowledge the problem. Your civil servants are very unhappy because they see the implications for their projects. it is likely some of the blame will attach to you, even if you try to fix it. Your estimated time in your current post is 18 months.
What do you do?
(a) state that this is a complete disgrace, address it and slash spending elsewhere. (b) Try and bury it so that the money never has to be spent. (c) Knock it down the road (inquiries suggest you are actually doing something and buy a lot of time) and leave it for the next guy to sort out.
If it was just down to the membership then Patel would certainly have a chance, albeit Badenoch is probably still their first preference.
I can't see enough Tory MPs picking her though for her to get to the final 2. While popular with the Conservative core vote and Reform voters she is toxic with swing voters in polls and even the ERG is probably more likely to back Braverman or Badenoch as their preferred leadership candidate if Sunak resigned after a general election defeat than her
Good morning
Point of order - they are all toxic with swing voters
Last week's by-elections were a disaster for Rishi Sunak. But things are only going to get worse. He needs to call a May election, and make his final stand > Mail On Sunday >
Well if Dan Hodges is suggesting May, it’s nailed on to be in the autumn.
The thing is May is the better date but the current narrative (by election results, economy) make a May election impossible to call.
So the election will be in the Autumn and the Tory party will do disasterously because they won’t have the (remaining) troops to get he vote out.
The right are no longer conservative. If you like pragmatic, “what matters is what works” policies you head to the left. If you want to take the world forward you also vote for the left or centre.
If you want the world to burn or more radical change you head to the neo right (or far lef)t, who want to turn the clock back to an illusion of childhood before the modern world took hold.
What utter shite. If you want pragmatic “what matters is what works” policies for an advanced economy, then you copy the Singaporean government
If you’re a poor country, you copy China. If you’re a poor country with terrible crime, you cope El Salvador
What works is all about consent, in the end. You need a broad buy-in of a broad direction of travel: the Nordics, Switzerland, Singapore, Uruguay (never gets a mention but compare it to Argentina and Brazil) etc. They go through ups and downs but generally plough forward. China has had an extraordinary 30 year spurt but now faces huge headwinds which are leading to ever-greater authoritarianism. That suggests consent is not readily available. There may be big trouble ahead.
What should perhaps concern us more is the End of Democracy altogether. Young people are staggeringly illiberal, and strikingly apathetic about democracy - they see it as not working for them, so why should they?
"Younger people more likely to doubt merits of democracy – global poll
International study reveals 42% of people aged 18 to 35 supportive of military rule, against 20% of older respondents"
This is a global trend, and we see it also in the UK
See also this paragraph:
"Many respondents believed China’s growing influence would be a force for good, with nearly twice as many respondents believing it would have a positive impact (45%) on their country as a negative one (25%)."
America is no longer the beacon, in many ways China supplants it (even as China faces problems). Out here in impoverished Phnom Penh - paradoxically surging with Chinese money - I can see why. Crime is low, food is good, life gets better, there is possibly less litter in central Phnom Penh than in Paris, London or NYC
Are we surprised?
They're all taught that Western nations and Western values are at the root of all evil in the world from the moment they're able to write.
Indeed. The problem with having the right in charge is that they routinely denigrate the tolerant liberal values that built our civilisation as being 'woke' rather than celebrate them. I may say that you are occasionally guilty of this. When you have Tory mouthpieces like the DM and the Tele screaming that the values that built us are somehow foreign, is it surprising that we are heading towards the rightist authoritarianism they crave?
This is a matter of perception. For a while I have been of the view that it is mostly the other way around, that the it is the left 'woke' thinking that is trashing civilisation. But actually, both extremes are as bad as each other and both have dictatorial and authoritarian tendencies. The point that annoys me immensely is that the woke left get an endless free pass because of the belief that they are on 'the right side of history', whereas the right are on the 'wrong side of history'. All I would comment is that, in the end, is that you have to decide these things for yourself.
It seems to me that the centrist/one nation wing of the conservative party are redundant and finished, and the question is whether the new political movement on the right comes from either within the Conservative party, or outside of it. I've said a few times that Tice and the message about 'saving Britain' comes across quite well. But it is also worth following what Dominic Cummings is saying. Essentially I expect the 'new right' movement to promote certain things that are currently not part of mainstream politics, like leave the ECHR, re do the asylum rules, fundamentally reform environmental and planning legislation, abolish net zero, change welfare and health care eligibility rules, fundamentally reform equalities rules. All these are issues that should really be on the table but aren't because of the dubious perception that they are an essential part of 'western civilisation'.
Last week's by-elections were a disaster for Rishi Sunak. But things are only going to get worse. He needs to call a May election, and make his final stand > Mail On Sunday >
Well if Dan Hodges is suggesting May, it’s nailed on to be in the autumn.
The thing is May is the better date but the current narrative (by election results, economy) make a May election impossible to call.
So the election will be in the Autumn and the Tory party will do disasterously because they won’t have the (remaining) troops to get he vote out.
Not sure it could be any worse than now
Oh I can easily see a summer of 3000+ people a week arriving on boats dripping more and more votes to Reform while things in the opposite direction drip feeds more votes to Labour.
The problem is there are a whole set of problems this country is facing and the Government doesn't seem to be doing anything to resolve them...
As I said a while back come May / June a lot of local authorities will be under new management looking at the finances and going - we need to fix this while we can blame the previous leadership (probably a fair few votes there for Labour)...
Last week's by-elections were a disaster for Rishi Sunak. But things are only going to get worse. He needs to call a May election, and make his final stand > Mail On Sunday >
Well if Dan Hodges is suggesting May, it’s nailed on to be in the autumn.
The thing is May is the better date but the current narrative (by election results, economy) make a May election impossible to call.
So the election will be in the Autumn and the Tory party will do disasterously because they won’t have the (remaining) troops to get he vote out.
Not sure it could be any worse than now
Oh I can easily see a summer of 3000+ people a week arriving on boats dripping more and more votes to Reform while things in the opposite direction drip feeds more votes to Labour.
The problem is there are a whole set of problems this country is facing and the Government doesn't seem to be doing anything to resolve them...
As I said a while back come May / June a lot of local authorities will be under new management looking at the finances and going - we need to fix this while we can blame the previous leadership...
Indeed but on Wellingborough swing didn't someone say they would be left with just 8 mps
Tories had fun trying to pin the thing on Davey. Its all his fault. What was Badenoch doing? Instructing the PO not to pay out compensation to limit the government's liability.
No point being appalled any more, is there. They can't stoop any lower.
So, you are a cabinet minister. Money is very tight and you are trying to identify savings. Someone comes to you and says that there is a group of people who have been poisoned by blood products or wrongly accused of theft as a result of utter incompetence (and a naff computer system) or have been sexually abused whilst under the care of the State.
its going to cost big money to fix it or acknowledge the problem. Your civil servants are very unhappy because they see the implications for their projects. it is likely some of the blame will attach to you, even if you try to fix it. Your estimated time in your current post is 18 months.
What do you do?
(a) state that this is a complete disgrace, address it and slash spending elsewhere. (b) Try and bury it so that the money never has to be spent. (c) Knock it down the road (inquiries suggest you are actually doing something and buy a lot of time) and leave it for the next guy to sort out.
(d) a combination of b and c whilst cynically spinning it that another party is actually in office and to blame and it must be their fault really
The Tories have got a credibility problem. Moral credibility as much as anything else. This kind of stunt really doesn't help when the reaction of so many people to the word "Tory" is to feel slightly sick.
Tories had fun trying to pin the thing on Davey. Its all his fault. What was Badenoch doing? Instructing the PO not to pay out compensation to limit the government's liability.
No point being appalled any more, is there. They can't stoop any lower.
So, you are a cabinet minister. Money is very tight and you are trying to identify savings. Someone comes to you and says that there is a group of people who have been poisoned by blood products or wrongly accused of theft as a result of utter incompetence (and a naff computer system) or have been sexually abused whilst under the care of the State.
its going to cost big money to fix it or acknowledge the problem. Your civil servants are very unhappy because they see the implications for their projects. it is likely some of the blame will attach to you, even if you try to fix it. Your estimated time in your current post is 18 months.
What do you do?
(a) state that this is a complete disgrace, address it and slash spending elsewhere. (b) Try and bury it so that the money never has to be spent. (c) Knock it down the road (inquiries suggest you are actually doing something and buy a lot of time) and leave it for the next guy to sort out.
Except the problem is 8 years old and it's been b and c has been implemented for all 8 years. Then a TV program appears that takes what was a complex story and puts it in Human terms and suddenly it's your problem.
The issue is you can't keep saying it's Full and Fair compensation when anyone looking at it can instantly see it's neither Full nor that Fair
The cost of anything is the cost of the labour required to produce it.
Things are cheap where the workers get paid bugger all.
Is it tho? Printing is just a machine
You feed the paper, press a button, it prints. Very little labour involved
Surely much of the cost is the paper, “ink”, electricity, machine usage
Getting 360 pages printed in London would cost me £20-30 at its cheapest?
So it’s ten times cheaper here to use a printer, paper, etc. I’m sure a clever economist can explain it - I am somewhat surprised
Most of what you pay in London is for the premises.
I bought two ink canisters for my hp printer in Ryman this week. £99. You cannot tell me that ink costs that much to make. The model is to sell you a cheap printer and milk you on the consumables.
Go for Epson Ecojet. Their business model is the opposite: more expensive printers, but cheap ink. And they *sip* the ink. They're blooming good if you do a fair amount of printng, and better than any HP or Lexmark inkjet I've ever had.
Trouble is I generally don't do that much printing, and it is extremely sporadic (because I travel so much) - but then suddenly I will need 200 pages done in a day, then three weeks go by and I need 7 pages, next day 2, then another 4 weeks of nothing and then I need another 100 pages and my printer breaks. Again. GAH
It's infuriating
Also I have a small flat and my printer/scanner has to be tiny as possible
Same here - my printing comes in bursts: I tend to do nothing for a couple of weeks or a month, and then print hundreds of pages. And that meant my old HP would be gunked up, and I'd use loads of ink aligning heads to get acceptable print quality. I don't have that issue with the EcoJet. Even better: because it prints well without hassle, I use it more. If I'm going somewhere, I often print out a local map to backup my phone. As it's easy, I do it.
Can't help with the flat size, though...
Just the words "print alignment" make me shudder with horror
Was considering just yesterday whether to dump my very nice but now middle-aged HP printer, kept on as a backup while gettign to grips with my Epson 8550 Ecojet inktank machine (which also does A3 printing: blissful to have proofs enlarged from A4 for my now older eyes).
Looked up the standard prices for refills. One (high capacity) black cartridge and one ditto colour for the HP is £85 with the sort of pricing one gets in a decent shop; that would keep me going for may be a month or two when working hard on a project, esp. if there are lots of images. The same money gets me seven substantial bottles of ink for the inktank, something like a year's supply.
And the HP colour cartridge is all colours in one. So if you use a lot of yellow, then the cyan and magenta are partly wasted.
The right are no longer conservative. If you like pragmatic, “what matters is what works” policies you head to the left. If you want to take the world forward you also vote for the left or centre.
If you want the world to burn or more radical change you head to the neo right (or far lef)t, who want to turn the clock back to an illusion of childhood before the modern world took hold.
What utter shite. If you want pragmatic “what matters is what works” policies for an advanced economy, then you copy the Singaporean government
If you’re a poor country, you copy China. If you’re a poor country with terrible crime, you cope El Salvador
What works is all about consent, in the end. You need a broad buy-in of a broad direction of travel: the Nordics, Switzerland, Singapore, Uruguay (never gets a mention but compare it to Argentina and Brazil) etc. They go through ups and downs but generally plough forward. China has had an extraordinary 30 year spurt but now faces huge headwinds which are leading to ever-greater authoritarianism. That suggests consent is not readily available. There may be big trouble ahead.
What should perhaps concern us more is the End of Democracy altogether. Young people are staggeringly illiberal, and strikingly apathetic about democracy - they see it as not working for them, so why should they?
"Younger people more likely to doubt merits of democracy – global poll
International study reveals 42% of people aged 18 to 35 supportive of military rule, against 20% of older respondents"
This is a global trend, and we see it also in the UK
See also this paragraph:
"Many respondents believed China’s growing influence would be a force for good, with nearly twice as many respondents believing it would have a positive impact (45%) on their country as a negative one (25%)."
America is no longer the beacon, in many ways China supplants it (even as China faces problems). Out here in impoverished Phnom Penh - paradoxically surging with Chinese money - I can see why. Crime is low, food is good, life gets better, there is possibly less litter in central Phnom Penh than in Paris, London or NYC
Are we surprised?
They're all taught that Western nations and Western values are at the root of all evil in the world from the moment they're able to write.
My eldest is in year 13 and despite growing up among the tofu eating wokerati of Lewisham I can tell you that at no point has she been taught at school that Western values are evil.
The right are no longer conservative. If you like pragmatic, “what matters is what works” policies you head to the left. If you want to take the world forward you also vote for the left or centre.
If you want the world to burn or more radical change you head to the neo right (or far lef)t, who want to turn the clock back to an illusion of childhood before the modern world took hold.
What utter shite. If you want pragmatic “what matters is what works” policies for an advanced economy, then you copy the Singaporean government
If you’re a poor country, you copy China. If you’re a poor country with terrible crime, you cope El Salvador
What works is all about consent, in the end. You need a broad buy-in of a broad direction of travel: the Nordics, Switzerland, Singapore, Uruguay (never gets a mention but compare it to Argentina and Brazil) etc. They go through ups and downs but generally plough forward. China has had an extraordinary 30 year spurt but now faces huge headwinds which are leading to ever-greater authoritarianism. That suggests consent is not readily available. There may be big trouble ahead.
What should perhaps concern us more is the End of Democracy altogether. Young people are staggeringly illiberal, and strikingly apathetic about democracy - they see it as not working for them, so why should they?
"Younger people more likely to doubt merits of democracy – global poll
International study reveals 42% of people aged 18 to 35 supportive of military rule, against 20% of older respondents"
This is a global trend, and we see it also in the UK
See also this paragraph:
"Many respondents believed China’s growing influence would be a force for good, with nearly twice as many respondents believing it would have a positive impact (45%) on their country as a negative one (25%)."
America is no longer the beacon, in many ways China supplants it (even as China faces problems). Out here in impoverished Phnom Penh - paradoxically surging with Chinese money - I can see why. Crime is low, food is good, life gets better, there is possibly less litter in central Phnom Penh than in Paris, London or NYC
Are we surprised?
They're all taught that Western nations and Western values are at the root of all evil in the world from the moment they're able to write.
My eldest is in year 13 and despite growing up among the tofu eating wokerati of Lewisham I can tell you that at no point has she been taught at school that Western values are evil.
Maybe it's in private or "public" schools that the children are taught that? There does seem to be a disconnect between our right wing posters and reality and this is an obvious hypothesis to test to explain it.
If it was just down to the membership then Patel would certainly have a chance, albeit Badenoch is probably still their first preference.
I can't see enough Tory MPs picking her though for her to get to the final 2. While popular with the Conservative core vote and Reform voters she is toxic with swing voters in polls and even the ERG is probably more likely to back Braverman or Badenoch as their preferred leadership candidate if Sunak resigned after a general election defeat than her
Good morning
Point of order - they are all toxic with swing voters
Is this really true though or is this based on an assumption that swing voters are drawn to centrist politics?
At points in history there can be a desire for rapid change, in which case having the vanilla politicians favoured by the labour party, and to a certain extent the Conservative party, may not quite be the ticket. The problem for any of the politicians set out above is that the tories are hampered by the demographics and desires of its main group of voters (as they found out when trying to pursue planning reform and adult social care reform) which will severely taint any radicalism. There is no point having someone like Patel wheel out more of the same dull centrism.
The right are no longer conservative. If you like pragmatic, “what matters is what works” policies you head to the left. If you want to take the world forward you also vote for the left or centre.
If you want the world to burn or more radical change you head to the neo right (or far lef)t, who want to turn the clock back to an illusion of childhood before the modern world took hold.
What utter shite. If you want pragmatic “what matters is what works” policies for an advanced economy, then you copy the Singaporean government
If you’re a poor country, you copy China. If you’re a poor country with terrible crime, you cope El Salvador
What works is all about consent, in the end. You need a broad buy-in of a broad direction of travel: the Nordics, Switzerland, Singapore, Uruguay (never gets a mention but compare it to Argentina and Brazil) etc. They go through ups and downs but generally plough forward. China has had an extraordinary 30 year spurt but now faces huge headwinds which are leading to ever-greater authoritarianism. That suggests consent is not readily available. There may be big trouble ahead.
What should perhaps concern us more is the End of Democracy altogether. Young people are staggeringly illiberal, and strikingly apathetic about democracy - they see it as not working for them, so why should they?
"Younger people more likely to doubt merits of democracy – global poll
International study reveals 42% of people aged 18 to 35 supportive of military rule, against 20% of older respondents"
This is a global trend, and we see it also in the UK
See also this paragraph:
"Many respondents believed China’s growing influence would be a force for good, with nearly twice as many respondents believing it would have a positive impact (45%) on their country as a negative one (25%)."
America is no longer the beacon, in many ways China supplants it (even as China faces problems). Out here in impoverished Phnom Penh - paradoxically surging with Chinese money - I can see why. Crime is low, food is good, life gets better, there is possibly less litter in central Phnom Penh than in Paris, London or NYC
Are we surprised?
They're all taught that Western nations and Western values are at the root of all evil in the world from the moment they're able to write.
My eldest is in year 13 and despite growing up among the tofu eating wokerati of Lewisham I can tell you that at no point has she been taught at school that Western values are evil.
Maybe it's in private or "public" schools that the children are taught that? There does seem to be a disconnect between our right wing posters and reality and this is an obvious hypothesis to test to explain it.
Yes maybe the private schools are over compensating or are trying to attract more Chinese and Middle Eastern clientele? Or perhaps what you and I would consider a middle of the road narrative that tells the facts without wrapping it in a union jack and setting it to the tune of Land of Hope and Glory is considered hideously woke by them? But yes, it is a bit of a mystery, it is completely at odds with our experience, with three children in the English schools system.
If it was just down to the membership then Patel would certainly have a chance, albeit Badenoch is probably still their first preference.
I can't see enough Tory MPs picking her though for her to get to the final 2. While popular with the Conservative core vote and Reform voters she is toxic with swing voters in polls and even the ERG is probably more likely to back Braverman or Badenoch as their preferred leadership candidate if Sunak resigned after a general election defeat than her
Good morning
Point of order - they are all toxic with swing voters
Is this really true though or is this based on an assumption that swing voters are drawn to centrist politics?
At points in history there can be a desire for rapid change, in which case having the vanilla politicians favoured by the labour party, and to a certain extent the Conservative party, may not quite be the ticket. The problem for any of the politicians set out above is that the tories are hampered by the demographics and desires of its main group of voters (as they found out when trying to pursue planning reform and adult social care reform) which will severely taint any radicalism. There is no point having someone like Patel wheel out more of the same dull centrism.
It is certainly true at this moment in time
I cannot speak for future swings in public opinion and it is very possible the issues with immigration and net zero overwhelm Labour but that is not applicable to GE24 and the 'change' election
The cost of anything is the cost of the labour required to produce it.
Things are cheap where the workers get paid bugger all.
Is it tho? Printing is just a machine
You feed the paper, press a button, it prints. Very little labour involved
Surely much of the cost is the paper, “ink”, electricity, machine usage
Getting 360 pages printed in London would cost me £20-30 at its cheapest?
So it’s ten times cheaper here to use a printer, paper, etc. I’m sure a clever economist can explain it - I am somewhat surprised
Most of what you pay in London is for the premises.
I bought two ink canisters for my hp printer in Ryman this week. £99. You cannot tell me that ink costs that much to make. The model is to sell you a cheap printer and milk you on the consumables.
See also razor blades.
Yes. Its a hideous business model but it clearly works - for them - as if hasn’t changed for many years
I did a deep dive on it about a year ago when we were discussing the vileness of printers on pb. Apparently they make the machines deliberately crap and flimsy so you keep having to replace them
Even the cheapness of the machines is an illusion
I pay HP a measly sum every month and they send me new ink when I need it, checked remotely so I never run out , it arrives before you are done.
I was using HP. The printer broke. Of course. They always break
15 years or so ago I bought a Samsung laser printer for not a huge amount of money. It is probably the best technology purchase I have ever made. It had a massive toner cartridge, unlike those starter cartridges that print 10 pages before the "out of ink" message flashes up. This one went on, and on, and on. I eventually had to buy a replacement cartridge that I had to source on eBay because the printer had been out of production for years. The printer is now struggling a bit to pull the paper through, so I need to pick off each page as it is printed. I am wondering whether to replace it.
When is the right wing going to learn that Boris really isn't one of them? They see Brexit and think he must some sort of fanatic, like them, and he just isn't. Boris never had any real problem with immigration. He likes public spending. He is relaxed about higher taxes. He doesn't believe in a small state. He wants to do things with public money, popular things. The evidence is there throughout his premiership. Look at what he did, not what he says.
The idea that bringing Boris back somehow unites the right is wrong. It just creates a whole new set of tensions. Maybe these won't matter too much in the next decade when it won't really matter what the Tories think about anything but eventually it will. The tension between the one nation Conservative types and the Singapore on Thames clique is a real dividing line in the party. You begin to wonder if even greed and the hunger for power can hold them together.
He's a Borisite. He'll do what it takes to advance his own career again. Pro immigration/Singapore on Thames suited his time as Mayor of London. Brexit and public spending when he was going after the red wall. What comes next? He'll be chasing the zeitgeist.
Badenoch's no nonsense conservatism might not sell very well in the current climate. Those who think she's a populist having really being paying attention. Her previous leadership campaign promised an end to cakeism. I suspect she will re-emphasise the Great in Britain which will prove very popular with those who are fed up with the nation being talked down and feel that so many of our elites and institutions don't really like Britain anymore.
Braverman I have never met but I understand most Tory MPs believe she is loopy and wouldn't make the final two.
Patel has always struck me as a lightweight. She could be a darling of the activists but a decent (one nation?) candidate like Tugendhat might pull her apart in the campaign.
The trouble with Reform is that they aren't really a party for the red wall. As Goodwin has been complaining they just seem to want to replace the Tories not 'reform' British politics completely and enter the bigger space that's currently vacant.
The cost of anything is the cost of the labour required to produce it.
Things are cheap where the workers get paid bugger all.
Is it tho? Printing is just a machine
You feed the paper, press a button, it prints. Very little labour involved
Surely much of the cost is the paper, “ink”, electricity, machine usage
Getting 360 pages printed in London would cost me £20-30 at its cheapest?
So it’s ten times cheaper here to use a printer, paper, etc. I’m sure a clever economist can explain it - I am somewhat surprised
Most of what you pay in London is for the premises.
I bought two ink canisters for my hp printer in Ryman this week. £99. You cannot tell me that ink costs that much to make. The model is to sell you a cheap printer and milk you on the consumables.
Go for Epson Ecojet. Their business model is the opposite: more expensive printers, but cheap ink. And they *sip* the ink. They're blooming good if you do a fair amount of printng, and better than any HP or Lexmark inkjet I've ever had.
This interests me.
But why on earth buy an inkjet? I don't see the gap in the market, short of giclee type applications - but they need pigment-ink, not dye-ink, to avoid fade. Has the Epson pigment-ink technology migrated down the line, or something else changed? I see that they are now going "inkjet only" for "ecological reasons" (Arf !).
The business model has been "stiff the customer on the ink" since the 1980s; my architect dad was buying 3rd party ink-refill kits for his "toaster" Canon A3 printer back then.
The only industry with more outrageous margins on consumables has perhaps been perfume. Does anyone know the margin on an ink cartridge? I've always thought 95-99%+, but I've never bought any for decades.
I can't honestly recall my last purchased inkjet - it must be the A3 version of the Stylus Color back in about 1995, when one designed for simulated spot colour because putting any area down in even modest volume cost a fortune. I swapped to an Epson Aculaser colour laser (£499 from PCWorld with a free bundled inkjet printer for some reason) in around 2005-6 for all routine work, and the photo-colour was good enough that I put many thousands of commercial greetings cards through it.
Interested to hear further comments on this from a personal and professional perspective.
My current stable of (now mainly hobby) printers are an el-cheapo monochrome laser, an aged HP 24" (ie A1 or roll-feed) wide pigment ink printer, and an A3 duplex colour OKI 9655 printer which also goes up to about 300GSM paper.
The right are no longer conservative. If you like pragmatic, “what matters is what works” policies you head to the left. If you want to take the world forward you also vote for the left or centre.
If you want the world to burn or more radical change you head to the neo right (or far lef)t, who want to turn the clock back to an illusion of childhood before the modern world took hold.
What utter shite. If you want pragmatic “what matters is what works” policies for an advanced economy, then you copy the Singaporean government
If you’re a poor country, you copy China. If you’re a poor country with terrible crime, you cope El Salvador
What works is all about consent, in the end. You need a broad buy-in of a broad direction of travel: the Nordics, Switzerland, Singapore, Uruguay (never gets a mention but compare it to Argentina and Brazil) etc. They go through ups and downs but generally plough forward. China has had an extraordinary 30 year spurt but now faces huge headwinds which are leading to ever-greater authoritarianism. That suggests consent is not readily available. There may be big trouble ahead.
What should perhaps concern us more is the End of Democracy altogether. Young people are staggeringly illiberal, and strikingly apathetic about democracy - they see it as not working for them, so why should they?
"Younger people more likely to doubt merits of democracy – global poll
International study reveals 42% of people aged 18 to 35 supportive of military rule, against 20% of older respondents"
This is a global trend, and we see it also in the UK
See also this paragraph:
"Many respondents believed China’s growing influence would be a force for good, with nearly twice as many respondents believing it would have a positive impact (45%) on their country as a negative one (25%)."
America is no longer the beacon, in many ways China supplants it (even as China faces problems). Out here in impoverished Phnom Penh - paradoxically surging with Chinese money - I can see why. Crime is low, food is good, life gets better, there is possibly less litter in central Phnom Penh than in Paris, London or NYC
Are we surprised?
They're all taught that Western nations and Western values are at the root of all evil in the world from the moment they're able to write.
My eldest is in year 13 and despite growing up among the tofu eating wokerati of Lewisham I can tell you that at no point has she been taught at school that Western values are evil.
Maybe it's in private or "public" schools that the children are taught that? There does seem to be a disconnect between our right wing posters and reality and this is an obvious hypothesis to test to explain it.
The infiltration of the education system is rather more subtle than this, it is the dissemination of a value system and structure of thought (based on conflicting identities and power relations) that has come forward in the last decade or so, found most obviously in discourse about concepts like 'equity' and 'antiracism'. It isn't like 13 year old kids are going to lessons with titles like 'the evils of western values'. The reality is several levels more complex than this.
The problem is that the kids tend to look to find ways to rebel against what they are taught, so whilst the current system is the antithesis of what existed before (the rejection of the idea of western superiority based on failings like Iraq); the next rebellion is likely to be against the current culture of excessive self criticism and obsession with minority rights - very much epitomised by characters like Trump and the 'far right' springing up across Europe. As long as democracy and free speech exists this type of cultural discourse will keep happening, which to me explains the panic driven authoritarianism of the left. They know they are on shaky ground, so they try and outlaw their opponents (see the vexatious legal cases against Trump, and the attempts to ban the AfD) to shore up their position.
The cost of anything is the cost of the labour required to produce it.
Things are cheap where the workers get paid bugger all.
Is it tho? Printing is just a machine
You feed the paper, press a button, it prints. Very little labour involved
Surely much of the cost is the paper, “ink”, electricity, machine usage
Getting 360 pages printed in London would cost me £20-30 at its cheapest?
So it’s ten times cheaper here to use a printer, paper, etc. I’m sure a clever economist can explain it - I am somewhat surprised
Most of what you pay in London is for the premises.
I bought two ink canisters for my hp printer in Ryman this week. £99. You cannot tell me that ink costs that much to make. The model is to sell you a cheap printer and milk you on the consumables.
See also razor blades.
Yes. Its a hideous business model but it clearly works - for them - as if hasn’t changed for many years
I did a deep dive on it about a year ago when we were discussing the vileness of printers on pb. Apparently they make the machines deliberately crap and flimsy so you keep having to replace them
Even the cheapness of the machines is an illusion
I pay HP a measly sum every month and they send me new ink when I need it, checked remotely so I never run out , it arrives before you are done.
I was using HP. The printer broke. Of course. They always break
15 years or so ago I bought a Samsung laser printer for not a huge amount of money. It is probably the best technology purchase I have ever made. It had a massive toner cartridge, unlike those starter cartridges that print 10 pages before the "out of ink" message flashes up. This one went on, and on, and on. I eventually had to buy a replacement cartridge that I had to source on eBay because the printer had been out of production for years. The printer is now struggling a bit to pull the paper through, so I need to pick off each page as it is printed. I am wondering whether to replace it.
I had a similar experience with a Samsung black and white laser printer - incredibly reliable for many years until the paper puller or whatever started to fail. I cleaned the moving parts that I could see with WD40 which bought me another couple of years.
Last week's by-elections were a disaster for Rishi Sunak. But things are only going to get worse. He needs to call a May election, and make his final stand > Mail On Sunday >
Well if Dan Hodges is suggesting May, it’s nailed on to be in the autumn.
The thing is May is the better date but the current narrative (by election results, economy) make a May election impossible to call.
So the election will be in the Autumn and the Tory party will do disasterously because they won’t have the (remaining) troops to get he vote out.
Not sure it could be any worse than now
Oh I can easily see a summer of 3000+ people a week arriving on boats dripping more and more votes to Reform while things in the opposite direction drip feeds more votes to Labour.
The problem is there are a whole set of problems this country is facing and the Government doesn't seem to be doing anything to resolve them...
As I said a while back come May / June a lot of local authorities will be under new management looking at the finances and going - we need to fix this while we can blame the previous leadership...
Indeed but on Wellingborough swing didn't someone say they would be left with just 8 mps
I just tried electoral calculus (albeit using maths I did in my head and I don't have a reliable head) and I got the Conservatives completely wiped out in England and Wales, but with 6 seats left in Scotland.
Fuck me, 99.5% of people have NO idea what is about to hit us
So give us a precis.
What, when, where.
There is too much to summarise
Some serious physicists are claiming that Sora proves we ARE living in a simulation - a mad theory that has been around for a while
Another theme: Sora appears to show - this is highly contentious - that AI has developed an intuitive understanding of physics, it seems to have learned this, simply by OpenAI scaling up the visual data it is given. IF this true then that is pretty much AGI right there, maybe even ASI
These are the higher concepts
Lower down are the enormous implications for virtually every human job dependent on cognition
The cost of anything is the cost of the labour required to produce it.
Things are cheap where the workers get paid bugger all.
Is it tho? Printing is just a machine
You feed the paper, press a button, it prints. Very little labour involved
Surely much of the cost is the paper, “ink”, electricity, machine usage
Getting 360 pages printed in London would cost me £20-30 at its cheapest?
So it’s ten times cheaper here to use a printer, paper, etc. I’m sure a clever economist can explain it - I am somewhat surprised
Most of what you pay in London is for the premises.
I bought two ink canisters for my hp printer in Ryman this week. £99. You cannot tell me that ink costs that much to make. The model is to sell you a cheap printer and milk you on the consumables.
See also razor blades.
Yes. Its a hideous business model but it clearly works - for them - as if hasn’t changed for many years
I did a deep dive on it about a year ago when we were discussing the vileness of printers on pb. Apparently they make the machines deliberately crap and flimsy so you keep having to replace them
Even the cheapness of the machines is an illusion
I pay HP a measly sum every month and they send me new ink when I need it, checked remotely so I never run out , it arrives before you are done.
I was using HP. The printer broke. Of course. They always break
15 years or so ago I bought a Samsung laser printer for not a huge amount of money. It is probably the best technology purchase I have ever made. It had a massive toner cartridge, unlike those starter cartridges that print 10 pages before the "out of ink" message flashes up. This one went on, and on, and on. I eventually had to buy a replacement cartridge that I had to source on eBay because the printer had been out of production for years. The printer is now struggling a bit to pull the paper through, so I need to pick off each page as it is printed. I am wondering whether to replace it.
I had a similar experience with a Samsung black and white laser printer - incredibly reliable for many years until the paper puller or whatever started to fail. I cleaned the moving parts that I could see with WD40 which bought me another couple of years.
"If you think OpenAI Sora is a creative toy like DALLE, ... think again. Sora is a data-driven physics engine. It is a simulation of many worlds, real or fantastical. The simulator learns intricate rendering, "intuitive" physics, long-horizon reasoning, and semantic grounding, all by some denoising and gradient maths."
The right are no longer conservative. If you like pragmatic, “what matters is what works” policies you head to the left. If you want to take the world forward you also vote for the left or centre.
If you want the world to burn or more radical change you head to the neo right (or far lef)t, who want to turn the clock back to an illusion of childhood before the modern world took hold.
What utter shite. If you want pragmatic “what matters is what works” policies for an advanced economy, then you copy the Singaporean government
If you’re a poor country, you copy China. If you’re a poor country with terrible crime, you cope El Salvador
What works is all about consent, in the end. You need a broad buy-in of a broad direction of travel: the Nordics, Switzerland, Singapore, Uruguay (never gets a mention but compare it to Argentina and Brazil) etc. They go through ups and downs but generally plough forward. China has had an extraordinary 30 year spurt but now faces huge headwinds which are leading to ever-greater authoritarianism. That suggests consent is not readily available. There may be big trouble ahead.
What should perhaps concern us more is the End of Democracy altogether. Young people are staggeringly illiberal, and strikingly apathetic about democracy - they see it as not working for them, so why should they?
"Younger people more likely to doubt merits of democracy – global poll
International study reveals 42% of people aged 18 to 35 supportive of military rule, against 20% of older respondents"
This is a global trend, and we see it also in the UK
See also this paragraph:
"Many respondents believed China’s growing influence would be a force for good, with nearly twice as many respondents believing it would have a positive impact (45%) on their country as a negative one (25%)."
America is no longer the beacon, in many ways China supplants it (even as China faces problems). Out here in impoverished Phnom Penh - paradoxically surging with Chinese money - I can see why. Crime is low, food is good, life gets better, there is possibly less litter in central Phnom Penh than in Paris, London or NYC
Are we surprised?
They're all taught that Western nations and Western values are at the root of all evil in the world from the moment they're able to write.
My eldest is in year 13 and despite growing up among the tofu eating wokerati of Lewisham I can tell you that at no point has she been taught at school that Western values are evil.
Maybe it's in private or "public" schools that the children are taught that? There does seem to be a disconnect between our right wing posters and reality and this is an obvious hypothesis to test to explain it.
The infiltration of the education system is rather more subtle than this, it is the dissemination of a value system and structure of thought (based on conflicting identities and power relations) that has come forward in the last decade or so, found most obviously in discourse about concepts like 'equity' and 'antiracism'. It isn't like 13 year old kids are going to lessons with titles like 'the evils of western values'. The reality is several levels more complex than this.
The problem is that the kids tend to look to find ways to rebel against what they are taught, so whilst the current system is the antithesis of what existed before (the rejection of the idea of western superiority based on failings like Iraq); the next rebellion is likely to be against the current culture of excessive self criticism and obsession with minority rights - very much epitomised by characters like Trump and the 'far right' springing up across Europe. As long as democracy and free speech exists this type of cultural discourse will keep happening, which to me explains the panic driven authoritarianism of the left. They know they are on shaky ground, so they try and outlaw their opponents (see the vexatious legal cases against Trump, and the attempts to ban the AfD) to shore up their position.
13 year old kids are struggling with telling the time by clocks and adding up the value of coins. Two things they barely ever see in real life let alone use. Then they wonder what in God's name is a fronted adverbial, and why should I know it? Meanwhile, their teachers are dealing with kids with undiagnosed conditions for which there is a waiting list of years, and no available drugs to treat anyways, and generally spending their time picking up on work that used to be the purview of social workers. And managing the often violent fallout from the previous night's social media spats. I'd love to get into "Western values", but Mikey Gove's curriculum leaves no space whatsoever for any discussion of anything so highbrow or relevant.
One notable shift in political commentary: a month ago there was a fair bit of noise from Tory loyalists about echoes of 1992. Now the noise is about how while the Tories are facing a landslide defeat there's no enthusiasm for Labour.
We're watching the 7 stages of grief play out before us.
He's also bet on Douglas Alexander to be next Labour leader at 193 to 1...
in about 5 years time you will be able to feed your favourite novel into Sora5 and it will give you the movie of it, with extra stepmom porn scenes, as required
Tories had fun trying to pin the thing on Davey. Its all his fault. What was Badenoch doing? Instructing the PO not to pay out compensation to limit the government's liability.
No point being appalled any more, is there. They can't stoop any lower.
So, you are a cabinet minister. Money is very tight and you are trying to identify savings. Someone comes to you and says that there is a group of people who have been poisoned by blood products or wrongly accused of theft as a result of utter incompetence (and a naff computer system) or have been sexually abused whilst under the care of the State.
its going to cost big money to fix it or acknowledge the problem. Your civil servants are very unhappy because they see the implications for their projects. it is likely some of the blame will attach to you, even if you try to fix it. Your estimated time in your current post is 18 months.
What do you do?
(a) state that this is a complete disgrace, address it and slash spending elsewhere. (b) Try and bury it so that the money never has to be spent. (c) Knock it down the road (inquiries suggest you are actually doing something and buy a lot of time) and leave it for the next guy to sort out.
(c) Obviously. Sacking the Chairman for no reason except to (barely) pretend to be doing something is part of this tactic, and is very on-type for Badenoch, who seems to specialise in inactivity that's not so much masterful as disdainful.
Fuck me, 99.5% of people have NO idea what is about to hit us
So give us a precis.
What, when, where.
There is too much to summarise
Some serious physicists are claiming that Sora proves we ARE living in a simulation - a mad theory that has been around for a while
Another theme: Sora appears to show - this is highly contentious - that AI has developed an intuitive understanding of physics, it seems to have learned this, simply by OpenAI scaling up the visual data it is given. IF this true then that is pretty much AGI right there, maybe even ASI
These are the higher concepts
Lower down are the enormous implications for virtually every human job dependent on cognition
Comments
"Younger people more likely to doubt merits of democracy – global poll
International study reveals 42% of people aged 18 to 35 supportive of military rule, against 20% of older respondents"
This is a global trend, and we see it also in the UK
See also this paragraph:
"Many respondents believed China’s growing influence would be a force for good, with nearly twice as many respondents believing it would have a positive impact (45%) on their country as a negative one (25%)."
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/sep/11/younger-people-more-relaxed-alternatives-democracy-survey
America is no longer the beacon, in many ways China supplants it (even as China faces problems). Out here in impoverished Phnom Penh - paradoxically surging with Chinese money - I can see why. Crime is low, food is good, life gets better, there is possibly less litter in central Phnom Penh than in Paris, London or NYC
As you say, I doubt many young people really have a particularly deep understanding of the conflict, or care that much either, its just a lot of noise is made about it as its seen to be totemic for left-wing values.
https://youtu.be/a3LEJCXLU28
It's infuriating
Also I have a small flat and my printer/scanner has to be tiny as possible
That said, an autocrat with nuclear weapons will always be dangerous, and externally you can't really tell how dangerous they'll be because so much depends on their state of mind, which could change at any time.
For all the noise the minority make most people couldn't give a toss about Gaza and for the young in general (those who are activist on social media) it's just the latest fashionable political in-thing.
On a face-to-face basis she’s perfectly OK to talk to; her accent is typical of reasonably educated Outer London.
No, I’m not going to vote for her!
Sadly he didn't.
TelAviv Keith is a superb PT down. Rishi should use it at PMQs.
[*] My Mum's exact words were "she tries terribly hard" but I remember that euphemism from when she used to be a teacher.
Top of the known unknowns that sees Sunak scrape over the line, is a Labour civil war over the Middle East.
Yeah, no, that's never going to happen, for obv reasons
British politicians are terrified of this issue, and with some justification
1. Allegations of bullying, which seem more severe than what Dominic Raab was sacked for.
2. She was the Home Secretary who conceived of the Rwanda policy, which I suspect most Conservative MPs now see as more of a nuisance than a solution to anything.
She is less unpopular than Baverman simply because she is currently less in the public eye. Anyone attempting to be a 'British Meloni' will not be popular.
I think a Badenoch/Tugendhat team-up is more plausible for the next Conservative leadership contest.
Can't help with the flat size, though...
Bully logic. The surest route to escalation is to sit back and give them space.
#Priti4Leader
If anyone comes at you from a campaign group with an iPhone pointed at your face on record, and shouting histrionically at you, they're not interested in a genuine conversation and you need to politely get out of there as fast as you can.
That's actually not a bad idea, if you want to run a really boring business that makes modest profits
https://twitter.com/ExStrategist/status/1759132123129074145
This *feels* real, but I've no idea when it was.
But it's a terrible look.
Rachel Revves handled it very well as did Angela Rayner last week.
I remember thinking this 25-30 years ago in Bangkok when I realised how hard they all work, and how honest they are, and how intensely they commit to their jobs, and - back then - how they do it for such little money, and with virtually nothing in the way of benefits to rely on if it goes wrong
My thought was: if theyever get to compete directly with coddled western workers, we are fucked. The welfare state will be unsustainable. Might finally be coming true
The idea that bringing Boris back somehow unites the right is wrong. It just creates a whole new set of tensions. Maybe these won't matter too much in the next decade when it won't really matter what the Tories think about anything but eventually it will. The tension between the one nation Conservative types and the Singapore on Thames clique is a real dividing line in the party. You begin to wonder if even greed and the hunger for power can hold them together.
And if you’re not bothered about human rights, treatment of minorities, equality, racism, the role of law, their policies ‘work’.
As someone once posted about Johnson; sees which way the crowd is running, jumps in front and shouts “Follow me!”.
It will, potentially, reduce crime to near-zero, via facial identification and all the other tech now coming on-stream
This will be a massive reduction in our liberties and "human rights", but as polls show, people increasingly care a lot less about all that fancy stuff - if you can deliver voters a zero crime society - like Singapore or Japan - they will jump at the chance. See also Salvador
If you'd taken a vote in 1997 you'd have got about 50% for ongoing British rule, 20% for some sort of independent microstate and only about 30% for reunion with China.
They're all taught that Western nations and Western values are at the root of all evil in the world from the moment they're able to write.
HK has a pro-Beijing minority but it was always a minority (probably even smaller now)
A very sad story, however there is probably not much Britain could have done differently. China is China
So the election will be in the Autumn and the Tory party will do disasterously because they won’t have the (remaining) troops to get he vote out.
For the country, probably.
For the Conservatives given the task of rebuilding after the rout, certainly.
But the Conservatives stopped caring about the country or the future a while back.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wa0MT8OwHuk
https://openai.com/sora
(The first Sora video of the woman walking down the street really is quite impressive - especially the cut to the close-up. But I think it's the one further down 'shot' through the train window - the reflections of the passengers as the outside lighting changes is remarkable).
I can't see enough Tory MPs picking her though for her to get to the final 2. While popular with the Conservative core vote and Reform voters she is toxic with swing voters in polls and even the ERG is probably more likely to back Braverman or Badenoch as their preferred leadership candidate if Sunak resigned after a general election defeat than her
Support for China is also more a non Western trend 'Many respondents believed China’s growing influence would be a force for good, with nearly twice as many respondents believing it would have a positive impact (45%) on their country as a negative one (25%).
However, people in lower-income countries such as Pakistan (76%), Ethiopia (72%), and Egypt (71%) were markedly more enthusiastic than those in higher-income democracies such as Japan (3%), Germany (14%), the UK (16%) and the US (25%).'
Obviously not all will be, and there's a real chance of strong results for the Greens in places they're already a force that are culturally advantageous. But there's a big difference between saying you might vote Green due to Gaza, and being presented with the chance to get rid of one of the most loathed governments in our history and refusing to do so as Keir Starmer didn't say some empty words about a conflict you have very little real understanding of.
(((Dan Hodges)))
@DPJHodges
·
31m
I think a landslide is virtually nailed on now.
Cameron of course is the only Tory leader since Thatcher's huge landslide in 1983 to win most 18-30 year olds votes, which he achieved in 2010. However that was as much a reflection of the deep unpopularity of Brown's Labour government with all age groups as his relatively social liberalism combined with his centre right economics
It also depends on how long an election campaign Rishi wants and I can't see him wanting more than the absolute minimum...
1 - Mr Anderson.
2 - Lib Demmery.
Both are perhaps caricatures, to some degree.
Yes, yet more enormous implications
Tories had fun trying to pin the thing on Davey. Its all his fault. What was Badenoch doing? Instructing the PO not to pay out compensation to limit the government's liability.
No point being appalled any more, is there. They can't stoop any lower.
Their only hope for them now is actually in the short campaign. Labour will go into it as such overwhelming favourites that the spotlight will be constantly on Starmer and Labour, and the Tories will go negative. It means that we will finally put this “no enthusiasm for Labour” theory to the test.
Nothing from anyone else.
What's so heartening about the UK is that young people have responded to their "lived experience", not by rioting or supporting some of despot, but by simply responding to pollsters saying that they are going to vote Labour in overwhelming numbers. A Labour led by the most boring man imaginable.
Of course, that might change at the GE as 20-30 year olds propel a Farage-led Reform to power. Place your bets according.
https://x.com/jessyseonoob/status/1758203166951424105?s=20
its going to cost big money to fix it or acknowledge the problem. Your civil servants are very unhappy because they see the implications for their projects. it is likely some of the blame will attach to you, even if you try to fix it. Your estimated time in your current post is 18 months.
What do you do?
(a) state that this is a complete disgrace, address it and slash spending elsewhere.
(b) Try and bury it so that the money never has to be spent.
(c) Knock it down the road (inquiries suggest you are actually doing something and buy a lot of time) and leave it for the next guy to sort out.
Point of order - they are all toxic with swing voters
It seems to me that the centrist/one nation wing of the conservative party are redundant and finished, and the question is whether the new political movement on the right comes from either within the Conservative party, or outside of it. I've said a few times that Tice and the message about 'saving Britain' comes across quite well. But it is also worth following what Dominic Cummings is saying. Essentially I expect the 'new right' movement to promote certain things that are currently not part of mainstream politics, like leave the ECHR, re do the asylum rules, fundamentally reform environmental and planning legislation, abolish net zero, change welfare and health care eligibility rules, fundamentally reform equalities rules. All these are issues that should really be on the table but aren't because of the dubious perception that they are an essential part of 'western civilisation'.
The problem is there are a whole set of problems this country is facing and the Government doesn't seem to be doing anything to resolve them...
As I said a while back come May / June a lot of local authorities will be under new management looking at the finances and going - we need to fix this while we can blame the previous leadership (probably a fair few votes there for Labour)...
The Tories have got a credibility problem. Moral credibility as much as anything else. This kind of stunt really doesn't help when the reaction of so many people to the word "Tory" is to feel slightly sick.
Return to Cabinet later this year? Starmer has very few who have actual cabinet experience and he's gonna need it sorting out the mess.
The issue is you can't keep saying it's Full and Fair compensation when anyone looking at it can instantly see it's neither Full nor that Fair
Looked up the standard prices for refills. One (high capacity) black cartridge and one ditto colour for the HP is £85 with the sort of pricing one gets in a decent shop; that would keep me going for may be a month or two when working hard on a project, esp. if there are lots of images. The same money gets me seven substantial bottles of ink for the inktank, something like a year's supply.
And the HP colour cartridge is all colours in one. So if you use a lot of yellow, then the cyan and magenta are partly wasted.
At points in history there can be a desire for rapid change, in which case having the vanilla politicians favoured by the labour party, and to a certain extent the Conservative party, may not quite be the ticket. The problem for any of the politicians set out above is that the tories are hampered by the demographics and desires of its main group of voters (as they found out when trying to pursue planning reform and adult social care reform) which will severely taint any radicalism. There is no point having someone like Patel wheel out more of the same dull centrism.
I cannot speak for future swings in public opinion and it is very possible the issues with immigration and net zero overwhelm Labour but that is not applicable to GE24 and the 'change' election
Badenoch's no nonsense conservatism might not sell very well in the current climate. Those who think she's a populist having really being paying attention. Her previous leadership campaign promised an end to cakeism. I suspect she will re-emphasise the Great in Britain which will prove very popular with those who are fed up with the nation being talked down and feel that so many of our elites and institutions don't really like Britain anymore.
Braverman I have never met but I understand most Tory MPs believe she is loopy and wouldn't make the final two.
Patel has always struck me as a lightweight. She could be a darling of the activists but a decent (one nation?) candidate like Tugendhat might pull her apart in the campaign.
The trouble with Reform is that they aren't really a party for the red wall. As Goodwin has been complaining they just seem to want to replace the Tories not 'reform' British politics completely and enter the bigger space that's currently vacant.
But why on earth buy an inkjet? I don't see the gap in the market, short of giclee type applications - but they need pigment-ink, not dye-ink, to avoid fade. Has the Epson pigment-ink technology migrated down the line, or something else changed? I see that they are now going "inkjet only" for "ecological reasons" (Arf !).
The business model has been "stiff the customer on the ink" since the 1980s; my architect dad was buying 3rd party ink-refill kits for his "toaster" Canon A3 printer back then.
The only industry with more outrageous margins on consumables has perhaps been perfume. Does anyone know the margin on an ink cartridge? I've always thought 95-99%+, but I've never bought any for decades.
I can't honestly recall my last purchased inkjet - it must be the A3 version of the Stylus Color back in about 1995, when one designed for simulated spot colour because putting any area down in even modest volume cost a fortune. I swapped to an Epson Aculaser colour laser (£499 from PCWorld with a free bundled inkjet printer for some reason) in around 2005-6 for all routine work, and the photo-colour was good enough that I put many thousands of commercial greetings cards through it.
Interested to hear further comments on this from a personal and professional perspective.
My current stable of (now mainly hobby) printers are an el-cheapo monochrome laser, an aged HP 24" (ie A1 or roll-feed) wide pigment ink printer, and an A3 duplex colour OKI 9655 printer which also goes up to about 300GSM paper.
Then there's the 'do as I say not as I do' hypocrisy together with the general financial and sexual sleaze.
While forgetting that Conservatives benefit from encouraging aspiration generally and home ownership in particular.
The problem is that the kids tend to look to find ways to rebel against what they are taught, so whilst the current system is the antithesis of what existed before (the rejection of the idea of western superiority based on failings like Iraq); the next rebellion is likely to be against the current culture of excessive self criticism and obsession with minority rights - very much epitomised by characters like Trump and the 'far right' springing up across Europe. As long as democracy and free speech exists this type of cultural discourse will keep happening, which to me explains the panic driven authoritarianism of the left. They know they are on shaky ground, so they try and outlaw their opponents (see the vexatious legal cases against Trump, and the attempts to ban the AfD) to shore up their position.
Fuck me, 99.5% of people have NO idea what is about to hit us
What, when, where.
Some serious physicists are claiming that Sora proves we ARE living in a simulation - a mad theory that has been around for a while
Another theme: Sora appears to show - this is highly contentious - that AI has developed an intuitive understanding of physics, it seems to have learned this, simply by OpenAI scaling up the visual data it is given. IF this true then that is pretty much AGI right there, maybe even ASI
These are the higher concepts
Lower down are the enormous implications for virtually every human job dependent on cognition
The thing is that what AI can sensible do and what we will expect it to be able to do are 2 completely different things.
Mr. Leon, if Warhammer 40K has taught us anything, it's that AI is nothing to be scared of.
"If you think OpenAI Sora is a creative toy like DALLE, ... think again. Sora is a data-driven physics engine. It is a simulation of many worlds, real or fantastical. The simulator learns intricate rendering, "intuitive" physics, long-horizon reasoning, and semantic grounding, all by some denoising and gradient maths."
https://x.com/DrJimFan/status/1758210245799920123?s=20
That's NVIDIA's Senior Research Scientist. Not a rando
Two things they barely ever see in real life let alone use.
Then they wonder what in God's name is a fronted adverbial, and why should I know it?
Meanwhile, their teachers are dealing with kids with undiagnosed conditions for which there is a waiting list of years, and no available drugs to treat anyways, and generally spending their time picking up on work that used to be the purview of social workers. And managing the often violent fallout from the previous night's social media spats.
I'd love to get into "Western values", but Mikey Gove's curriculum leaves no space whatsoever for any discussion of anything so highbrow or relevant.
One notable shift in political commentary: a month ago there was a fair bit of noise from Tory loyalists about echoes of 1992. Now the noise is about how while the Tories are facing a landslide defeat there's no enthusiasm for Labour.
We're watching the 7 stages of grief play out before us.
He's also bet on Douglas Alexander to be next Labour leader at 193 to 1...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T3O_BNexdEg