Meanwhile, in Graunland, the horrifying realisation that one Tory Government is simply going to be replaced by another is dawning...
The House of Commons levelling up, housing and communities select committee puts English councils’ current financial gap at about £4bn a year, which could have been filled more than twice over by the money Jeremy Hunt used for that almost meaningless cut in national insurance. He seems to still think that councils must sink or swim: even more depressingly, he and his allies in the rightwing press have reprised old and stupid rhetoric about millions supposedly being wasted on “consultants” and “diversity schemes”.
And Labour? Last weekend, the shadow chancellor, Rachel Reeves, was repeatedly asked by the Sky News presenter Trevor Phillips if she would fix councils’ crises once Labour was in power. But she would only offer her usual words about the awful problems she would inherit, and vague claims that changes to the planning system and increased business investment may eventually feed through to money for local services. I admire the optimism of people who think she is secretly preparing some kind of national rescue package, but I cannot quite shake off that eternally insightful Maya Angelou quotation: “When people show you who they are, believe them the first time.”
I've said it before, and I'll say it again: the differences between the Conservatives and Labour (and the Lib Dems) are wafer thin, and principally concern fringe culture wars issues. When it comes to everything that matters, all they're really interested in is the preservation and inflation of asset wealth (principally residential property,) and endlessly jacking up the state pension to appease the grey vote. Running down and winding up everything else in the process of shoring up those causes is wholly acceptable to them.
The parties are functionally identical, and that means we'll be in a far worse state in five years' time than we are now. Watch.
Why do you give no credence to the idea that Labour are simply taking no unnecessary risks with an election around the corner and a 20 point poll lead?
That is an equally good explanation for their caution as your thesis that they aren't planning to change anything.
Because it makes a great deal more sense than the notion that they are going to throw their manifesto into the recycling bin a week into their term and rediscover a taste for social democracy. If you can't argue the case for a meaningful programme of redistribution and investment when your opponents are as bad as this lot, then when can you?
The most likely scenario is that Labour means what it says and will play its term as a kind of mirror image of the Coalition Government: yet more austerity, though in this case practiced by Labour ministers whilst they pin the blame for the resultant suffering on the mistakes made by the previous Conservative administration.
The decay of the fabric of the state can only be repaired with truly heroic sums of money. Half the population (the poor, the young, working people on low to middle incomes) have already been bled white by a combination of inflation, taxation of their earnings, colossal rents/mortgages and austerity, and have little left to give. The other half (homeowners over the age of about 50, and the very wealthy) control the bulk of the nation's assets, but mostly believe that they have a God-given right not to be asked to pay for anything. The money can only come from the latter group but the politicians won't extract any loot from them, because (a) they are terrified of their power at the ballot box, and (b) they themselves mostly belong to this class, and the younger ones that aren't quite there yet are well-paid and have reasonable aspirations to join it.
The vague Huntreevesian guff about digging the country out of its malaise through "reform" and a magical return to rampant economic growth, if only we consent to put up with austerity for another thirty or forty years, disguises the bald truth: stagnation doesn't matter if the existing economic settlement acts as an engine for the redistribution of wealth upwards - through pensions, property price inflation and rents - and your people (the fellow members of your socio-economic class/favoured voter group) therefore continue to get richer, even as the rest of the country falls apart. Beneath all the high-blown rhetoric, this is the core prospectus that Government and Opposition will both be peddling come the election. It's nothing more than a contest to determine who can manage decline most efficiently, to the benefit of the already well-off.
There's nothing magical or mythical about a return to economic growth - it's just what happens when you don't tax, levy, and regulate it into extinction. The resentment against an age group that's managed to do slightly better out of the post 1997 economic shitshow (mainly due to investing in bricks and mortar, which hasn't declined in value the way everything else has) is daft. It's divide and rule.
The money needed to deal with the tsunami of need from elderly people, sick people, poverty stricken people and a decaying public infrastructure is not going to come from a radical libertarian program of deregulation and tax cuts. You might wish it were so, but it's not.
As for divide and rule, what do you think the last decade and a half has been all about?
Tax returns are hugely affected by growth or lack of it in the economy, hence pulling in the horns on tax cuts (though somehow never on the size of the state) becomes a self-fulfilling death spiral. If we want *any* of the money you seem to think we need, growing the pie is of massively higher importance than thinking about how unfair it is that boomers have kept a bit more pie than everyone else.
Private sector growth is very important indeed, but we can't afford to cut taxes - and with them spending - absolutely to the bone, in the hope that growth will somehow plug the gap and magically resolve the situation within the next few years. Firstly much of the public realm is already on its knees, and secondly the devotion to economic stimulus through tax cuts at the expense of all else ignores the fact that social breakdown, a crumbling school estate and especially a failing healthcare system are significant drags on growth in and of themselves. How do we get young people into decent employment if children are too cold and hungry to learn? How do we deal with the problem of people becoming too sick to work if they're getting into that state through being unable to access timely health care? How do we have a transport network that's functional and efficient if buses are being cut in most of the country, and people are thus being forced onto congested roads, full of potholes, in old bangers that they can barely afford to run and maintain?
The state is in need of repair, this is necessary for a successful economy, and - whilst much of what's needed to invest in infrastructure can plausibly come from borrowing - the day-to-day costs of employing, for example, a great many more health and social care workers (and on better wages that make the jobs more attractive and sustainable) can only come through raising revenue.
In short, if we want a country that works then some people are going to have to pay more for the privilege. It's unavoidable.
If you really want practical suggestions, I have several, though not perhaps the time to expound on them in detail.
1. The low hanging fruit. Make it clear that the Treasury will not indemnify the BOE's pointless sales of bonds at a loss. Thats about a £100bn back in the Treasury's coffers.
2. Serious and sustained cuts to levels of administrative staffing in public bodies, and dissolution of as many of them as possible. The ONS just threatended strike action for being asked to work two days in the office ffs. Piss off. At least 10% to go. Supported by simplification of the tax system - ditch VED and put it on fuel - lose a whole department.
3. Massive reform of energy to increase supply and drive down the cost This is absolutely key to a successful economy. Emergency planning granted to power generation schemes like energy from waste plants. Investment in tidal. Small nuclear reactors yes, but nix the huge nuclear white elephant plants if losses there can still be cut. Massive investment in UK grid capacity, made by savings from stopping interconnector projects linking us to the EU. Ending Government-funded smart meter rollout. Oil exploration to be classed as a tax-deductable investment. Fracking ban lifted.
4. A new Net Zero policy Get Net Zero out of the energy and farming, and give it its own department, the department for The Environment and Climate Optimisation. This department to foster creative ways to get to Net Zero and/or cool the climate that do not involve destructive decarbonisation only for such activity to appear elsewhere in countries that don't give a fuck - for example, shutting down our last blast furnace only to have a huge blast furnace built in India to make up for lost capacity. Capacity for virgin steel re-established in the UK, using coking cole from our own Cumbrian coalmine.
5. Agriculture A new agriculture incentive scheme to incentivise the growing and rearing of more healthy British food, rather than the shut down of the industry in favour of very dubious 'rewilding' initiatives, and crappy solar farms.
How will this do for starters?
Exactly none of next year's projected budget deficit comes from 1.
I'd heartily approve of 2, but you will find that it will save very little money. The civil service is small, and not particularly well paid.
I fully approve of easing up the planning process for energy. However, it is very important to make sure that externalities are properly priced. If you build a new coal fired power plant, and it generates cheap electricity, but also increases asthma levels in the local community, have you actually saved money?
There are, however, ~1m more public sector employees today than in 2017. It is the source of a major part of our deficit.
I'm also not sure you're right on point 1. It doesn't contribute to the current budget deficit, it does however count towards the overall figure as it's oddly stuck in the "investment" column because the mechanism is recapitalisation of the BoE. Iirc next year ~£30bn is pencilled in as net "investment" for the indemnity but I'm very much out of the game now so could be wrong on the exact number.
I se we're playing the old game of "let's get rid of some public sector pen pushers because they're all working from home and useless". It's up there with "if Labour get in, I'm going to emigrate to (fill in the blank) or I'm going to put all my money into gold coins and hide it under my mattress".
Seriously...
The truth is the public sector is struggling to recruit because of the chronic under-employment problem compounded by the fact they can't be competitive in terms of wages.
I say we randomly thanos 1m public sector employees from non public facing roles and see what happens. The reason the public sector can't compete on salary is because there's too many people to pay. Have fewer people and there's budget for more competitive salaries.
NHS England has been seeking 40% staff cuts, almost at Thanos levels, following merger with NHS Digital and Health Education England. The result has been huge delays in various things NHS England are meant to do while everyone has been more concerned about re-applying for their job.
What are those things?
We were waiting about 6 months on a tendering process for educational services. Developing a model for digital health has gone nowhere lately. Evaluation of primary care service reform has been stymied. The promise of NHS data powering a new generation of treatments and supporting UK plc has yet to be achieved. I'm sure there's plenty more. That's just the stuff I bump up against.
Trump 2 will be very different to Trump 1. Much harder edged with a more competent team around him. He will use his office to exact retribution and encourage a cult of personality. Trump 1 was a clownshow Trump 2 will be something much darker. I also think he will use his office to encourage hard right movements in Europe and the UK.
It's a bit like Leon's description of anti-semitism upthread - Trump's detractors want us to believe that he's an intellectually sub-normal manchild who never achieved anything, or believed in anything in his stupid life, but at the same time, he's an evil genius who's going to mastermind the fascist takeover of the West.
I don't want you to believe anything.
You might, though, actually acknowledge the numerous articles we've posted which describe in some detail the far more coherent organisation behind him this time around.
A second Trump administration could indeed be much more damaging than the first.
Trump 2 will be very different to Trump 1. Much harder edged with a more competent team around him. He will use his office to exact retribution and encourage a cult of personality. Trump 1 was a clownshow Trump 2 will be something much darker. I also think he will use his office to encourage hard right movements in Europe and the UK.
It's a bit like Leon's description of anti-semitism upthread - Trump's detractors want us to believe that he's an intellectually sub-normal manchild who never achieved anything, or believed in anything in his stupid life, but at the same time, he's an evil genius who's going to mastermind the fascist takeover of the West.
Musk invokes the same reactions
A sap who got lucky with an emerald mine and who can barely spell, let alone “make things”, yet at the same time a wicked super brain who is subverting politics and winning the war for Putin
Using the converse of the recent Ashcroft polling, can we assume that 61% would consider Corbyn to be an asset to the Labour Party if he were campaigning against Labour?
The SNP's hate crime legislation comes into force on 1 April (I kid you not). I suspect it will go the same way as the gender stuff. Ad yes, they really have created a cartoon Hate Monster. Why do they do this kind of thing? Why is Yousaf so useless? Anyway,here's an extract from Iain McWhirter (formerly BBC journo) on it:
A new bogeyman has been invented to scare Scottish children at night: the Hate Monster. Resembling a reject from Sesame Street, this carton icon of negative emotion has been enlisted by Police Scotland to publicise the Scottish government’s controversial Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act 2021, which will finally come into force on April 1st. ...This is illiberal and probably unworkable legislation supposedly designed to protect from abuse people with the characteristics of “disability, race, religion, sexual orientation or transgender identity”. Though not, you will note, people with the characteristic of being a woman. They are somehow excluded from this hierarchy of victimhood.
Actually, according to the Hate Monster, this has very little to do with protected characteristics. “If you or someone you know is a victim of hate”, says Police Scotland’s campaign baldly, “report it”. No reference there to the Equality Act or categories of “aggravated” crime. The perpetrators of hate, we’re told, are mostly young men aged 18-30 from “socially excluded communities” who have “ideas about white-male entitlement”. ...
I don’t know who invented this risible campaign, but it has certainly worked in one way: it has alerted people to the repressive idiocy of the Scottish government’s new crime of “stirring up hatred”. For, in Scotland next month you’ll be able to drop into a sex shop, make an anonymous accusation of hate crime against someone you dislike and potentially see your bete noir locked up. The sex shop in question is an LGBTQ-friendly establishment in Glasgow’s Merchant City. It is what is called a “third party reporting centre” set up by Police Scotland to provide a “safe space” for people to accuse others of hate crime. There will be 411 of these “snitching centres” the lengths and breadth of Scotland conveniently located everywhere from libraries to mushroom farms. ....
....As the SNP MP Joanna Cherry KC forecasts, the law will most likely be “weaponised” first against gender critical women. Trans activists across the land will be able to accuse JK Rowling, of being a transphobe to their hearts content by dropping in to one of the hundreds of third party reporting stations. The trans campaigner, India Willoughby, has already tried to have the novelist prosecuted for misgendering him/her. After the complaint was dismissed by Northumberland Police, Willoughby’s supporters made clear they will be accusing JK Rowling in Scotland where she lives. They might even succeed. For this new law takes us into uncharted legal territory.
Didn’t Canada try this a while back? And discover that it was a Witch Smellers charter?
Scotland was the British capital of witch-hunting according to the BBC:
And the king they kindly bestowed on the rest of us was one of the worst.
I think you’ll find your best evah English queen bestowed him upon you.
Given that James VI didn't start a civil war, he was a distinct improvement on quite a ferw of his predecessors or successors. Greatly underestimated in my view.
Uncannily similar to what I said on here a few days ago: the world has never before been this INTERESTING
Brace
Gabriele D'Annunzio and Jorge Ubico live! Ante Pavelic and that Austrian guy probably said similar things.
ISTR a Master of Trinity saying something similar about his term of mastership.
AI = the real Fall. That's if it succeeds. "Beyond Freedom and Dignity" as B F Skinner put it.
Meanwhile, man posts tweet and man posts one-liner to web forum. Perhaps half the fall has happened already. I don't know whether you saw that public discussion between Elon Musk and Benyamin Netanyahu. They had a laugh recognising that the near-universal carrying of smartphones has gone a long way towards the famed fudging of the brain-computer interface already.
You’ll be surprised to find I partly agree. Probably the last time the world was this interesting was the final year of world war 2
And before that, the end of world war 1?
These aren’t encouraging comparisons
If AGI is close - and who the heck knows - then it will be even more interesting than global war
Trump 2 will be very different to Trump 1. Much harder edged with a more competent team around him. He will use his office to exact retribution and encourage a cult of personality. Trump 1 was a clownshow Trump 2 will be something much darker. I also think he will use his office to encourage hard right movements in Europe and the UK.
It's a bit like Leon's description of anti-semitism upthread - Trump's detractors want us to believe that he's an intellectually sub-normal manchild who never achieved anything, or believed in anything in his stupid life, but at the same time, he's an evil genius who's going to mastermind the fascist takeover of the West.
Musk invokes the same reactions
A sap who got lucky with an emerald mine and who can barely spell, let alone “make things”, yet at the same time a wicked super brain who is subverting politics and winning the war for Putin
Meanwhile, in Graunland, the horrifying realisation that one Tory Government is simply going to be replaced by another is dawning...
The House of Commons levelling up, housing and communities select committee puts English councils’ current financial gap at about £4bn a year, which could have been filled more than twice over by the money Jeremy Hunt used for that almost meaningless cut in national insurance. He seems to still think that councils must sink or swim: even more depressingly, he and his allies in the rightwing press have reprised old and stupid rhetoric about millions supposedly being wasted on “consultants” and “diversity schemes”.
And Labour? Last weekend, the shadow chancellor, Rachel Reeves, was repeatedly asked by the Sky News presenter Trevor Phillips if she would fix councils’ crises once Labour was in power. But she would only offer her usual words about the awful problems she would inherit, and vague claims that changes to the planning system and increased business investment may eventually feed through to money for local services. I admire the optimism of people who think she is secretly preparing some kind of national rescue package, but I cannot quite shake off that eternally insightful Maya Angelou quotation: “When people show you who they are, believe them the first time.”
I've said it before, and I'll say it again: the differences between the Conservatives and Labour (and the Lib Dems) are wafer thin, and principally concern fringe culture wars issues. When it comes to everything that matters, all they're really interested in is the preservation and inflation of asset wealth (principally residential property,) and endlessly jacking up the state pension to appease the grey vote. Running down and winding up everything else in the process of shoring up those causes is wholly acceptable to them.
The parties are functionally identical, and that means we'll be in a far worse state in five years' time than we are now. Watch.
Why do you give no credence to the idea that Labour are simply taking no unnecessary risks with an election around the corner and a 20 point poll lead?
That is an equally good explanation for their caution as your thesis that they aren't planning to change anything.
Because it makes a great deal more sense than the notion that they are going to throw their manifesto into the recycling bin a week into their term and rediscover a taste for social democracy. If you can't argue the case for a meaningful programme of redistribution and investment when your opponents are as bad as this lot, then when can you?
The most likely scenario is that Labour means what it says and will play its term as a kind of mirror image of the Coalition Government: yet more austerity, though in this case practiced by Labour ministers whilst they pin the blame for the resultant suffering on the mistakes made by the previous Conservative administration.
The decay of the fabric of the state can only be repaired with truly heroic sums of money. Half the population (the poor, the young, working people on low to middle incomes) have already been bled white by a combination of inflation, taxation of their earnings, colossal rents/mortgages and austerity, and have little left to give. The other half (homeowners over the age of about 50, and the very wealthy) control the bulk of the nation's assets, but mostly believe that they have a God-given right not to be asked to pay for anything. The money can only come from the latter group but the politicians won't extract any loot from them, because (a) they are terrified of their power at the ballot box, and (b) they themselves mostly belong to this class, and the younger ones that aren't quite there yet are well-paid and have reasonable aspirations to join it.
The vague Huntreevesian guff about digging the country out of its malaise through "reform" and a magical return to rampant economic growth, if only we consent to put up with austerity for another thirty or forty years, disguises the bald truth: stagnation doesn't matter if the existing economic settlement acts as an engine for the redistribution of wealth upwards - through pensions, property price inflation and rents - and your people (the fellow members of your socio-economic class/favoured voter group) therefore continue to get richer, even as the rest of the country falls apart. Beneath all the high-blown rhetoric, this is the core prospectus that Government and Opposition will both be peddling come the election. It's nothing more than a contest to determine who can manage decline most efficiently, to the benefit of the already well-off.
There's nothing magical or mythical about a return to economic growth - it's just what happens when you don't tax, levy, and regulate it into extinction. The resentment against an age group that's managed to do slightly better out of the post 1997 economic shitshow (mainly due to investing in bricks and mortar, which hasn't declined in value the way everything else has) is daft. It's divide and rule.
The money needed to deal with the tsunami of need from elderly people, sick people, poverty stricken people and a decaying public infrastructure is not going to come from a radical libertarian program of deregulation and tax cuts. You might wish it were so, but it's not.
As for divide and rule, what do you think the last decade and a half has been all about?
Tax returns are hugely affected by growth or lack of it in the economy, hence pulling in the horns on tax cuts (though somehow never on the size of the state) becomes a self-fulfilling death spiral. If we want *any* of the money you seem to think we need, growing the pie is of massively higher importance than thinking about how unfair it is that boomers have kept a bit more pie than everyone else.
Private sector growth is very important indeed, but we can't afford to cut taxes - and with them spending - absolutely to the bone, in the hope that growth will somehow plug the gap and magically resolve the situation within the next few years. Firstly much of the public realm is already on its knees, and secondly the devotion to economic stimulus through tax cuts at the expense of all else ignores the fact that social breakdown, a crumbling school estate and especially a failing healthcare system are significant drags on growth in and of themselves. How do we get young people into decent employment if children are too cold and hungry to learn? How do we deal with the problem of people becoming too sick to work if they're getting into that state through being unable to access timely health care? How do we have a transport network that's functional and efficient if buses are being cut in most of the country, and people are thus being forced onto congested roads, full of potholes, in old bangers that they can barely afford to run and maintain?
The state is in need of repair, this is necessary for a successful economy, and - whilst much of what's needed to invest in infrastructure can plausibly come from borrowing - the day-to-day costs of employing, for example, a great many more health and social care workers (and on better wages that make the jobs more attractive and sustainable) can only come through raising revenue.
In short, if we want a country that works then some people are going to have to pay more for the privilege. It's unavoidable.
If you really want practical suggestions, I have several, though not perhaps the time to expound on them in detail.
1. The low hanging fruit. Make it clear that the Treasury will not indemnify the BOE's pointless sales of bonds at a loss. Thats about a £100bn back in the Treasury's coffers.
2. Serious and sustained cuts to levels of administrative staffing in public bodies, and dissolution of as many of them as possible. The ONS just threatended strike action for being asked to work two days in the office ffs. Piss off. At least 10% to go. Supported by simplification of the tax system - ditch VED and put it on fuel - lose a whole department.
3. Massive reform of energy to increase supply and drive down the cost This is absolutely key to a successful economy. Emergency planning granted to power generation schemes like energy from waste plants. Investment in tidal. Small nuclear reactors yes, but nix the huge nuclear white elephant plants if losses there can still be cut. Massive investment in UK grid capacity, made by savings from stopping interconnector projects linking us to the EU. Ending Government-funded smart meter rollout. Oil exploration to be classed as a tax-deductable investment. Fracking ban lifted.
4. A new Net Zero policy Get Net Zero out of the energy and farming, and give it its own department, the department for The Environment and Climate Optimisation. This department to foster creative ways to get to Net Zero and/or cool the climate that do not involve destructive decarbonisation only for such activity to appear elsewhere in countries that don't give a fuck - for example, shutting down our last blast furnace only to have a huge blast furnace built in India to make up for lost capacity. Capacity for virgin steel re-established in the UK, using coking cole from our own Cumbrian coalmine.
5. Agriculture A new agriculture incentive scheme to incentivise the growing and rearing of more healthy British food, rather than the shut down of the industry in favour of very dubious 'rewilding' initiatives, and crappy solar farms.
How will this do for starters?
Exactly none of next year's projected budget deficit comes from 1.
I'd heartily approve of 2, but you will find that it will save very little money. The civil service is small, and not particularly well paid.
I fully approve of easing up the planning process for energy. However, it is very important to make sure that externalities are properly priced. If you build a new coal fired power plant, and it generates cheap electricity, but also increases asthma levels in the local community, have you actually saved money?
There are, however, ~1m more public sector employees today than in 2017. It is the source of a major part of our deficit.
I'm also not sure you're right on point 1. It doesn't contribute to the current budget deficit, it does however count towards the overall figure as it's oddly stuck in the "investment" column because the mechanism is recapitalisation of the BoE. Iirc next year ~£30bn is pencilled in as net "investment" for the indemnity but I'm very much out of the game now so could be wrong on the exact number.
I se we're playing the old game of "let's get rid of some public sector pen pushers because they're all working from home and useless". It's up there with "if Labour get in, I'm going to emigrate to (fill in the blank) or I'm going to put all my money into gold coins and hide it under my mattress".
Seriously...
The truth is the public sector is struggling to recruit because of the chronic under-employment problem compounded by the fact they can't be competitive in terms of wages.
I say we randomly thanos 1m public sector employees from non public facing roles and see what happens. The reason the public sector can't compete on salary is because there's too many people to pay. Have fewer people and there's budget for more competitive salaries.
NHS England has been seeking 40% staff cuts, almost at Thanos levels, following merger with NHS Digital and Health Education England. The result has been huge delays in various things NHS England are meant to do while everyone has been more concerned about re-applying for their job.
What are those things?
We were waiting about 6 months on a tendering process for educational services. Developing a model for digital health has gone nowhere lately. Evaluation of primary care service reform has been stymied. The promise of NHS data powering a new generation of treatments and supporting UK plc has yet to be achieved. I'm sure there's plenty more. That's just the stuff I bump up against.
I don't know what digital health is, but none of those things sound like Herculean tasks to me. I can't really see why a proportion of the vast workforce re-applying for their jobs could have derailed those projects significantly if those responsible for them were in any way efficient or motivated.
Those advocating the removal of 1 million public sector jobs clearly have little clue about what the public sector is and how it operates.
I'm happy to admit my ignorance in that my knowledge comes from local not central Government and I would contend the notion of there being large numbers of non-public facing "pen pushers" whose jobs could easily be removed without any detrimental effect on or to public services is nonsense.
Quite apart from those who are public facing, those who aren't support those who are in ensuring they have the IT, property, procurement, financial and legal (amongst others) support required. They help the private sector in ensuring for example the awarding of contracts via the tendering process happens as quickly as possible. They also support the elected representatives, the Councillors, who bring questions and issues for resolution.
In addition, local authorities are complex businesses who have to do all the things more homogenous entities do so whether it's repairing a footpath, making sure a vulnerable adult or child is properly assessed and looked after or simply making sure a child who wants to learn how to play the cello has an instrument and a teacher, all that has to be done as well as paying suppliers and contractors and ensuring the work and services provided by the private sector is of good quality (hint, it isn't always).
Unless you think vulnerable people shouldn't be looked after, footpaths shouldn't be repaired, children not given opportunities to improve themselves - that's a view I suppose.
If you think there's a pot of gold at the end of that rainbow, that's the same thinking some Conservatives had when they wanted Councils to sell all their land and buildings.
Meanwhile, in Graunland, the horrifying realisation that one Tory Government is simply going to be replaced by another is dawning...
The House of Commons levelling up, housing and communities select committee puts English councils’ current financial gap at about £4bn a year, which could have been filled more than twice over by the money Jeremy Hunt used for that almost meaningless cut in national insurance. He seems to still think that councils must sink or swim: even more depressingly, he and his allies in the rightwing press have reprised old and stupid rhetoric about millions supposedly being wasted on “consultants” and “diversity schemes”.
And Labour? Last weekend, the shadow chancellor, Rachel Reeves, was repeatedly asked by the Sky News presenter Trevor Phillips if she would fix councils’ crises once Labour was in power. But she would only offer her usual words about the awful problems she would inherit, and vague claims that changes to the planning system and increased business investment may eventually feed through to money for local services. I admire the optimism of people who think she is secretly preparing some kind of national rescue package, but I cannot quite shake off that eternally insightful Maya Angelou quotation: “When people show you who they are, believe them the first time.”
I've said it before, and I'll say it again: the differences between the Conservatives and Labour (and the Lib Dems) are wafer thin, and principally concern fringe culture wars issues. When it comes to everything that matters, all they're really interested in is the preservation and inflation of asset wealth (principally residential property,) and endlessly jacking up the state pension to appease the grey vote. Running down and winding up everything else in the process of shoring up those causes is wholly acceptable to them.
The parties are functionally identical, and that means we'll be in a far worse state in five years' time than we are now. Watch.
Why do you give no credence to the idea that Labour are simply taking no unnecessary risks with an election around the corner and a 20 point poll lead?
That is an equally good explanation for their caution as your thesis that they aren't planning to change anything.
Because it makes a great deal more sense than the notion that they are going to throw their manifesto into the recycling bin a week into their term and rediscover a taste for social democracy. If you can't argue the case for a meaningful programme of redistribution and investment when your opponents are as bad as this lot, then when can you?
The most likely scenario is that Labour means what it says and will play its term as a kind of mirror image of the Coalition Government: yet more austerity, though in this case practiced by Labour ministers whilst they pin the blame for the resultant suffering on the mistakes made by the previous Conservative administration.
The decay of the fabric of the state can only be repaired with truly heroic sums of money. Half the population (the poor, the young, working people on low to middle incomes) have already been bled white by a combination of inflation, taxation of their earnings, colossal rents/mortgages and austerity, and have little left to give. The other half (homeowners over the age of about 50, and the very wealthy) control the bulk of the nation's assets, but mostly believe that they have a God-given right not to be asked to pay for anything. The money can only come from the latter group but the politicians won't extract any loot from them, because (a) they are terrified of their power at the ballot box, and (b) they themselves mostly belong to this class, and the younger ones that aren't quite there yet are well-paid and have reasonable aspirations to join it.
The vague Huntreevesian guff about digging the country out of its malaise through "reform" and a magical return to rampant economic growth, if only we consent to put up with austerity for another thirty or forty years, disguises the bald truth: stagnation doesn't matter if the existing economic settlement acts as an engine for the redistribution of wealth upwards - through pensions, property price inflation and rents - and your people (the fellow members of your socio-economic class/favoured voter group) therefore continue to get richer, even as the rest of the country falls apart. Beneath all the high-blown rhetoric, this is the core prospectus that Government and Opposition will both be peddling come the election. It's nothing more than a contest to determine who can manage decline most efficiently, to the benefit of the already well-off.
There's nothing magical or mythical about a return to economic growth - it's just what happens when you don't tax, levy, and regulate it into extinction. The resentment against an age group that's managed to do slightly better out of the post 1997 economic shitshow (mainly due to investing in bricks and mortar, which hasn't declined in value the way everything else has) is daft. It's divide and rule.
The money needed to deal with the tsunami of need from elderly people, sick people, poverty stricken people and a decaying public infrastructure is not going to come from a radical libertarian program of deregulation and tax cuts. You might wish it were so, but it's not.
As for divide and rule, what do you think the last decade and a half has been all about?
Tax returns are hugely affected by growth or lack of it in the economy, hence pulling in the horns on tax cuts (though somehow never on the size of the state) becomes a self-fulfilling death spiral. If we want *any* of the money you seem to think we need, growing the pie is of massively higher importance than thinking about how unfair it is that boomers have kept a bit more pie than everyone else.
Private sector growth is very important indeed, but we can't afford to cut taxes - and with them spending - absolutely to the bone, in the hope that growth will somehow plug the gap and magically resolve the situation within the next few years. Firstly much of the public realm is already on its knees, and secondly the devotion to economic stimulus through tax cuts at the expense of all else ignores the fact that social breakdown, a crumbling school estate and especially a failing healthcare system are significant drags on growth in and of themselves. How do we get young people into decent employment if children are too cold and hungry to learn? How do we deal with the problem of people becoming too sick to work if they're getting into that state through being unable to access timely health care? How do we have a transport network that's functional and efficient if buses are being cut in most of the country, and people are thus being forced onto congested roads, full of potholes, in old bangers that they can barely afford to run and maintain?
The state is in need of repair, this is necessary for a successful economy, and - whilst much of what's needed to invest in infrastructure can plausibly come from borrowing - the day-to-day costs of employing, for example, a great many more health and social care workers (and on better wages that make the jobs more attractive and sustainable) can only come through raising revenue.
In short, if we want a country that works then some people are going to have to pay more for the privilege. It's unavoidable.
If you really want practical suggestions, I have several, though not perhaps the time to expound on them in detail.
1. The low hanging fruit. Make it clear that the Treasury will not indemnify the BOE's pointless sales of bonds at a loss. Thats about a £100bn back in the Treasury's coffers.
2. Serious and sustained cuts to levels of administrative staffing in public bodies, and dissolution of as many of them as possible. The ONS just threatended strike action for being asked to work two days in the office ffs. Piss off. At least 10% to go. Supported by simplification of the tax system - ditch VED and put it on fuel - lose a whole department.
3. Massive reform of energy to increase supply and drive down the cost This is absolutely key to a successful economy. Emergency planning granted to power generation schemes like energy from waste plants. Investment in tidal. Small nuclear reactors yes, but nix the huge nuclear white elephant plants if losses there can still be cut. Massive investment in UK grid capacity, made by savings from stopping interconnector projects linking us to the EU. Ending Government-funded smart meter rollout. Oil exploration to be classed as a tax-deductable investment. Fracking ban lifted.
4. A new Net Zero policy Get Net Zero out of the energy and farming, and give it its own department, the department for The Environment and Climate Optimisation. This department to foster creative ways to get to Net Zero and/or cool the climate that do not involve destructive decarbonisation only for such activity to appear elsewhere in countries that don't give a fuck - for example, shutting down our last blast furnace only to have a huge blast furnace built in India to make up for lost capacity. Capacity for virgin steel re-established in the UK, using coking cole from our own Cumbrian coalmine.
5. Agriculture A new agriculture incentive scheme to incentivise the growing and rearing of more healthy British food, rather than the shut down of the industry in favour of very dubious 'rewilding' initiatives, and crappy solar farms.
How will this do for starters?
Exactly none of next year's projected budget deficit comes from 1.
I'd heartily approve of 2, but you will find that it will save very little money. The civil service is small, and not particularly well paid.
I fully approve of easing up the planning process for energy. However, it is very important to make sure that externalities are properly priced. If you build a new coal fired power plant, and it generates cheap electricity, but also increases asthma levels in the local community, have you actually saved money?
There are, however, ~1m more public sector employees today than in 2017. It is the source of a major part of our deficit.
I'm also not sure you're right on point 1. It doesn't contribute to the current budget deficit, it does however count towards the overall figure as it's oddly stuck in the "investment" column because the mechanism is recapitalisation of the BoE. Iirc next year ~£30bn is pencilled in as net "investment" for the indemnity but I'm very much out of the game now so could be wrong on the exact number.
I se we're playing the old game of "let's get rid of some public sector pen pushers because they're all working from home and useless". It's up there with "if Labour get in, I'm going to emigrate to (fill in the blank) or I'm going to put all my money into gold coins and hide it under my mattress".
Seriously...
The truth is the public sector is struggling to recruit because of the chronic under-employment problem compounded by the fact they can't be competitive in terms of wages.
I say we randomly thanos 1m public sector employees from non public facing roles and see what happens. The reason the public sector can't compete on salary is because there's too many people to pay. Have fewer people and there's budget for more competitive salaries.
NHS England has been seeking 40% staff cuts, almost at Thanos levels, following merger with NHS Digital and Health Education England. The result has been huge delays in various things NHS England are meant to do while everyone has been more concerned about re-applying for their job.
What are those things?
We were waiting about 6 months on a tendering process for educational services. Developing a model for digital health has gone nowhere lately. Evaluation of primary care service reform has been stymied. The promise of NHS data powering a new generation of treatments and supporting UK plc has yet to be achieved. I'm sure there's plenty more. That's just the stuff I bump up against.
I don't know what digital health is, but none of those things sound like Herculean tasks to me. I can't really see why a proportion of the vast workforce re-applying for their jobs could have derailed those projects significantly if those responsible for them were in any way efficient or motivated.
LOL. You don't know what something is, but you're confident it is easy. This is typical of those who propose swingeing cuts. "I don't understand it, so it can't be needed."
Well, exactly. Anyone who attracts popular support is, err, barred.
Putin has popular support. The reason the election is rigged to exclude a possible anti-Putin popular candidate is not because Putin would lose the popular vote but because there might be a danger of such an opponent scoring e.g. a high % with the intelligentsia especially in Moscow and St Petersburg. That wouldn't be so likely, though, given it's wartime. But you could imagine a western-flavoured candidate winning too many intelligentsia votes for full silovik and three-letter-agency comfort.
It's not to do with Mr Dictator wanting everybody to say they love him at all times, while disposing of a squad of sweaty henchmen who'll garotte whoever doesn't.
For what it's worth, reported turnout will probably be a few % up on the 65% (2012) and 68% (2018).
Yes Putin is pretty respected in Russia. I just watched bbc news and they showed some anti Putin protests but they were laughably small. The same bbc that did not cover at all the massive anti lockdown protests in London.
Meanwhile, in Graunland, the horrifying realisation that one Tory Government is simply going to be replaced by another is dawning...
The House of Commons levelling up, housing and communities select committee puts English councils’ current financial gap at about £4bn a year, which could have been filled more than twice over by the money Jeremy Hunt used for that almost meaningless cut in national insurance. He seems to still think that councils must sink or swim: even more depressingly, he and his allies in the rightwing press have reprised old and stupid rhetoric about millions supposedly being wasted on “consultants” and “diversity schemes”.
And Labour? Last weekend, the shadow chancellor, Rachel Reeves, was repeatedly asked by the Sky News presenter Trevor Phillips if she would fix councils’ crises once Labour was in power. But she would only offer her usual words about the awful problems she would inherit, and vague claims that changes to the planning system and increased business investment may eventually feed through to money for local services. I admire the optimism of people who think she is secretly preparing some kind of national rescue package, but I cannot quite shake off that eternally insightful Maya Angelou quotation: “When people show you who they are, believe them the first time.”
I've said it before, and I'll say it again: the differences between the Conservatives and Labour (and the Lib Dems) are wafer thin, and principally concern fringe culture wars issues. When it comes to everything that matters, all they're really interested in is the preservation and inflation of asset wealth (principally residential property,) and endlessly jacking up the state pension to appease the grey vote. Running down and winding up everything else in the process of shoring up those causes is wholly acceptable to them.
The parties are functionally identical, and that means we'll be in a far worse state in five years' time than we are now. Watch.
Why do you give no credence to the idea that Labour are simply taking no unnecessary risks with an election around the corner and a 20 point poll lead?
That is an equally good explanation for their caution as your thesis that they aren't planning to change anything.
Because it makes a great deal more sense than the notion that they are going to throw their manifesto into the recycling bin a week into their term and rediscover a taste for social democracy. If you can't argue the case for a meaningful programme of redistribution and investment when your opponents are as bad as this lot, then when can you?
The most likely scenario is that Labour means what it says and will play its term as a kind of mirror image of the Coalition Government: yet more austerity, though in this case practiced by Labour ministers whilst they pin the blame for the resultant suffering on the mistakes made by the previous Conservative administration.
The decay of the fabric of the state can only be repaired with truly heroic sums of money. Half the population (the poor, the young, working people on low to middle incomes) have already been bled white by a combination of inflation, taxation of their earnings, colossal rents/mortgages and austerity, and have little left to give. The other half (homeowners over the age of about 50, and the very wealthy) control the bulk of the nation's assets, but mostly believe that they have a God-given right not to be asked to pay for anything. The money can only come from the latter group but the politicians won't extract any loot from them, because (a) they are terrified of their power at the ballot box, and (b) they themselves mostly belong to this class, and the younger ones that aren't quite there yet are well-paid and have reasonable aspirations to join it.
The vague Huntreevesian guff about digging the country out of its malaise through "reform" and a magical return to rampant economic growth, if only we consent to put up with austerity for another thirty or forty years, disguises the bald truth: stagnation doesn't matter if the existing economic settlement acts as an engine for the redistribution of wealth upwards - through pensions, property price inflation and rents - and your people (the fellow members of your socio-economic class/favoured voter group) therefore continue to get richer, even as the rest of the country falls apart. Beneath all the high-blown rhetoric, this is the core prospectus that Government and Opposition will both be peddling come the election. It's nothing more than a contest to determine who can manage decline most efficiently, to the benefit of the already well-off.
There's nothing magical or mythical about a return to economic growth - it's just what happens when you don't tax, levy, and regulate it into extinction. The resentment against an age group that's managed to do slightly better out of the post 1997 economic shitshow (mainly due to investing in bricks and mortar, which hasn't declined in value the way everything else has) is daft. It's divide and rule.
The money needed to deal with the tsunami of need from elderly people, sick people, poverty stricken people and a decaying public infrastructure is not going to come from a radical libertarian program of deregulation and tax cuts. You might wish it were so, but it's not.
As for divide and rule, what do you think the last decade and a half has been all about?
Tax returns are hugely affected by growth or lack of it in the economy, hence pulling in the horns on tax cuts (though somehow never on the size of the state) becomes a self-fulfilling death spiral. If we want *any* of the money you seem to think we need, growing the pie is of massively higher importance than thinking about how unfair it is that boomers have kept a bit more pie than everyone else.
Private sector growth is very important indeed, but we can't afford to cut taxes - and with them spending - absolutely to the bone, in the hope that growth will somehow plug the gap and magically resolve the situation within the next few years. Firstly much of the public realm is already on its knees, and secondly the devotion to economic stimulus through tax cuts at the expense of all else ignores the fact that social breakdown, a crumbling school estate and especially a failing healthcare system are significant drags on growth in and of themselves. How do we get young people into decent employment if children are too cold and hungry to learn? How do we deal with the problem of people becoming too sick to work if they're getting into that state through being unable to access timely health care? How do we have a transport network that's functional and efficient if buses are being cut in most of the country, and people are thus being forced onto congested roads, full of potholes, in old bangers that they can barely afford to run and maintain?
The state is in need of repair, this is necessary for a successful economy, and - whilst much of what's needed to invest in infrastructure can plausibly come from borrowing - the day-to-day costs of employing, for example, a great many more health and social care workers (and on better wages that make the jobs more attractive and sustainable) can only come through raising revenue.
In short, if we want a country that works then some people are going to have to pay more for the privilege. It's unavoidable.
If you really want practical suggestions, I have several, though not perhaps the time to expound on them in detail.
1. The low hanging fruit. Make it clear that the Treasury will not indemnify the BOE's pointless sales of bonds at a loss. Thats about a £100bn back in the Treasury's coffers.
2. Serious and sustained cuts to levels of administrative staffing in public bodies, and dissolution of as many of them as possible. The ONS just threatended strike action for being asked to work two days in the office ffs. Piss off. At least 10% to go. Supported by simplification of the tax system - ditch VED and put it on fuel - lose a whole department.
3. Massive reform of energy to increase supply and drive down the cost This is absolutely key to a successful economy. Emergency planning granted to power generation schemes like energy from waste plants. Investment in tidal. Small nuclear reactors yes, but nix the huge nuclear white elephant plants if losses there can still be cut. Massive investment in UK grid capacity, made by savings from stopping interconnector projects linking us to the EU. Ending Government-funded smart meter rollout. Oil exploration to be classed as a tax-deductable investment. Fracking ban lifted.
4. A new Net Zero policy Get Net Zero out of the energy and farming, and give it its own department, the department for The Environment and Climate Optimisation. This department to foster creative ways to get to Net Zero and/or cool the climate that do not involve destructive decarbonisation only for such activity to appear elsewhere in countries that don't give a fuck - for example, shutting down our last blast furnace only to have a huge blast furnace built in India to make up for lost capacity. Capacity for virgin steel re-established in the UK, using coking cole from our own Cumbrian coalmine.
5. Agriculture A new agriculture incentive scheme to incentivise the growing and rearing of more healthy British food, rather than the shut down of the industry in favour of very dubious 'rewilding' initiatives, and crappy solar farms.
How will this do for starters?
Exactly none of next year's projected budget deficit comes from 1.
I'd heartily approve of 2, but you will find that it will save very little money. The civil service is small, and not particularly well paid.
I fully approve of easing up the planning process for energy. However, it is very important to make sure that externalities are properly priced. If you build a new coal fired power plant, and it generates cheap electricity, but also increases asthma levels in the local community, have you actually saved money?
There are, however, ~1m more public sector employees today than in 2017. It is the source of a major part of our deficit.
I'm also not sure you're right on point 1. It doesn't contribute to the current budget deficit, it does however count towards the overall figure as it's oddly stuck in the "investment" column because the mechanism is recapitalisation of the BoE. Iirc next year ~£30bn is pencilled in as net "investment" for the indemnity but I'm very much out of the game now so could be wrong on the exact number.
I se we're playing the old game of "let's get rid of some public sector pen pushers because they're all working from home and useless". It's up there with "if Labour get in, I'm going to emigrate to (fill in the blank) or I'm going to put all my money into gold coins and hide it under my mattress".
Seriously...
The truth is the public sector is struggling to recruit because of the chronic under-employment problem compounded by the fact they can't be competitive in terms of wages.
I say we randomly thanos 1m public sector employees from non public facing roles and see what happens. The reason the public sector can't compete on salary is because there's too many people to pay. Have fewer people and there's budget for more competitive salaries.
NHS England has been seeking 40% staff cuts, almost at Thanos levels, following merger with NHS Digital and Health Education England. The result has been huge delays in various things NHS England are meant to do while everyone has been more concerned about re-applying for their job.
What are those things?
We were waiting about 6 months on a tendering process for educational services. Developing a model for digital health has gone nowhere lately. Evaluation of primary care service reform has been stymied. The promise of NHS data powering a new generation of treatments and supporting UK plc has yet to be achieved. I'm sure there's plenty more. That's just the stuff I bump up against.
I don't know what digital health is, but none of those things sound like Herculean tasks to me. I can't really see why a proportion of the vast workforce re-applying for their jobs could have derailed those projects significantly if those responsible for them were in any way efficient or motivated.
LOL. You don't know what something is, but you're confident it is easy. This is typical of those who propose swingeing cuts. "I don't understand it, so it can't be needed."
You can remove "digital health" from that assessment if you like. Since you are the expert, why don't you tell me roughly how many man hours you think each project should take. Let us all have a LOL.
Well, exactly. Anyone who attracts popular support is, err, barred.
Putin has popular support. The reason the election is rigged to exclude a possible anti-Putin popular candidate is not because Putin would lose the popular vote but because there might be a danger of such an opponent scoring e.g. a high % with the intelligentsia especially in Moscow and St Petersburg. That wouldn't be so likely, though, given it's wartime. But you could imagine a western-flavoured candidate winning too many intelligentsia votes for full silovik and three-letter-agency comfort.
It's not to do with Mr Dictator wanting everybody to say they love him at all times, while disposing of a squad of sweaty henchmen who'll garotte whoever doesn't.
For what it's worth, reported turnout will probably be a few % up on the 65% (2012) and 68% (2018).
Yes Putin is pretty respected in Russia. I just watched bbc news and they showed some anti Putin protests but they were laughably small. The same bbc that did not cover at all the massive anti lockdown protests in London.
Probably true outside the biggest cities certainly, the Russian Presidents most liked in the West ie Gorbachev and Yeltsin, tended to be those seen as weak or corrupt at home.
Well, exactly. Anyone who attracts popular support is, err, barred.
Putin has popular support. The reason the election is rigged to exclude a possible anti-Putin popular candidate is not because Putin would lose the popular vote but because there might be a danger of such an opponent scoring e.g. a high % with the intelligentsia especially in Moscow and St Petersburg. That wouldn't be so likely, though, given it's wartime. But you could imagine a western-flavoured candidate winning too many intelligentsia votes for full silovik and three-letter-agency comfort.
It's not to do with Mr Dictator wanting everybody to say they love him at all times, while disposing of a squad of sweaty henchmen who'll garotte whoever doesn't.
For what it's worth, reported turnout will probably be a few % up on the 65% (2012) and 68% (2018).
Yes Putin is pretty respected in Russia. I just watched bbc news and they showed some anti Putin protests but they were laughably small. The same bbc that did not cover at all the massive anti lockdown protests in London.
Those advocating the removal of 1 million public sector jobs clearly have little clue about what the public sector is and how it operates.
I'm happy to admit my ignorance in that my knowledge comes from local not central Government and I would contend the notion of there being large numbers of non-public facing "pen pushers" whose jobs could easily be removed without any detrimental effect on or to public services is nonsense.
Quite apart from those who are public facing, those who aren't support those who are in ensuring they have the IT, property, procurement, financial and legal (amongst others) support required. They help the private sector in ensuring for example the awarding of contracts via the tendering process happens as quickly as possible. They also support the elected representatives, the Councillors, who bring questions and issues for resolution.
In addition, local authorities are complex businesses who have to do all the things more homogenous entities do so whether it's repairing a footpath, making sure a vulnerable adult or child is properly assessed and looked after or simply making sure a child who wants to learn how to play the cello has an instrument and a teacher, all that has to be done as well as paying suppliers and contractors and ensuring the work and services provided by the private sector is of good quality (hint, it isn't always).
Unless you think vulnerable people shouldn't be looked after, footpaths shouldn't be repaired, children not given opportunities to improve themselves - that's a view I suppose.
If you think there's a pot of gold at the end of that rainbow, that's the same thinking some Conservatives had when they wanted Councils to sell all their land and buildings.
The amount of time we waste because we don't have a full time receptionist in our school. The old one knew every child. Every parent. Every staff member. No message, no nuance was missed. She knew who was safe to let in and let out. And all the gossip. Now we have a series of supply, and no one knows anything. She was a pen pusher.
CEO Altman, who met with a Korean Silicon Valley correspondent on the 14th (local time), said, "I don't know when the GPT-5 will be released, but it will make great progress as a model that takes the next step forward in advanced reasoning function. There are many questions about whether there are some limitations in GPT, but I will confidently say 'no'." There are no limits to the GPT model, and if enough computational resources are put in, it's confident that it's not too much to build an AGI that surpasses humans.
Sounds like GPT5 is near, and it sounds like a consequential improvement on 4. And he says “no limitations to the transformer model”
They think they can reach AGI through GPTs and they think they are close
Meanwhile, in Graunland, the horrifying realisation that one Tory Government is simply going to be replaced by another is dawning...
The House of Commons levelling up, housing and communities select committee puts English councils’ current financial gap at about £4bn a year, which could have been filled more than twice over by the money Jeremy Hunt used for that almost meaningless cut in national insurance. He seems to still think that councils must sink or swim: even more depressingly, he and his allies in the rightwing press have reprised old and stupid rhetoric about millions supposedly being wasted on “consultants” and “diversity schemes”.
And Labour? Last weekend, the shadow chancellor, Rachel Reeves, was repeatedly asked by the Sky News presenter Trevor Phillips if she would fix councils’ crises once Labour was in power. But she would only offer her usual words about the awful problems she would inherit, and vague claims that changes to the planning system and increased business investment may eventually feed through to money for local services. I admire the optimism of people who think she is secretly preparing some kind of national rescue package, but I cannot quite shake off that eternally insightful Maya Angelou quotation: “When people show you who they are, believe them the first time.”
I've said it before, and I'll say it again: the differences between the Conservatives and Labour (and the Lib Dems) are wafer thin, and principally concern fringe culture wars issues. When it comes to everything that matters, all they're really interested in is the preservation and inflation of asset wealth (principally residential property,) and endlessly jacking up the state pension to appease the grey vote. Running down and winding up everything else in the process of shoring up those causes is wholly acceptable to them.
The parties are functionally identical, and that means we'll be in a far worse state in five years' time than we are now. Watch.
Why do you give no credence to the idea that Labour are simply taking no unnecessary risks with an election around the corner and a 20 point poll lead?
That is an equally good explanation for their caution as your thesis that they aren't planning to change anything.
Because it makes a great deal more sense than the notion that they are going to throw their manifesto into the recycling bin a week into their term and rediscover a taste for social democracy. If you can't argue the case for a meaningful programme of redistribution and investment when your opponents are as bad as this lot, then when can you?
The most likely scenario is that Labour means what it says and will play its term as a kind of mirror image of the Coalition Government: yet more austerity, though in this case practiced by Labour ministers whilst they pin the blame for the resultant suffering on the mistakes made by the previous Conservative administration.
The decay of the fabric of the state can only be repaired with truly heroic sums of money. Half the population (the poor, the young, working people on low to middle incomes) have already been bled white by a combination of inflation, taxation of their earnings, colossal rents/mortgages and austerity, and have little left to give. The other half (homeowners over the age of about 50, and the very wealthy) control the bulk of the nation's assets, but mostly believe that they have a God-given right not to be asked to pay for anything. The money can only come from the latter group but the politicians won't extract any loot from them, because (a) they are terrified of their power at the ballot box, and (b) they themselves mostly belong to this class, and the younger ones that aren't quite there yet are well-paid and have reasonable aspirations to join it.
The vague Huntreevesian guff about digging the country out of its malaise through "reform" and a magical return to rampant economic growth, if only we consent to put up with austerity for another thirty or forty years, disguises the bald truth: stagnation doesn't matter if the existing economic settlement acts as an engine for the redistribution of wealth upwards - through pensions, property price inflation and rents - and your people (the fellow members of your socio-economic class/favoured voter group) therefore continue to get richer, even as the rest of the country falls apart. Beneath all the high-blown rhetoric, this is the core prospectus that Government and Opposition will both be peddling come the election. It's nothing more than a contest to determine who can manage decline most efficiently, to the benefit of the already well-off.
There's nothing magical or mythical about a return to economic growth - it's just what happens when you don't tax, levy, and regulate it into extinction. The resentment against an age group that's managed to do slightly better out of the post 1997 economic shitshow (mainly due to investing in bricks and mortar, which hasn't declined in value the way everything else has) is daft. It's divide and rule.
The money needed to deal with the tsunami of need from elderly people, sick people, poverty stricken people and a decaying public infrastructure is not going to come from a radical libertarian program of deregulation and tax cuts. You might wish it were so, but it's not.
As for divide and rule, what do you think the last decade and a half has been all about?
Tax returns are hugely affected by growth or lack of it in the economy, hence pulling in the horns on tax cuts (though somehow never on the size of the state) becomes a self-fulfilling death spiral. If we want *any* of the money you seem to think we need, growing the pie is of massively higher importance than thinking about how unfair it is that boomers have kept a bit more pie than everyone else.
Private sector growth is very important indeed, but we can't afford to cut taxes - and with them spending - absolutely to the bone, in the hope that growth will somehow plug the gap and magically resolve the situation within the next few years. Firstly much of the public realm is already on its knees, and secondly the devotion to economic stimulus through tax cuts at the expense of all else ignores the fact that social breakdown, a crumbling school estate and especially a failing healthcare system are significant drags on growth in and of themselves. How do we get young people into decent employment if children are too cold and hungry to learn? How do we deal with the problem of people becoming too sick to work if they're getting into that state through being unable to access timely health care? How do we have a transport network that's functional and efficient if buses are being cut in most of the country, and people are thus being forced onto congested roads, full of potholes, in old bangers that they can barely afford to run and maintain?
The state is in need of repair, this is necessary for a successful economy, and - whilst much of what's needed to invest in infrastructure can plausibly come from borrowing - the day-to-day costs of employing, for example, a great many more health and social care workers (and on better wages that make the jobs more attractive and sustainable) can only come through raising revenue.
In short, if we want a country that works then some people are going to have to pay more for the privilege. It's unavoidable.
If you really want practical suggestions, I have several, though not perhaps the time to expound on them in detail.
1. The low hanging fruit. Make it clear that the Treasury will not indemnify the BOE's pointless sales of bonds at a loss. Thats about a £100bn back in the Treasury's coffers.
2. Serious and sustained cuts to levels of administrative staffing in public bodies, and dissolution of as many of them as possible. The ONS just threatended strike action for being asked to work two days in the office ffs. Piss off. At least 10% to go. Supported by simplification of the tax system - ditch VED and put it on fuel - lose a whole department.
3. Massive reform of energy to increase supply and drive down the cost This is absolutely key to a successful economy. Emergency planning granted to power generation schemes like energy from waste plants. Investment in tidal. Small nuclear reactors yes, but nix the huge nuclear white elephant plants if losses there can still be cut. Massive investment in UK grid capacity, made by savings from stopping interconnector projects linking us to the EU. Ending Government-funded smart meter rollout. Oil exploration to be classed as a tax-deductable investment. Fracking ban lifted.
4. A new Net Zero policy Get Net Zero out of the energy and farming, and give it its own department, the department for The Environment and Climate Optimisation. This department to foster creative ways to get to Net Zero and/or cool the climate that do not involve destructive decarbonisation only for such activity to appear elsewhere in countries that don't give a fuck - for example, shutting down our last blast furnace only to have a huge blast furnace built in India to make up for lost capacity. Capacity for virgin steel re-established in the UK, using coking cole from our own Cumbrian coalmine.
5. Agriculture A new agriculture incentive scheme to incentivise the growing and rearing of more healthy British food, rather than the shut down of the industry in favour of very dubious 'rewilding' initiatives, and crappy solar farms.
How will this do for starters?
Exactly none of next year's projected budget deficit comes from 1.
I'd heartily approve of 2, but you will find that it will save very little money. The civil service is small, and not particularly well paid.
I fully approve of easing up the planning process for energy. However, it is very important to make sure that externalities are properly priced. If you build a new coal fired power plant, and it generates cheap electricity, but also increases asthma levels in the local community, have you actually saved money?
There are, however, ~1m more public sector employees today than in 2017. It is the source of a major part of our deficit.
I'm also not sure you're right on point 1. It doesn't contribute to the current budget deficit, it does however count towards the overall figure as it's oddly stuck in the "investment" column because the mechanism is recapitalisation of the BoE. Iirc next year ~£30bn is pencilled in as net "investment" for the indemnity but I'm very much out of the game now so could be wrong on the exact number.
I se we're playing the old game of "let's get rid of some public sector pen pushers because they're all working from home and useless". It's up there with "if Labour get in, I'm going to emigrate to (fill in the blank) or I'm going to put all my money into gold coins and hide it under my mattress".
Seriously...
The truth is the public sector is struggling to recruit because of the chronic under-employment problem compounded by the fact they can't be competitive in terms of wages.
I say we randomly thanos 1m public sector employees from non public facing roles and see what happens. The reason the public sector can't compete on salary is because there's too many people to pay. Have fewer people and there's budget for more competitive salaries.
NHS England has been seeking 40% staff cuts, almost at Thanos levels, following merger with NHS Digital and Health Education England. The result has been huge delays in various things NHS England are meant to do while everyone has been more concerned about re-applying for their job.
What are those things?
We were waiting about 6 months on a tendering process for educational services. Developing a model for digital health has gone nowhere lately. Evaluation of primary care service reform has been stymied. The promise of NHS data powering a new generation of treatments and supporting UK plc has yet to be achieved. I'm sure there's plenty more. That's just the stuff I bump up against.
I don't know what digital health is, but none of those things sound like Herculean tasks to me. I can't really see why a proportion of the vast workforce re-applying for their jobs could have derailed those projects significantly if those responsible for them were in any way efficient or motivated.
LOL. You don't know what something is, but you're confident it is easy. This is typical of those who propose swingeing cuts. "I don't understand it, so it can't be needed."
You can remove "digital health" from that assessment if you like. Since you are the expert, why don't you tell me roughly how many man hours you think each project should take. Let us all have a LOL.
You see, that's the thing you've missed. I'm not saying I'm the expert. I don't think I can just tell how long all these things should take. I don't think any one person possibly can. The world is a complicated place. Government is a complicated job. People who come along with simplistic solutions are generally wrong.
CEO Altman, who met with a Korean Silicon Valley correspondent on the 14th (local time), said, "I don't know when the GPT-5 will be released, but it will make great progress as a model that takes the next step forward in advanced reasoning function. There are many questions about whether there are some limitations in GPT, but I will confidently say 'no'." There are no limits to the GPT model, and if enough computational resources are put in, it's confident that it's not too much to build an AGI that surpasses humans.
Sounds like GPT5 is near, and it sounds like a consequential improvement on 4. And he says “no limitations to the transformer model”
They think they can reach AGI through GPTs and they think they are close
Yes but his job is to talk up AI so he gets more investor money. Classic salesmanship.
CEO Altman, who met with a Korean Silicon Valley correspondent on the 14th (local time), said, "I don't know when the GPT-5 will be released, but it will make great progress as a model that takes the next step forward in advanced reasoning function. There are many questions about whether there are some limitations in GPT, but I will confidently say 'no'." There are no limits to the GPT model, and if enough computational resources are put in, it's confident that it's not too much to build an AGI that surpasses humans.
Sounds like GPT5 is near, and it sounds like a consequential improvement on 4. And he says “no limitations to the transformer model”
They think they can reach AGI through GPTs and they think they are close
Yes but his job is to talk up AI so he gets more investor money. Classic salesmanship.
This is going a bit beyond “salesmanship”
Also you should never overpromise and underdeliver,. And that’s not the OpenAI style, they know this and don’t do it.
Look how they casually dropped Sora a few weeks ago. The most amazing video AI tech ever seen - potentially destroying Hollywood and TV - and they just blithely rolled it out, without any hype, and said “ooh this is cute, take a look”
And we all took a look, and we were all astounded
He also said this:
“Many startups assume that the development of GPT-5 will be slow because they are happier with only a small development (since there are many business opportunities) rather than a major development, but I think it is a big mistake. When this happens, as often happens, it will be ‘steamrolled’ by the next generation model. In the past, we had a very broad picture of everything happening in the world and were able to see things that we couldn’t see from a narrow perspective, unfortunately, these days, we are completely focused on AI (AI all of the time at full tilt), so there is a different perspective. It is difficult to have.
“Other than thinking about the next generation AI model, the area where I spend the most time recently is ‘building compute,’ and I am increasingly convinced that computing will become the most important currency in the future. [But the world,] they have not planned enough computing and are not facing this problem, so there is a lot of concern about what is needed to build a huge amount of computing as cheaply as possible.
“What I am most excited about from AGI is that the faster we develop AI through scientific discoveries, the faster we will be able to find solutions to power problems by making nuclear fusion power generation a reality. Scientific research through AGI will lead to sustainable economic growth. I think it is almost the only driving force and determining factor.”
It sounds MASSIVE. He also talks of AGI as a done deal, not a “possibility” - it’s really happening, and soon
Meanwhile, in Graunland, the horrifying realisation that one Tory Government is simply going to be replaced by another is dawning...
The House of Commons levelling up, housing and communities select committee puts English councils’ current financial gap at about £4bn a year, which could have been filled more than twice over by the money Jeremy Hunt used for that almost meaningless cut in national insurance. He seems to still think that councils must sink or swim: even more depressingly, he and his allies in the rightwing press have reprised old and stupid rhetoric about millions supposedly being wasted on “consultants” and “diversity schemes”.
And Labour? Last weekend, the shadow chancellor, Rachel Reeves, was repeatedly asked by the Sky News presenter Trevor Phillips if she would fix councils’ crises once Labour was in power. But she would only offer her usual words about the awful problems she would inherit, and vague claims that changes to the planning system and increased business investment may eventually feed through to money for local services. I admire the optimism of people who think she is secretly preparing some kind of national rescue package, but I cannot quite shake off that eternally insightful Maya Angelou quotation: “When people show you who they are, believe them the first time.”
I've said it before, and I'll say it again: the differences between the Conservatives and Labour (and the Lib Dems) are wafer thin, and principally concern fringe culture wars issues. When it comes to everything that matters, all they're really interested in is the preservation and inflation of asset wealth (principally residential property,) and endlessly jacking up the state pension to appease the grey vote. Running down and winding up everything else in the process of shoring up those causes is wholly acceptable to them.
The parties are functionally identical, and that means we'll be in a far worse state in five years' time than we are now. Watch.
Why do you give no credence to the idea that Labour are simply taking no unnecessary risks with an election around the corner and a 20 point poll lead?
That is an equally good explanation for their caution as your thesis that they aren't planning to change anything.
Because it makes a great deal more sense than the notion that they are going to throw their manifesto into the recycling bin a week into their term and rediscover a taste for social democracy. If you can't argue the case for a meaningful programme of redistribution and investment when your opponents are as bad as this lot, then when can you?
The most likely scenario is that Labour means what it says and will play its term as a kind of mirror image of the Coalition Government: yet more austerity, though in this case practiced by Labour ministers whilst they pin the blame for the resultant suffering on the mistakes made by the previous Conservative administration.
The decay of the fabric of the state can only be repaired with truly heroic sums of money. Half the population (the poor, the young, working people on low to middle incomes) have already been bled white by a combination of inflation, taxation of their earnings, colossal rents/mortgages and austerity, and have little left to give. The other half (homeowners over the age of about 50, and the very wealthy) control the bulk of the nation's assets, but mostly believe that they have a God-given right not to be asked to pay for anything. The money can only come from the latter group but the politicians won't extract any loot from them, because (a) they are terrified of their power at the ballot box, and (b) they themselves mostly belong to this class, and the younger ones that aren't quite there yet are well-paid and have reasonable aspirations to join it.
The vague Huntreevesian guff about digging the country out of its malaise through "reform" and a magical return to rampant economic growth, if only we consent to put up with austerity for another thirty or forty years, disguises the bald truth: stagnation doesn't matter if the existing economic settlement acts as an engine for the redistribution of wealth upwards - through pensions, property price inflation and rents - and your people (the fellow members of your socio-economic class/favoured voter group) therefore continue to get richer, even as the rest of the country falls apart. Beneath all the high-blown rhetoric, this is the core prospectus that Government and Opposition will both be peddling come the election. It's nothing more than a contest to determine who can manage decline most efficiently, to the benefit of the already well-off.
There's nothing magical or mythical about a return to economic growth - it's just what happens when you don't tax, levy, and regulate it into extinction. The resentment against an age group that's managed to do slightly better out of the post 1997 economic shitshow (mainly due to investing in bricks and mortar, which hasn't declined in value the way everything else has) is daft. It's divide and rule.
The money needed to deal with the tsunami of need from elderly people, sick people, poverty stricken people and a decaying public infrastructure is not going to come from a radical libertarian program of deregulation and tax cuts. You might wish it were so, but it's not.
As for divide and rule, what do you think the last decade and a half has been all about?
Tax returns are hugely affected by growth or lack of it in the economy, hence pulling in the horns on tax cuts (though somehow never on the size of the state) becomes a self-fulfilling death spiral. If we want *any* of the money you seem to think we need, growing the pie is of massively higher importance than thinking about how unfair it is that boomers have kept a bit more pie than everyone else.
Private sector growth is very important indeed, but we can't afford to cut taxes - and with them spending - absolutely to the bone, in the hope that growth will somehow plug the gap and magically resolve the situation within the next few years. Firstly much of the public realm is already on its knees, and secondly the devotion to economic stimulus through tax cuts at the expense of all else ignores the fact that social breakdown, a crumbling school estate and especially a failing healthcare system are significant drags on growth in and of themselves. How do we get young people into decent employment if children are too cold and hungry to learn? How do we deal with the problem of people becoming too sick to work if they're getting into that state through being unable to access timely health care? How do we have a transport network that's functional and efficient if buses are being cut in most of the country, and people are thus being forced onto congested roads, full of potholes, in old bangers that they can barely afford to run and maintain?
The state is in need of repair, this is necessary for a successful economy, and - whilst much of what's needed to invest in infrastructure can plausibly come from borrowing - the day-to-day costs of employing, for example, a great many more health and social care workers (and on better wages that make the jobs more attractive and sustainable) can only come through raising revenue.
In short, if we want a country that works then some people are going to have to pay more for the privilege. It's unavoidable.
If you really want practical suggestions, I have several, though not perhaps the time to expound on them in detail.
1. The low hanging fruit. Make it clear that the Treasury will not indemnify the BOE's pointless sales of bonds at a loss. Thats about a £100bn back in the Treasury's coffers.
2. Serious and sustained cuts to levels of administrative staffing in public bodies, and dissolution of as many of them as possible. The ONS just threatended strike action for being asked to work two days in the office ffs. Piss off. At least 10% to go. Supported by simplification of the tax system - ditch VED and put it on fuel - lose a whole department.
3. Massive reform of energy to increase supply and drive down the cost This is absolutely key to a successful economy. Emergency planning granted to power generation schemes like energy from waste plants. Investment in tidal. Small nuclear reactors yes, but nix the huge nuclear white elephant plants if losses there can still be cut. Massive investment in UK grid capacity, made by savings from stopping interconnector projects linking us to the EU. Ending Government-funded smart meter rollout. Oil exploration to be classed as a tax-deductable investment. Fracking ban lifted.
4. A new Net Zero policy Get Net Zero out of the energy and farming, and give it its own department, the department for The Environment and Climate Optimisation. This department to foster creative ways to get to Net Zero and/or cool the climate that do not involve destructive decarbonisation only for such activity to appear elsewhere in countries that don't give a fuck - for example, shutting down our last blast furnace only to have a huge blast furnace built in India to make up for lost capacity. Capacity for virgin steel re-established in the UK, using coking cole from our own Cumbrian coalmine.
5. Agriculture A new agriculture incentive scheme to incentivise the growing and rearing of more healthy British food, rather than the shut down of the industry in favour of very dubious 'rewilding' initiatives, and crappy solar farms.
How will this do for starters?
Exactly none of next year's projected budget deficit comes from 1.
I'd heartily approve of 2, but you will find that it will save very little money. The civil service is small, and not particularly well paid.
I fully approve of easing up the planning process for energy. However, it is very important to make sure that externalities are properly priced. If you build a new coal fired power plant, and it generates cheap electricity, but also increases asthma levels in the local community, have you actually saved money?
There are, however, ~1m more public sector employees today than in 2017. It is the source of a major part of our deficit.
I'm also not sure you're right on point 1. It doesn't contribute to the current budget deficit, it does however count towards the overall figure as it's oddly stuck in the "investment" column because the mechanism is recapitalisation of the BoE. Iirc next year ~£30bn is pencilled in as net "investment" for the indemnity but I'm very much out of the game now so could be wrong on the exact number.
I se we're playing the old game of "let's get rid of some public sector pen pushers because they're all working from home and useless". It's up there with "if Labour get in, I'm going to emigrate to (fill in the blank) or I'm going to put all my money into gold coins and hide it under my mattress".
Seriously...
The truth is the public sector is struggling to recruit because of the chronic under-employment problem compounded by the fact they can't be competitive in terms of wages.
I say we randomly thanos 1m public sector employees from non public facing roles and see what happens. The reason the public sector can't compete on salary is because there's too many people to pay. Have fewer people and there's budget for more competitive salaries.
NHS England has been seeking 40% staff cuts, almost at Thanos levels, following merger with NHS Digital and Health Education England. The result has been huge delays in various things NHS England are meant to do while everyone has been more concerned about re-applying for their job.
What are those things?
We were waiting about 6 months on a tendering process for educational services. Developing a model for digital health has gone nowhere lately. Evaluation of primary care service reform has been stymied. The promise of NHS data powering a new generation of treatments and supporting UK plc has yet to be achieved. I'm sure there's plenty more. That's just the stuff I bump up against.
I don't know what digital health is, but none of those things sound like Herculean tasks to me. I can't really see why a proportion of the vast workforce re-applying for their jobs could have derailed those projects significantly if those responsible for them were in any way efficient or motivated.
LOL. You don't know what something is, but you're confident it is easy. This is typical of those who propose swingeing cuts. "I don't understand it, so it can't be needed."
You can remove "digital health" from that assessment if you like. Since you are the expert, why don't you tell me roughly how many man hours you think each project should take. Let us all have a LOL.
You see, that's the thing you've missed. I'm not saying I'm the expert. I don't think I can just tell how long all these things should take. I don't think any one person possibly can. The world is a complicated place. Government is a complicated job. People who come along with simplistic solutions are generally wrong.
Can you have a chat to my new(ish) IT manager? Ta!
Meanwhile, in Graunland, the horrifying realisation that one Tory Government is simply going to be replaced by another is dawning...
The House of Commons levelling up, housing and communities select committee puts English councils’ current financial gap at about £4bn a year, which could have been filled more than twice over by the money Jeremy Hunt used for that almost meaningless cut in national insurance. He seems to still think that councils must sink or swim: even more depressingly, he and his allies in the rightwing press have reprised old and stupid rhetoric about millions supposedly being wasted on “consultants” and “diversity schemes”.
And Labour? Last weekend, the shadow chancellor, Rachel Reeves, was repeatedly asked by the Sky News presenter Trevor Phillips if she would fix councils’ crises once Labour was in power. But she would only offer her usual words about the awful problems she would inherit, and vague claims that changes to the planning system and increased business investment may eventually feed through to money for local services. I admire the optimism of people who think she is secretly preparing some kind of national rescue package, but I cannot quite shake off that eternally insightful Maya Angelou quotation: “When people show you who they are, believe them the first time.”
I've said it before, and I'll say it again: the differences between the Conservatives and Labour (and the Lib Dems) are wafer thin, and principally concern fringe culture wars issues. When it comes to everything that matters, all they're really interested in is the preservation and inflation of asset wealth (principally residential property,) and endlessly jacking up the state pension to appease the grey vote. Running down and winding up everything else in the process of shoring up those causes is wholly acceptable to them.
The parties are functionally identical, and that means we'll be in a far worse state in five years' time than we are now. Watch.
Why do you give no credence to the idea that Labour are simply taking no unnecessary risks with an election around the corner and a 20 point poll lead?
That is an equally good explanation for their caution as your thesis that they aren't planning to change anything.
Because it makes a great deal more sense than the notion that they are going to throw their manifesto into the recycling bin a week into their term and rediscover a taste for social democracy. If you can't argue the case for a meaningful programme of redistribution and investment when your opponents are as bad as this lot, then when can you?
The most likely scenario is that Labour means what it says and will play its term as a kind of mirror image of the Coalition Government: yet more austerity, though in this case practiced by Labour ministers whilst they pin the blame for the resultant suffering on the mistakes made by the previous Conservative administration.
The decay of the fabric of the state can only be repaired with truly heroic sums of money. Half the population (the poor, the young, working people on low to middle incomes) have already been bled white by a combination of inflation, taxation of their earnings, colossal rents/mortgages and austerity, and have little left to give. The other half (homeowners over the age of about 50, and the very wealthy) control the bulk of the nation's assets, but mostly believe that they have a God-given right not to be asked to pay for anything. The money can only come from the latter group but the politicians won't extract any loot from them, because (a) they are terrified of their power at the ballot box, and (b) they themselves mostly belong to this class, and the younger ones that aren't quite there yet are well-paid and have reasonable aspirations to join it.
The vague Huntreevesian guff about digging the country out of its malaise through "reform" and a magical return to rampant economic growth, if only we consent to put up with austerity for another thirty or forty years, disguises the bald truth: stagnation doesn't matter if the existing economic settlement acts as an engine for the redistribution of wealth upwards - through pensions, property price inflation and rents - and your people (the fellow members of your socio-economic class/favoured voter group) therefore continue to get richer, even as the rest of the country falls apart. Beneath all the high-blown rhetoric, this is the core prospectus that Government and Opposition will both be peddling come the election. It's nothing more than a contest to determine who can manage decline most efficiently, to the benefit of the already well-off.
There's nothing magical or mythical about a return to economic growth - it's just what happens when you don't tax, levy, and regulate it into extinction. The resentment against an age group that's managed to do slightly better out of the post 1997 economic shitshow (mainly due to investing in bricks and mortar, which hasn't declined in value the way everything else has) is daft. It's divide and rule.
The money needed to deal with the tsunami of need from elderly people, sick people, poverty stricken people and a decaying public infrastructure is not going to come from a radical libertarian program of deregulation and tax cuts. You might wish it were so, but it's not.
As for divide and rule, what do you think the last decade and a half has been all about?
Tax returns are hugely affected by growth or lack of it in the economy, hence pulling in the horns on tax cuts (though somehow never on the size of the state) becomes a self-fulfilling death spiral. If we want *any* of the money you seem to think we need, growing the pie is of massively higher importance than thinking about how unfair it is that boomers have kept a bit more pie than everyone else.
Private sector growth is very important indeed, but we can't afford to cut taxes - and with them spending - absolutely to the bone, in the hope that growth will somehow plug the gap and magically resolve the situation within the next few years. Firstly much of the public realm is already on its knees, and secondly the devotion to economic stimulus through tax cuts at the expense of all else ignores the fact that social breakdown, a crumbling school estate and especially a failing healthcare system are significant drags on growth in and of themselves. How do we get young people into decent employment if children are too cold and hungry to learn? How do we deal with the problem of people becoming too sick to work if they're getting into that state through being unable to access timely health care? How do we have a transport network that's functional and efficient if buses are being cut in most of the country, and people are thus being forced onto congested roads, full of potholes, in old bangers that they can barely afford to run and maintain?
The state is in need of repair, this is necessary for a successful economy, and - whilst much of what's needed to invest in infrastructure can plausibly come from borrowing - the day-to-day costs of employing, for example, a great many more health and social care workers (and on better wages that make the jobs more attractive and sustainable) can only come through raising revenue.
In short, if we want a country that works then some people are going to have to pay more for the privilege. It's unavoidable.
If you really want practical suggestions, I have several, though not perhaps the time to expound on them in detail.
1. The low hanging fruit. Make it clear that the Treasury will not indemnify the BOE's pointless sales of bonds at a loss. Thats about a £100bn back in the Treasury's coffers.
2. Serious and sustained cuts to levels of administrative staffing in public bodies, and dissolution of as many of them as possible. The ONS just threatended strike action for being asked to work two days in the office ffs. Piss off. At least 10% to go. Supported by simplification of the tax system - ditch VED and put it on fuel - lose a whole department.
3. Massive reform of energy to increase supply and drive down the cost This is absolutely key to a successful economy. Emergency planning granted to power generation schemes like energy from waste plants. Investment in tidal. Small nuclear reactors yes, but nix the huge nuclear white elephant plants if losses there can still be cut. Massive investment in UK grid capacity, made by savings from stopping interconnector projects linking us to the EU. Ending Government-funded smart meter rollout. Oil exploration to be classed as a tax-deductable investment. Fracking ban lifted.
4. A new Net Zero policy Get Net Zero out of the energy and farming, and give it its own department, the department for The Environment and Climate Optimisation. This department to foster creative ways to get to Net Zero and/or cool the climate that do not involve destructive decarbonisation only for such activity to appear elsewhere in countries that don't give a fuck - for example, shutting down our last blast furnace only to have a huge blast furnace built in India to make up for lost capacity. Capacity for virgin steel re-established in the UK, using coking cole from our own Cumbrian coalmine.
5. Agriculture A new agriculture incentive scheme to incentivise the growing and rearing of more healthy British food, rather than the shut down of the industry in favour of very dubious 'rewilding' initiatives, and crappy solar farms.
How will this do for starters?
Exactly none of next year's projected budget deficit comes from 1.
I'd heartily approve of 2, but you will find that it will save very little money. The civil service is small, and not particularly well paid.
I fully approve of easing up the planning process for energy. However, it is very important to make sure that externalities are properly priced. If you build a new coal fired power plant, and it generates cheap electricity, but also increases asthma levels in the local community, have you actually saved money?
There are, however, ~1m more public sector employees today than in 2017. It is the source of a major part of our deficit.
I'm also not sure you're right on point 1. It doesn't contribute to the current budget deficit, it does however count towards the overall figure as it's oddly stuck in the "investment" column because the mechanism is recapitalisation of the BoE. Iirc next year ~£30bn is pencilled in as net "investment" for the indemnity but I'm very much out of the game now so could be wrong on the exact number.
I se we're playing the old game of "let's get rid of some public sector pen pushers because they're all working from home and useless". It's up there with "if Labour get in, I'm going to emigrate to (fill in the blank) or I'm going to put all my money into gold coins and hide it under my mattress".
Seriously...
The truth is the public sector is struggling to recruit because of the chronic under-employment problem compounded by the fact they can't be competitive in terms of wages.
I say we randomly thanos 1m public sector employees from non public facing roles and see what happens. The reason the public sector can't compete on salary is because there's too many people to pay. Have fewer people and there's budget for more competitive salaries.
NHS England has been seeking 40% staff cuts, almost at Thanos levels, following merger with NHS Digital and Health Education England. The result has been huge delays in various things NHS England are meant to do while everyone has been more concerned about re-applying for their job.
What are those things?
We were waiting about 6 months on a tendering process for educational services. Developing a model for digital health has gone nowhere lately. Evaluation of primary care service reform has been stymied. The promise of NHS data powering a new generation of treatments and supporting UK plc has yet to be achieved. I'm sure there's plenty more. That's just the stuff I bump up against.
I don't know what digital health is, but none of those things sound like Herculean tasks to me. I can't really see why a proportion of the vast workforce re-applying for their jobs could have derailed those projects significantly if those responsible for them were in any way efficient or motivated.
LOL. You don't know what something is, but you're confident it is easy. This is typical of those who propose swingeing cuts. "I don't understand it, so it can't be needed."
One of the successors to the National IT Programme.
Not sure the exact mix of contract management, paying money to racist Tory donors and in house expertise they have, but protecting hospitals from Putin cyber attacks I'm sure it's the type of function you'd love to flush down the toilet given your past record.
It classic modern Tory that because Fatcha (because the Tory Thatcher is as much a dumbass cartoon of her as the lefty version) said public services were bad things, so I won't bother to run it, I don't want to understand it and I don't see the point of it. We've had 14 years of this wretchedness.
Administration is bad, HR / personnel is bad, the media is bad, the law is bad. These are not worthy things for a right wing person. So, from clipped patrician ex-service types running the BBC, getting chaps into the business and all that good stuff, over the decades they ran away and the types who did see it as worthwhile endeavour occupied the vacated space. And now, oh no, woke, woke, woke, wah. You lot vacated those spaces as beneath you, and left them to those who still thought those things were worthwhile endeavours. You let all of that happen.
And it's clear now you don't think actually governing is a worthwhile endeavour any more, it is not a respectable thing for a right wing person to do, so please vacate from here as well and don't come back.
Or alternatively, grow the hell up, realise these things do have worth, and do come back when some of you actually decide there is value on engaging with this at an adult level.
Well, exactly. Anyone who attracts popular support is, err, barred.
Putin has popular support. The reason the election is rigged to exclude a possible anti-Putin popular candidate is not because Putin would lose the popular vote but because there might be a danger of such an opponent scoring e.g. a high % with the intelligentsia especially in Moscow and St Petersburg. That wouldn't be so likely, though, given it's wartime. But you could imagine a western-flavoured candidate winning too many intelligentsia votes for full silovik and three-letter-agency comfort.
It's not to do with Mr Dictator wanting everybody to say they love him at all times, while disposing of a squad of sweaty henchmen who'll garotte whoever doesn't.
For what it's worth, reported turnout will probably be a few % up on the 65% (2012) and 68% (2018).
Yes Putin is pretty respected in Russia. I just watched bbc news and they showed some anti Putin protests but they were laughably small. The same bbc that did not cover at all the massive anti lockdown protests in London.
Can't PB ban people who repeatedly and systematically come out with this sort of bullshit?
Especially when one troll who joined on March 9th is replying to agree with another troll who joined on March 6th on the specialist troll subject of Russian political leadership. They've given the game away now though, you'll get your wish soon enough I think.
@RuthDavidsonPC on #electoraldsyfunction podcast this week: “You talked about adjectives leaders don’t want & embattled is certainly one of them. I mean, you’re one away from beleaguered. And once you’re beleaguered you’re f**ked” >
CEO Altman, who met with a Korean Silicon Valley correspondent on the 14th (local time), said, "I don't know when the GPT-5 will be released, but it will make great progress as a model that takes the next step forward in advanced reasoning function. There are many questions about whether there are some limitations in GPT, but I will confidently say 'no'." There are no limits to the GPT model, and if enough computational resources are put in, it's confident that it's not too much to build an AGI that surpasses humans.
Sounds like GPT5 is near, and it sounds like a consequential improvement on 4. And he says “no limitations to the transformer model”
They think they can reach AGI through GPTs and they think they are close
Yes but his job is to talk up AI so he gets more investor money. Classic salesmanship.
This is going a bit beyond “salesmanship”
Also you should never overpromise and underdeliver,. And that’s not the OpenAI style, they know this and don’t do it.
Look how they casually dropped Sora a few weeks ago. The most amazing video AI tech ever seen - potentially destroying Hollywood and TV - and they just blithely rolled it out, without any hype, and said “ooh this is cute, take a look”
And we all took a look, and we were all astounded
He also said this:
“Many startups assume that the development of GPT-5 will be slow because they are happier with only a small development (since there are many business opportunities) rather than a major development, but I think it is a big mistake. When this happens, as often happens, it will be ‘steamrolled’ by the next generation model. In the past, we had a very broad picture of everything happening in the world and were able to see things that we couldn’t see from a narrow perspective, unfortunately, these days, we are completely focused on AI (AI all of the time at full tilt), so there is a different perspective. It is difficult to have.
“Other than thinking about the next generation AI model, the area where I spend the most time recently is ‘building compute,’ and I am increasingly convinced that computing will become the most important currency in the future. [But the world,] they have not planned enough computing and are not facing this problem, so there is a lot of concern about what is needed to build a huge amount of computing as cheaply as possible.
“What I am most excited about from AGI is that the faster we develop AI through scientific discoveries, the faster we will be able to find solutions to power problems by making nuclear fusion power generation a reality. Scientific research through AGI will lead to sustainable economic growth. I think it is almost the only driving force and determining factor.”
It sounds MASSIVE. He also talks of AGI as a done deal, not a “possibility” - it’s really happening, and soon
Somewhat contradictory - he has also talked down expectations 'gpt-5'. Though they clearly need something to take away from Gemini 1,5 and Claude 3. With the prospect of llama 3 this summer.
In the short term, I'm quite happy with my new meal planner 'thing'. Take a photo of my veg box delivery, and it gives me a few random recipes based on it's guess of the quantities, then also consults my 'backstory' of preferences, utensils, store-cupboard sh*t, previous suggestions. And spits out a meal plan for the week ahead - taking into account the time of year, how I like to cook etc.
If I wasn't so lazy I'd turn it into a little side-business. I had another version that optimised your 'recipe needs' based on the normal layout of UK supermarkets so you weren't wandering back and forth between isles.
Well, exactly. Anyone who attracts popular support is, err, barred.
Putin has popular support. The reason the election is rigged to exclude a possible anti-Putin popular candidate is not because Putin would lose the popular vote but because there might be a danger of such an opponent scoring e.g. a high % with the intelligentsia especially in Moscow and St Petersburg. That wouldn't be so likely, though, given it's wartime. But you could imagine a western-flavoured candidate winning too many intelligentsia votes for full silovik and three-letter-agency comfort.
It's not to do with Mr Dictator wanting everybody to say they love him at all times, while disposing of a squad of sweaty henchmen who'll garotte whoever doesn't.
For what it's worth, reported turnout will probably be a few % up on the 65% (2012) and 68% (2018).
Yes Putin is pretty respected in Russia. I just watched bbc news and they showed some anti Putin protests but they were laughably small. The same bbc that did not cover at all the massive anti lockdown protests in London.
The average punter on the Rochdale omnibus would be forgiven for starting to suspect that it's all made up, like Dynasty, the Archers, or [edit] one of those weird wrestling matches. Edit: and see this.
'Perhaps the former Guardian editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger said it best in 2020, pointing out: “It is unusually difficult to judge the reliability of most royal reporting because it is a world almost devoid of open or named sources.
“So, in order to believe what we’re being told, we have to take it on trust that there are currently legions of ‘aides’, ‘palace insiders’, ‘friends’ and ‘senior courtiers’ constantly WhatsApping their favourite reporters with the latest gossip. It has been known to happen. Maybe they are, maybe they aren’t. We just don’t know.”'
I know people here often bemoan the state of the Royal Navy, but today I invite you to feel better about it by considering the state of the Irish Naval Service.
Nominally this consists of six vessels, but four were put into reserve during 2023 due to manpower shortages, but only one ship, LÉ George Bernard Shaw, is active to patrol Irish waters. The gardaí (police) recently requested it searched off the SW cost for a drug delivery ship following a drug gang arrested with a rib, but the naval ship is busy in Dún Laoghaire this weekend taking visitors on board for St Patrick's Day.
This is one of the stranger labour disputes I've come across.
Collapse of emergency medical system looms large https://m.koreatimes.co.kr/pages/article.asp?newsIdx=370755 Concerns over the collapse of the emergency medical system are intensifying as professors at medical schools nationwide have decided to submit their resignations from their respective universities after March 25.
More than 90 percent of the country's 13,000 trainee doctors have been on strike for nearly four weeks in protest against the government's decision to increase enrollment at medical schools by 2,000.
Medical school professors are poised to submit their resignations in a bid to oppose the government's plan and in support of trainee doctors' walkout...
Well, exactly. Anyone who attracts popular support is, err, barred.
Putin has popular support. The reason the election is rigged to exclude a possible anti-Putin popular candidate is not because Putin would lose the popular vote but because there might be a danger of such an opponent scoring e.g. a high % with the intelligentsia especially in Moscow and St Petersburg. That wouldn't be so likely, though, given it's wartime. But you could imagine a western-flavoured candidate winning too many intelligentsia votes for full silovik and three-letter-agency comfort.
It's not to do with Mr Dictator wanting everybody to say they love him at all times, while disposing of a squad of sweaty henchmen who'll garotte whoever doesn't.
For what it's worth, reported turnout will probably be a few % up on the 65% (2012) and 68% (2018).
Yes Putin is pretty respected in Russia. I just watched bbc news and they showed some anti Putin protests but they were laughably small. The same bbc that did not cover at all the massive anti lockdown protests in London.
CEO Altman, who met with a Korean Silicon Valley correspondent on the 14th (local time), said, "I don't know when the GPT-5 will be released, but it will make great progress as a model that takes the next step forward in advanced reasoning function. There are many questions about whether there are some limitations in GPT, but I will confidently say 'no'." There are no limits to the GPT model, and if enough computational resources are put in, it's confident that it's not too much to build an AGI that surpasses humans.
Sounds like GPT5 is near, and it sounds like a consequential improvement on 4. And he says “no limitations to the transformer model”
They think they can reach AGI through GPTs and they think they are close
Yes but his job is to talk up AI so he gets more investor money. Classic salesmanship.
This is going a bit beyond “salesmanship”
Also you should never overpromise and underdeliver,. And that’s not the OpenAI style, they know this and don’t do it.
Look how they casually dropped Sora a few weeks ago. The most amazing video AI tech ever seen - potentially destroying Hollywood and TV - and they just blithely rolled it out, without any hype, and said “ooh this is cute, take a look”
And we all took a look, and we were all astounded
He also said this:
“Many startups assume that the development of GPT-5 will be slow because they are happier with only a small development (since there are many business opportunities) rather than a major development, but I think it is a big mistake. When this happens, as often happens, it will be ‘steamrolled’ by the next generation model. In the past, we had a very broad picture of everything happening in the world and were able to see things that we couldn’t see from a narrow perspective, unfortunately, these days, we are completely focused on AI (AI all of the time at full tilt), so there is a different perspective. It is difficult to have.
“Other than thinking about the next generation AI model, the area where I spend the most time recently is ‘building compute,’ and I am increasingly convinced that computing will become the most important currency in the future. [But the world,] they have not planned enough computing and are not facing this problem, so there is a lot of concern about what is needed to build a huge amount of computing as cheaply as possible.
“What I am most excited about from AGI is that the faster we develop AI through scientific discoveries, the faster we will be able to find solutions to power problems by making nuclear fusion power generation a reality. Scientific research through AGI will lead to sustainable economic growth. I think it is almost the only driving force and determining factor.”
It sounds MASSIVE. He also talks of AGI as a done deal, not a “possibility” - it’s really happening, and soon
Somewhat contradictory - he has also talked down expectations 'gpt-5'. Though they clearly need something to take away from Gemini 1,5 and Claude 3. With the prospect of llama 3 this summer.
In the short term, I'm quite happy with my new meal planner 'thing'. Take a photo of my veg box delivery, and it gives me a few random recipes based on it's guess of the quantities, then also consults my 'backstory' of preferences, utensils, store-cupboard sh*t, previous suggestions. And spits out a meal plan for the week ahead - taking into account the time of year, how I like to cook etc.
If I wasn't so lazy I'd turn it into a little side-business. I had another version that optimised your 'recipe needs' based on the normal layout of UK supermarkets so you weren't wandering back and forth between isles.
These little things pass the time.
The developments are coming so fast it is hard to stay abreast, and easy to forget what enormous leaps are being made, on a weekly basis
Like, I’ve seen comments on Reddit saying “OpenAI are finished, they’re falling behind, Claude 3 is the best” etc
In the last month OpenAI have released Sora, astonishing the world (and shuttering a planned $800m Hollywood studio) and in the last WEEK we saw the OpenAI/Figure01 robot, essentially the most incredible “humanoid” robot ever seen - such that many wrongly thought it was fake
Atman could be bluffing to please shareholders, but my hunch is that if he says GPT is a massive improvement, then it probably is
Well, exactly. Anyone who attracts popular support is, err, barred.
Putin has popular support. The reason the election is rigged to exclude a possible anti-Putin popular candidate is not because Putin would lose the popular vote but because there might be a danger of such an opponent scoring e.g. a high % with the intelligentsia especially in Moscow and St Petersburg. That wouldn't be so likely, though, given it's wartime. But you could imagine a western-flavoured candidate winning too many intelligentsia votes for full silovik and three-letter-agency comfort.
It's not to do with Mr Dictator wanting everybody to say they love him at all times, while disposing of a squad of sweaty henchmen who'll garotte whoever doesn't.
For what it's worth, reported turnout will probably be a few % up on the 65% (2012) and 68% (2018).
Yes Putin is pretty respected in Russia. I just watched bbc news and they showed some anti Putin protests but they were laughably small. The same bbc that did not cover at all the massive anti lockdown protests in London.
Can't PB ban people who repeatedly and systematically come out with this sort of bullshit?
Also 2 of your examples are regional local london news not national news. I am talking about national news not a small article hidden in the online local news section. I have videos of the June 2021 antilockdown protests in London which were absolutely massive yet that evening they werent mentioned on the bbc evening news broadcast.
@RuthDavidsonPC on #electoraldsyfunction podcast this week: “You talked about adjectives leaders don’t want & embattled is certainly one of them. I mean, you’re one away from beleaguered. And once you’re beleaguered you’re f**ked” >
You know, Ruth was ten times better at being Penny Mordaunt back in the day than Penny Mordaunt is now.
Well, exactly. Anyone who attracts popular support is, err, barred.
Putin has popular support. The reason the election is rigged to exclude a possible anti-Putin popular candidate is not because Putin would lose the popular vote but because there might be a danger of such an opponent scoring e.g. a high % with the intelligentsia especially in Moscow and St Petersburg. That wouldn't be so likely, though, given it's wartime. But you could imagine a western-flavoured candidate winning too many intelligentsia votes for full silovik and three-letter-agency comfort.
It's not to do with Mr Dictator wanting everybody to say they love him at all times, while disposing of a squad of sweaty henchmen who'll garotte whoever doesn't.
For what it's worth, reported turnout will probably be a few % up on the 65% (2012) and 68% (2018).
Yes Putin is pretty respected in Russia. I just watched bbc news and they showed some anti Putin protests but they were laughably small. The same bbc that did not cover at all the massive anti lockdown protests in London.
Putin is… admired… in many places
Any Big Weapons to be announced this week?
I do wish the quality of your posts would match your intelligence level.
The average punter on the Rochdale omnibus would be forgiven for starting to suspect that it's all made up, like Dynasty, the Archers, or [edit] one of those weird wrestling matches. Edit: and see this.
'Perhaps the former Guardian editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger said it best in 2020, pointing out: “It is unusually difficult to judge the reliability of most royal reporting because it is a world almost devoid of open or named sources.
“So, in order to believe what we’re being told, we have to take it on trust that there are currently legions of ‘aides’, ‘palace insiders’, ‘friends’ and ‘senior courtiers’ constantly WhatsApping their favourite reporters with the latest gossip. It has been known to happen. Maybe they are, maybe they aren’t. We just don’t know.”'
Does anyone feel like Sunak is crafting a narrative that he's been forced into an election?
No. No i don’t.
It’s more likely the press are making far too much of noises off from usual right wing suspects, that going by Rwanda rebellion is about a 5th con MP’s, and ratio of 4:1 bewilderment:intent about this talk removing Sunak.
Polling is Truss at her worse depths, and the budget sent polling backwards - if they hadn’t binned two PMs already in recent years, and there was 18 months to polling day, don’t we all think it would be a certainty Sunak replaced, because he comes across so bad at fronting the band and doing the lead vocal it’s hard to imagine him as leader in a campaign.
I don’t think for a second Tory’s haven’t started writing manifesto yet as claimed. There’s quite a lot of what many PBers last evening called “Sunak holding gun to his head and threatening to pull it” in the papers tonight, but rather than this situation being by design, I think, though it’s a long wait for it, the memoirs will show how much they wanted a May election, and the signs off this we spotted were for real, but polls just didn’t move whatever they tried. This is where TSE previous header was brilliant and spot in - as far as there is swing not roundabouts outside a two party system where now there’s 6 key players, Conservatives have dropped in recent months it seems to Ref, Lab and LDM, all at same time.
CEO Altman, who met with a Korean Silicon Valley correspondent on the 14th (local time), said, "I don't know when the GPT-5 will be released, but it will make great progress as a model that takes the next step forward in advanced reasoning function. There are many questions about whether there are some limitations in GPT, but I will confidently say 'no'." There are no limits to the GPT model, and if enough computational resources are put in, it's confident that it's not too much to build an AGI that surpasses humans.
Sounds like GPT5 is near, and it sounds like a consequential improvement on 4. And he says “no limitations to the transformer model”
They think they can reach AGI through GPTs and they think they are close
Yes but his job is to talk up AI so he gets more investor money. Classic salesmanship.
This is going a bit beyond “salesmanship”
Also you should never overpromise and underdeliver,. And that’s not the OpenAI style, they know this and don’t do it.
Look how they casually dropped Sora a few weeks ago. The most amazing video AI tech ever seen - potentially destroying Hollywood and TV - and they just blithely rolled it out, without any hype, and said “ooh this is cute, take a look”
And we all took a look, and we were all astounded
He also said this:
“Many startups assume that the development of GPT-5 will be slow because they are happier with only a small development (since there are many business opportunities) rather than a major development, but I think it is a big mistake. When this happens, as often happens, it will be ‘steamrolled’ by the next generation model. In the past, we had a very broad picture of everything happening in the world and were able to see things that we couldn’t see from a narrow perspective, unfortunately, these days, we are completely focused on AI (AI all of the time at full tilt), so there is a different perspective. It is difficult to have.
“Other than thinking about the next generation AI model, the area where I spend the most time recently is ‘building compute,’ and I am increasingly convinced that computing will become the most important currency in the future. [But the world,] they have not planned enough computing and are not facing this problem, so there is a lot of concern about what is needed to build a huge amount of computing as cheaply as possible.
“What I am most excited about from AGI is that the faster we develop AI through scientific discoveries, the faster we will be able to find solutions to power problems by making nuclear fusion power generation a reality. Scientific research through AGI will lead to sustainable economic growth. I think it is almost the only driving force and determining factor.”
It sounds MASSIVE. He also talks of AGI as a done deal, not a “possibility” - it’s really happening, and soon
Somewhat contradictory - he has also talked down expectations 'gpt-5'. Though they clearly need something to take away from Gemini 1,5 and Claude 3. With the prospect of llama 3 this summer.
In the short term, I'm quite happy with my new meal planner 'thing'. Take a photo of my veg box delivery, and it gives me a few random recipes based on it's guess of the quantities, then also consults my 'backstory' of preferences, utensils, store-cupboard sh*t, previous suggestions. And spits out a meal plan for the week ahead - taking into account the time of year, how I like to cook etc.
If I wasn't so lazy I'd turn it into a little side-business. I had another version that optimised your 'recipe needs' based on the normal layout of UK supermarkets so you weren't wandering back and forth between isles.
These little things pass the time.
The developments are coming so fast it is hard to stay abreast, and easy to forget what enormous leaps are being made, on a weekly basis
Like, I’ve seen comments on Reddit saying “OpenAI are finished, they’re falling behind, Claude 3 is the best” etc
In the last month OpenAI have released Sora, astonishing the world (and shuttering a planned $800m Hollywood studio) and in the last WEEK we saw the OpenAI/Figure01 robot, essentially the most incredible “humanoid” robot ever seen - such that many wrongly thought it was fake
Atman could be bluffing to please shareholders, but my hunch is that if he says GPT is a massive improvement, then it probably is
Does anyone feel like Sunak is crafting a narrative that he's been forced into an election?
No. No i don’t.
It’s more likely the press are making far too much of noises off from usual right wing suspects, that going by Rwanda rebellion is about a 5th con MP’s, and ratio of 4:1 bewilderment:intent about this talk removing Sunak.
Polling is Truss at her worse depths, and the budget sent polling backwards - if they hadn’t binned two PMs already in recent years, and there was 18 months to polling day, don’t we all think it would be a certainty Sunak replaced, because he comes across so bad at fronting the band and doing the lead vocal it’s hard to imagine him as leader in a campaign.
I don’t think for a second Tory’s haven’t started writing manifesto yet as claimed. There’s quite a lot of what many PBers last evening called “Sunak holding gun to his head and threatening to pull it” in the papers tonight, but rather than this situation being by design, I think, though it’s a long wait for it, the memoirs will show how much they wanted a May election, and the signs off this we spotted were for real, but polls just didn’t move whatever they tried. This is where TSE previous header was brilliant and spot in - as far as there is swing not roundabouts outside a two party system where now there’s 6 key players, Conservatives have dropped in recent months it seems to Ref, Lab and LDM, all at same time.
Which brings us to the basis of the Rishi fight back, and reason for an autumn election - the economy coming good.
Reading the front of every paper tonight, they are cherry picking the good bits. And not only that, some good bits, inflation for example, may hit sweet spot spring and early summer and be on rise by late autumn election day alongs with energy costs.
And if you blip out technical recession just as you blipped in, no one is predicting significant growth to fight an election campaign on. OBR 0.8 for whole year is best of the predictions.
forcasts for interest rates is at best 5.25 to 5.0 in June - two more 0.25 taking it to 4.5 by year end. The right direction for a June 2025 general election, but too slow to help with this years?
Correct me where wrong, as some of you know more about the economy than me, but it’s not just inflation that puts pressure on interest rate cut, I understand the government has a big problem with the pound being far too strong right now, as the reason that will be given for interest rates will be kept unchanged till autumn. How can the government sort out the problem of a strong pound hurting the economic fight back?
Yeah.... looking at that Twitter feed; need a better source.
why?
Some other 'information' on it: "🇷🇺 Russia's President Putin says if oil producers in the Middle East stop using the US dollar, it will be the end of the dollar." "BRICS Ambassador Says US Dollar-Dominated World Will End Soon" "JUST IN: 🇫🇷 Thousands of people protest in France calling for an end to the war in Ukraine against Russia and France's withdrawal from NATO."
etc, etc.
The de use of the dollar has been forecast for many many years. Never happens.
And hasn't the Euro been on the point of collapse since 2012?
Does anyone feel like Sunak is crafting a narrative that he's been forced into an election?
No. No i don’t.
It’s more likely the press are making far too much of noises off from usual right wing suspects, that going by Rwanda rebellion is about a 5th con MP’s, and ratio of 4:1 bewilderment:intent about this talk removing Sunak.
Polling is Truss at her worse depths, and the budget sent polling backwards - if they hadn’t binned two PMs already in recent years, and there was 18 months to polling day, don’t we all think it would be a certainty Sunak replaced, because he comes across so bad at fronting the band and doing the lead vocal it’s hard to imagine him as leader in a campaign.
I don’t think for a second Tory’s haven’t started writing manifesto yet as claimed. There’s quite a lot of what many PBers last evening called “Sunak holding gun to his head and threatening to pull it” in the papers tonight, but rather than this situation being by design, I think, though it’s a long wait for it, the memoirs will show how much they wanted a May election, and the signs off this we spotted were for real, but polls just didn’t move whatever they tried. This is where TSE previous header was brilliant and spot in - as far as there is swing not roundabouts outside a two party system where now there’s 6 key players, Conservatives have dropped in recent months it seems to Ref, Lab and LDM, all at same time.
Which brings us to the basis of the Rishi fight back, and reason for an autumn election - the economy coming good.
Reading the front of every paper tonight, they are cherry picking the good bits. And not only that, some good bits, inflation for example, may hit sweet spot spring and early summer and be on rise by late autumn election day alongs with energy costs.
And if you blip out technical recession just as you blipped in, no one is predicting significant growth to fight an election campaign on. OBR 0.8 for whole year is best of the predictions.
forcasts for interest rates is at best 5.25 to 5.0 in June - two more 0.25 taking it to 4.5 by year end. The right direction for a June 2025 general election, but too slow to help with this years?
Correct me where wrong, as some of you know more about the economy than me, but it’s not just inflation that puts pressure on interest rate cut, I understand the government has a big problem with the pound being far too strong right now, as the reason that will be given for interest rates will be kept unchanged till autumn. How can the government sort out the problem of a strong pound hurting the economic fight back?
Recent us ppi was 0.6% vs 0.3% expectations. Not good fot interest rate cuts. Doubtful if fed will even cut in June now.
Well, exactly. Anyone who attracts popular support is, err, barred.
Putin has popular support. The reason the election is rigged to exclude a possible anti-Putin popular candidate is not because Putin would lose the popular vote but because there might be a danger of such an opponent scoring e.g. a high % with the intelligentsia especially in Moscow and St Petersburg. That wouldn't be so likely, though, given it's wartime. But you could imagine a western-flavoured candidate winning too many intelligentsia votes for full silovik and three-letter-agency comfort.
It's not to do with Mr Dictator wanting everybody to say they love him at all times, while disposing of a squad of sweaty henchmen who'll garotte whoever doesn't.
For what it's worth, reported turnout will probably be a few % up on the 65% (2012) and 68% (2018).
Yes Putin is pretty respected in Russia. I just watched bbc news and they showed some anti Putin protests but they were laughably small. The same bbc that did not cover at all the massive anti lockdown protests in London.
Probably true outside the biggest cities certainly, the Russian Presidents most liked in the West ie Gorbachev and Yeltsin, tended to be those seen as weak or corrupt at home.
The oligarchs who succeeded Yeltsin were even more corrupt, no-one gets rich in Russia without Putin's permission.
Well, exactly. Anyone who attracts popular support is, err, barred.
Putin has popular support. The reason the election is rigged to exclude a possible anti-Putin popular candidate is not because Putin would lose the popular vote but because there might be a danger of such an opponent scoring e.g. a high % with the intelligentsia especially in Moscow and St Petersburg. That wouldn't be so likely, though, given it's wartime. But you could imagine a western-flavoured candidate winning too many intelligentsia votes for full silovik and three-letter-agency comfort.
It's not to do with Mr Dictator wanting everybody to say they love him at all times, while disposing of a squad of sweaty henchmen who'll garotte whoever doesn't.
For what it's worth, reported turnout will probably be a few % up on the 65% (2012) and 68% (2018).
Yes Putin is pretty respected in Russia. I just watched bbc news and they showed some anti Putin protests but they were laughably small. The same bbc that did not cover at all the massive anti lockdown protests in London.
Putin is… admired… in many places
Any Big Weapons to be announced this week?
I do wish the quality of your posts would match your intelligence level.
Flabby Gollum is looking a lot worse since that photo was taken. He was a short, middle ranking bureaucrat that only achieved anything because a drunkard felt inadequate next to Nemtsov. Now there was a heroic Russian.
Yeah.... looking at that Twitter feed; need a better source.
why?
Some other 'information' on it: "🇷🇺 Russia's President Putin says if oil producers in the Middle East stop using the US dollar, it will be the end of the dollar." "BRICS Ambassador Says US Dollar-Dominated World Will End Soon" "JUST IN: 🇫🇷 Thousands of people protest in France calling for an end to the war in Ukraine against Russia and France's withdrawal from NATO."
etc, etc.
The de use of the dollar has been forecast for many many years. Never happens.
And hasn't the Euro been on the point of collapse since 2012?
The Euro survives on the back of generations of unemployed Greeks.
Does anyone feel like Sunak is crafting a narrative that he's been forced into an election?
No. No i don’t.
It’s more likely the press are making far too much of noises off from usual right wing suspects, that going by Rwanda rebellion is about a 5th con MP’s, and ratio of 4:1 bewilderment:intent about this talk removing Sunak.
Polling is Truss at her worse depths, and the budget sent polling backwards - if they hadn’t binned two PMs already in recent years, and there was 18 months to polling day, don’t we all think it would be a certainty Sunak replaced, because he comes across so bad at fronting the band and doing the lead vocal it’s hard to imagine him as leader in a campaign.
I don’t think for a second Tory’s haven’t started writing manifesto yet as claimed. There’s quite a lot of what many PBers last evening called “Sunak holding gun to his head and threatening to pull it” in the papers tonight, but rather than this situation being by design, I think, though it’s a long wait for it, the memoirs will show how much they wanted a May election, and the signs off this we spotted were for real, but polls just didn’t move whatever they tried. This is where TSE previous header was brilliant and spot in - as far as there is swing not roundabouts outside a two party system where now there’s 6 key players, Conservatives have dropped in recent months it seems to Ref, Lab and LDM, all at same time.
Which brings us to the basis of the Rishi fight back, and reason for an autumn election - the economy coming good.
Reading the front of every paper tonight, they are cherry picking the good bits. And not only that, some good bits, inflation for example, may hit sweet spot spring and early summer and be on rise by late autumn election day alongs with energy costs.
And if you blip out technical recession just as you blipped in, no one is predicting significant growth to fight an election campaign on. OBR 0.8 for whole year is best of the predictions.
forcasts for interest rates is at best 5.25 to 5.0 in June - two more 0.25 taking it to 4.5 by year end. The right direction for a June 2025 general election, but too slow to help with this years?
Correct me where wrong, as some of you know more about the economy than me, but it’s not just inflation that puts pressure on interest rate cut, I understand the government has a big problem with the pound being far too strong right now, as the reason that will be given for interest rates will be kept unchanged till autumn. How can the government sort out the problem of a strong pound hurting the economic fight back?
Recent us ppi was 0.6% vs 0.3% expectations. Not good fot interest rate cuts. Doubtful if fed will even cut in June now.
The UK is in a different place than US - our whole economy is different DNA, partly due to difference in proper inflation from the years of printing money - that money wasn’t free, it inflated stock markets, and here in UK house prices too. We are paying more to own homes than they are technically worth but for that inflation.
Baring something extraordinary in worlds oil production and transportation, UK inflation is going to behave differently than US blip upwards, UK inflation will fall consistently in the coming monthly announcements, this will encourage a lot of pressure from politics, Tory MPs and their client press, for slashing of interest rates.
And from PBers too, which is why I’m trying to flag up right now why the BoE will only go slowly, they will consider not just top rate of inflation, but underlying inflation, wage inflation, and the problem of a strong pound.
£ is too strong, beating 90% of currencies, and this is a problem for the government because our economy is weak at the same time meaning inflationary over demand.
So when inflation rate is announced, and PBer’s demand interest rate cut, dig out this post and ask for their thoughts on it. 🤑
Does anyone feel like Sunak is crafting a narrative that he's been forced into an election?
No. No i don’t.
It’s more likely the press are making far too much of noises off from usual right wing suspects, that going by Rwanda rebellion is about a 5th con MP’s, and ratio of 4:1 bewilderment:intent about this talk removing Sunak.
Polling is Truss at her worse depths, and the budget sent polling backwards - if they hadn’t binned two PMs already in recent years, and there was 18 months to polling day, don’t we all think it would be a certainty Sunak replaced, because he comes across so bad at fronting the band and doing the lead vocal it’s hard to imagine him as leader in a campaign.
I don’t think for a second Tory’s haven’t started writing manifesto yet as claimed. There’s quite a lot of what many PBers last evening called “Sunak holding gun to his head and threatening to pull it” in the papers tonight, but rather than this situation being by design, I think, though it’s a long wait for it, the memoirs will show how much they wanted a May election, and the signs off this we spotted were for real, but polls just didn’t move whatever they tried. This is where TSE previous header was brilliant and spot in - as far as there is swing not roundabouts outside a two party system where now there’s 6 key players, Conservatives have dropped in recent months it seems to Ref, Lab and LDM, all at same time.
Which brings us to the basis of the Rishi fight back, and reason for an autumn election - the economy coming good.
Reading the front of every paper tonight, they are cherry picking the good bits. And not only that, some good bits, inflation for example, may hit sweet spot spring and early summer and be on rise by late autumn election day alongs with energy costs.
And if you blip out technical recession just as you blipped in, no one is predicting significant growth to fight an election campaign on. OBR 0.8 for whole year is best of the predictions.
forcasts for interest rates is at best 5.25 to 5.0 in June - two more 0.25 taking it to 4.5 by year end. The right direction for a June 2025 general election, but too slow to help with this years?
Correct me where wrong, as some of you know more about the economy than me, but it’s not just inflation that puts pressure on interest rate cut, I understand the government has a big problem with the pound being far too strong right now, as the reason that will be given for interest rates will be kept unchanged till autumn. How can the government sort out the problem of a strong pound hurting the economic fight back?
Recent us ppi was 0.6% vs 0.3% expectations. Not good fot interest rate cuts. Doubtful if fed will even cut in June now.
The UK is in a different place than US - our whole economy is different DNA, partly due to difference in proper inflation from the years of printing money - that money wasn’t free, it inflated stock markets, and here in UK house prices too. We are paying more to own homes than they are technically worth but for that inflation.
Baring something extraordinary in worlds oil production and transportation, UK inflation is going to behave differently than US blip upwards, UK inflation will fall consistently in the coming monthly announcements, this will encourage a lot of pressure from politics, Tory MPs and their client press, for slashing of interest rates.
And from PBers too, which is why I’m trying to flag up right now why the BoE will only go slowly, they will consider not just top rate of inflation, but underlying inflation, wage inflation, and the problem of a strong pound.
£ is too strong, beating 90% of currencies, and this is a problem for the government because our economy is weak at the same time meaning inflationary over demand.
So when inflation rate is announced, and PBer’s demand interest rate cut, dig out this post and ask for their thoughts on it. 🤑
@MoonRabbit , GBP is currently worth 1 GBP = 1.27314 USD and 1 GBP = 1.16975 EUR. If you could tell me what it will be on May 1st I would be most grateful.
CEO Altman, who met with a Korean Silicon Valley correspondent on the 14th (local time), said, "I don't know when the GPT-5 will be released, but it will make great progress as a model that takes the next step forward in advanced reasoning function. There are many questions about whether there are some limitations in GPT, but I will confidently say 'no'." There are no limits to the GPT model, and if enough computational resources are put in, it's confident that it's not too much to build an AGI that surpasses humans.
Sounds like GPT5 is near, and it sounds like a consequential improvement on 4. And he says “no limitations to the transformer model”
They think they can reach AGI through GPTs and they think they are close
Yes but his job is to talk up AI so he gets more investor money. Classic salesmanship.
This is going a bit beyond “salesmanship”
Also you should never overpromise and underdeliver,. And that’s not the OpenAI style, they know this and don’t do it.
Look how they casually dropped Sora a few weeks ago. The most amazing video AI tech ever seen - potentially destroying Hollywood and TV - and they just blithely rolled it out, without any hype, and said “ooh this is cute, take a look”
And we all took a look, and we were all astounded
He also said this:
“Many startups assume that the development of GPT-5 will be slow because they are happier with only a small development (since there are many business opportunities) rather than a major development, but I think it is a big mistake. When this happens, as often happens, it will be ‘steamrolled’ by the next generation model. In the past, we had a very broad picture of everything happening in the world and were able to see things that we couldn’t see from a narrow perspective, unfortunately, these days, we are completely focused on AI (AI all of the time at full tilt), so there is a different perspective. It is difficult to have.
“Other than thinking about the next generation AI model, the area where I spend the most time recently is ‘building compute,’ and I am increasingly convinced that computing will become the most important currency in the future. [But the world,] they have not planned enough computing and are not facing this problem, so there is a lot of concern about what is needed to build a huge amount of computing as cheaply as possible.
“What I am most excited about from AGI is that the faster we develop AI through scientific discoveries, the faster we will be able to find solutions to power problems by making nuclear fusion power generation a reality. Scientific research through AGI will lead to sustainable economic growth. I think it is almost the only driving force and determining factor.”
It sounds MASSIVE. He also talks of AGI as a done deal, not a “possibility” - it’s really happening, and soon
Somewhat contradictory - he has also talked down expectations 'gpt-5'. Though they clearly need something to take away from Gemini 1,5 and Claude 3. With the prospect of llama 3 this summer.
In the short term, I'm quite happy with my new meal planner 'thing'. Take a photo of my veg box delivery, and it gives me a few random recipes based on it's guess of the quantities, then also consults my 'backstory' of preferences, utensils, store-cupboard sh*t, previous suggestions. And spits out a meal plan for the week ahead - taking into account the time of year, how I like to cook etc.
If I wasn't so lazy I'd turn it into a little side-business. I had another version that optimised your 'recipe needs' based on the normal layout of UK supermarkets so you weren't wandering back and forth between isles.
These little things pass the time.
Deskilling happened first at work. Now it's happening in the rest of life: driving a car, education, financial management, even things like walking along the street, having a conversation, finding a mate, preparing a meal, staying fit.
This is the thing: what they call a win for AI (although that's such a stupid way of putting it) is not just a loss for humanity in general. It involves humanity in general becoming less intelligent, towards the main type of non-emotional intelligence left in human beings (because machines can't be intelligent - that's just shit talk) being an artificial type.
Well, exactly. Anyone who attracts popular support is, err, barred.
Putin has popular support. The reason the election is rigged to exclude a possible anti-Putin popular candidate is not because Putin would lose the popular vote but because there might be a danger of such an opponent scoring e.g. a high % with the intelligentsia especially in Moscow and St Petersburg. That wouldn't be so likely, though, given it's wartime. But you could imagine a western-flavoured candidate winning too many intelligentsia votes for full silovik and three-letter-agency comfort.
It's not to do with Mr Dictator wanting everybody to say they love him at all times, while disposing of a squad of sweaty henchmen who'll garotte whoever doesn't.
For what it's worth, reported turnout will probably be a few % up on the 65% (2012) and 68% (2018).
Yes Putin is pretty respected in Russia. I just watched bbc news and they showed some anti Putin protests but they were laughably small. The same bbc that did not cover at all the massive anti lockdown protests in London.
Probably true outside the biggest cities certainly, the Russian Presidents most liked in the West ie Gorbachev and Yeltsin, tended to be those seen as weak or corrupt at home.
Yes this is true. Gorbachev - seen as weak (but not corrupt). Yeltsin - seen as both corrupt and weak. For a leader to be popular among the narod, he's got to swing to the "Slavophile" side, not the "westerniser" one. Those are terms from the 19th century but they haven't lost their applicability.
Putin started off as kind of a bit of a westerniser (anyone remember G8?), but he's definitely a Slavophile now.
Does anyone feel like Sunak is crafting a narrative that he's been forced into an election?
No. No i don’t.
It’s more likely the press are making far too much of noises off from usual right wing suspects, that going by Rwanda rebellion is about a 5th con MP’s, and ratio of 4:1 bewilderment:intent about this talk removing Sunak.
Polling is Truss at her worse depths, and the budget sent polling backwards - if they hadn’t binned two PMs already in recent years, and there was 18 months to polling day, don’t we all think it would be a certainty Sunak replaced, because he comes across so bad at fronting the band and doing the lead vocal it’s hard to imagine him as leader in a campaign.
I don’t think for a second Tory’s haven’t started writing manifesto yet as claimed. There’s quite a lot of what many PBers last evening called “Sunak holding gun to his head and threatening to pull it” in the papers tonight, but rather than this situation being by design, I think, though it’s a long wait for it, the memoirs will show how much they wanted a May election, and the signs off this we spotted were for real, but polls just didn’t move whatever they tried. This is where TSE previous header was brilliant and spot in - as far as there is swing not roundabouts outside a two party system where now there’s 6 key players, Conservatives have dropped in recent months it seems to Ref, Lab and LDM, all at same time.
Which brings us to the basis of the Rishi fight back, and reason for an autumn election - the economy coming good.
Reading the front of every paper tonight, they are cherry picking the good bits. And not only that, some good bits, inflation for example, may hit sweet spot spring and early summer and be on rise by late autumn election day alongs with energy costs.
And if you blip out technical recession just as you blipped in, no one is predicting significant growth to fight an election campaign on. OBR 0.8 for whole year is best of the predictions.
forcasts for interest rates is at best 5.25 to 5.0 in June - two more 0.25 taking it to 4.5 by year end. The right direction for a June 2025 general election, but too slow to help with this years?
Correct me where wrong, as some of you know more about the economy than me, but it’s not just inflation that puts pressure on interest rate cut, I understand the government has a big problem with the pound being far too strong right now, as the reason that will be given for interest rates will be kept unchanged till autumn. How can the government sort out the problem of a strong pound hurting the economic fight back?
Recent us ppi was 0.6% vs 0.3% expectations. Not good fot interest rate cuts. Doubtful if fed will even cut in June now.
The UK is in a different place than US - our whole economy is different DNA, partly due to difference in proper inflation from the years of printing money - that money wasn’t free, it inflated stock markets, and here in UK house prices too. We are paying more to own homes than they are technically worth but for that inflation.
Baring something extraordinary in worlds oil production and transportation, UK inflation is going to behave differently than US blip upwards, UK inflation will fall consistently in the coming monthly announcements, this will encourage a lot of pressure from politics, Tory MPs and their client press, for slashing of interest rates.
And from PBers too, which is why I’m trying to flag up right now why the BoE will only go slowly, they will consider not just top rate of inflation, but underlying inflation, wage inflation, and the problem of a strong pound.
£ is too strong, beating 90% of currencies, and this is a problem for the government because our economy is weak at the same time meaning inflationary over demand.
So when inflation rate is announced, and PBer’s demand interest rate cut, dig out this post and ask for their thoughts on it. 🤑
@MoonRabbit , GBP is currently worth 1 GBP = 1.27314 USD and 1 GBP = 1.16975 EUR. If you could tell me what it will be on May 1st I would be most grateful.
So far this year it’s beating 90% of currencies. There’s probably pluses and minuses to it doing such a thing, good to go and buy something abroad with it, bad for selling your wares to foreign customers?
We have PBers who can answer your question better about where it’s going, they work in the city or have done, and passed degrees in it, I took GCSE maths and didn’t trouble the scorers. But for a government in election year, is a £ beating 80% of currencies an issue, and if so how do they do something about it? Promise a £50B unfunded tax cut to devalue it?
Well, exactly. Anyone who attracts popular support is, err, barred.
Putin has popular support. The reason the election is rigged to exclude a possible anti-Putin popular candidate is not because Putin would lose the popular vote but because there might be a danger of such an opponent scoring e.g. a high % with the intelligentsia especially in Moscow and St Petersburg. That wouldn't be so likely, though, given it's wartime. But you could imagine a western-flavoured candidate winning too many intelligentsia votes for full silovik and three-letter-agency comfort.
It's not to do with Mr Dictator wanting everybody to say they love him at all times, while disposing of a squad of sweaty henchmen who'll garotte whoever doesn't.
For what it's worth, reported turnout will probably be a few % up on the 65% (2012) and 68% (2018).
Yes Putin is pretty respected in Russia. I just watched bbc news and they showed some anti Putin protests but they were laughably small. The same bbc that did not cover at all the massive anti lockdown protests in London.
Probably true outside the biggest cities certainly, the Russian Presidents most liked in the West ie Gorbachev and Yeltsin, tended to be those seen as weak or corrupt at home.
Yes this is true. Gorbachev - seen as weak. Yeltsin - seen as corrupt. For a leader to be popular among the narod, he's got to swing to the "Slavophile" side, not the "westerniser" one. Those are terms from the 19th century but they haven't lost their applicability.
Putin started off as kind of a bit of a westerniser (anyone remember G8?), but he's definitely a Slavophile now.
Because right wing nationalists control the media. Have a free and fair election with freedom of speech and we would all see just how unpopular Putin is.
Now that I'm not up to much and still waiting for baby number 2 to arrive I've been catching up on random shite that I missed over the last few years, one of which is the Heard vs Depp trial from the US. It's absolutely box office and really shows our judicial process in a very negative light. The amount of evidence that was presented in the US trial that was deemed inadmissible in the UK one is absolutely wild.
It really does feel as though Heard went into the courtroom and batted her eyelashes at the old fool of a judge and he fell for it. Some of the picture evidence provided in support of the "wife beating" was truly laughable and some of the things she said were just fantastical and completely contradictory. In some instances she says he walks out and she won't see him for days after she got mad at him and in the next sentence she's saying he punched her in the back of the head multiple times though she didn't go for any medical exams, made no police reports and took no pictures which showed any significant pictures. That our justice system didn't allow any of this evidence to be shown and tested in open court is a huge shortcoming, that Heard could, ostensibly, bewitch the old male judge with a smile and a few eyelash flutters is another huge shortcoming. The case was, of course not the same parties, yet the evidence was absolutely relevant to determining the truth of the statement that labelled him a "wife beater".
Also, Camile Vasquez is an absolute star. The way she methodically tears Heard's testimony to shreds over the 90 minute session is truly a sight to behold. My wife and I have been watching all of the sessions on YouTube and it's properly compulsive viewing. I'm also shocked that the advice to Heard wasn't to settle because there's no doubt that this trial did her more reputational harm than a settlement would have done. The lawyers got that wrong but it may have been the case that she didn't want to in which case they should have refused the case.
All in all, if anyone hasn't watched it they absolutely should. The Depp legal team give a master class in presenting an evidence based case, retaining the services of true experts in their fields as witnesses and trial lawyers that are among the best in their field at extracting the truth from opposition witnesses.
I disagree.
To me the US legal system is a comprehensive, out of control, mess driven by politics and money.
The Election of legal officials, and politicisation of Judges, is horrific. That the first comment made about each Judge to assess their likely position on the Trump cases is to identify which administration appointed them eg "Trump", "Biden", "Obama", "W Bush", "Reagan", is an admission of basic failure.
The UK doesn't come out well on spend level (London being a major international centre may be a part of that), for which less money p*ss*d away on lawyers is I suggest desirable, however we are nowhere near as disastrous as the USA.
The SNP's hate crime legislation comes into force on 1 April (I kid you not). I suspect it will go the same way as the gender stuff. Ad yes, they really have created a cartoon Hate Monster. Why do they do this kind of thing? Why is Yousaf so useless? Anyway,here's an extract from Iain McWhirter (formerly BBC journo) on it:
A new bogeyman has been invented to scare Scottish children at night: the Hate Monster. Resembling a reject from Sesame Street, this carton icon of negative emotion has been enlisted by Police Scotland to publicise the Scottish government’s controversial Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act 2021, which will finally come into force on April 1st. ...This is illiberal and probably unworkable legislation supposedly designed to protect from abuse people with the characteristics of “disability, race, religion, sexual orientation or transgender identity”. Though not, you will note, people with the characteristic of being a woman. They are somehow excluded from this hierarchy of victimhood.
Actually, according to the Hate Monster, this has very little to do with protected characteristics. “If you or someone you know is a victim of hate”, says Police Scotland’s campaign baldly, “report it”. No reference there to the Equality Act or categories of “aggravated” crime. The perpetrators of hate, we’re told, are mostly young men aged 18-30 from “socially excluded communities” who have “ideas about white-male entitlement”. ...
I don’t know who invented this risible campaign, but it has certainly worked in one way: it has alerted people to the repressive idiocy of the Scottish government’s new crime of “stirring up hatred”. For, in Scotland next month you’ll be able to drop into a sex shop, make an anonymous accusation of hate crime against someone you dislike and potentially see your bete noir locked up. The sex shop in question is an LGBTQ-friendly establishment in Glasgow’s Merchant City. It is what is called a “third party reporting centre” set up by Police Scotland to provide a “safe space” for people to accuse others of hate crime. There will be 411 of these “snitching centres” the lengths and breadth of Scotland conveniently located everywhere from libraries to mushroom farms. ....
....As the SNP MP Joanna Cherry KC forecasts, the law will most likely be “weaponised” first against gender critical women. Trans activists across the land will be able to accuse JK Rowling, of being a transphobe to their hearts content by dropping in to one of the hundreds of third party reporting stations. The trans campaigner, India Willoughby, has already tried to have the novelist prosecuted for misgendering him/her. After the complaint was dismissed by Northumberland Police, Willoughby’s supporters made clear they will be accusing JK Rowling in Scotland where she lives. They might even succeed. For this new law takes us into uncharted legal territory.
Didn’t Canada try this a while back? And discover that it was a Witch Smellers charter?
Part of that is I think the SNP being the SNP, and part of it is Police Scotland being a failed organisation who should have been able to make sure that measures were practical and proportionate.
The Trans Activist lobby have been witch-smellers since it started, with Mermaids' setting of the police on journalists simply doing their job being one small example of routine abusive activity.
Does anyone feel like Sunak is crafting a narrative that he's been forced into an election?
No. No i don’t.
It’s more likely the press are making far too much of noises off from usual right wing suspects, that going by Rwanda rebellion is about a 5th con MP’s, and ratio of 4:1 bewilderment:intent about this talk removing Sunak.
Polling is Truss at her worse depths, and the budget sent polling backwards - if they hadn’t binned two PMs already in recent years, and there was 18 months to polling day, don’t we all think it would be a certainty Sunak replaced, because he comes across so bad at fronting the band and doing the lead vocal it’s hard to imagine him as leader in a campaign.
I don’t think for a second Tory’s haven’t started writing manifesto yet as claimed. There’s quite a lot of what many PBers last evening called “Sunak holding gun to his head and threatening to pull it” in the papers tonight, but rather than this situation being by design, I think, though it’s a long wait for it, the memoirs will show how much they wanted a May election, and the signs off this we spotted were for real, but polls just didn’t move whatever they tried. This is where TSE previous header was brilliant and spot in - as far as there is swing not roundabouts outside a two party system where now there’s 6 key players, Conservatives have dropped in recent months it seems to Ref, Lab and LDM, all at same time.
Which brings us to the basis of the Rishi fight back, and reason for an autumn election - the economy coming good.
Reading the front of every paper tonight, they are cherry picking the good bits. And not only that, some good bits, inflation for example, may hit sweet spot spring and early summer and be on rise by late autumn election day alongs with energy costs.
And if you blip out technical recession just as you blipped in, no one is predicting significant growth to fight an election campaign on. OBR 0.8 for whole year is best of the predictions.
forcasts for interest rates is at best 5.25 to 5.0 in June - two more 0.25 taking it to 4.5 by year end. The right direction for a June 2025 general election, but too slow to help with this years?
Correct me where wrong, as some of you know more about the economy than me, but it’s not just inflation that puts pressure on interest rate cut, I understand the government has a big problem with the pound being far too strong right now, as the reason that will be given for interest rates will be kept unchanged till autumn. How can the government sort out the problem of a strong pound hurting the economic fight back?
Recent us ppi was 0.6% vs 0.3% expectations. Not good fot interest rate cuts. Doubtful if fed will even cut in June now.
The UK is in a different place than US - our whole economy is different DNA, partly due to difference in proper inflation from the years of printing money - that money wasn’t free, it inflated stock markets, and here in UK house prices too. We are paying more to own homes than they are technically worth but for that inflation.
Baring something extraordinary in worlds oil production and transportation, UK inflation is going to behave differently than US blip upwards, UK inflation will fall consistently in the coming monthly announcements, this will encourage a lot of pressure from politics, Tory MPs and their client press, for slashing of interest rates.
And from PBers too, which is why I’m trying to flag up right now why the BoE will only go slowly, they will consider not just top rate of inflation, but underlying inflation, wage inflation, and the problem of a strong pound.
£ is too strong, beating 90% of currencies, and this is a problem for the government because our economy is weak at the same time meaning inflationary over demand.
So when inflation rate is announced, and PBer’s demand interest rate cut, dig out this post and ask for their thoughts on it. 🤑
@MoonRabbit , GBP is currently worth 1 GBP = 1.27314 USD and 1 GBP = 1.16975 EUR. If you could tell me what it will be on May 1st I would be most grateful.
So far this year it’s beating 90% of currencies. There’s probably pluses and minuses to it doing such a thing, good to go and buy something abroad with it, bad for selling your wares to foreign customers?
We have PBers who can answer your question better about where it’s going, they work in the city or have done, and passed degrees in it, I took GCSE maths and didn’t trouble the scorers. But for a government in election year, is a £ beating 80% of currencies an issue, and if so how do they do something about it? Promise a £50B unfunded tax cut to devalue it?
I think that politically Rishi Sunk is so thoroughly sunk that it will make little difference.
The SNP's hate crime legislation comes into force on 1 April (I kid you not). I suspect it will go the same way as the gender stuff. Ad yes, they really have created a cartoon Hate Monster. Why do they do this kind of thing? Why is Yousaf so useless? Anyway,here's an extract from Iain McWhirter (formerly BBC journo) on it:
A new bogeyman has been invented to scare Scottish children at night: the Hate Monster. Resembling a reject from Sesame Street, this carton icon of negative emotion has been enlisted by Police Scotland to publicise the Scottish government’s controversial Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act 2021, which will finally come into force on April 1st. ...This is illiberal and probably unworkable legislation supposedly designed to protect from abuse people with the characteristics of “disability, race, religion, sexual orientation or transgender identity”. Though not, you will note, people with the characteristic of being a woman. They are somehow excluded from this hierarchy of victimhood.
Actually, according to the Hate Monster, this has very little to do with protected characteristics. “If you or someone you know is a victim of hate”, says Police Scotland’s campaign baldly, “report it”. No reference there to the Equality Act or categories of “aggravated” crime. The perpetrators of hate, we’re told, are mostly young men aged 18-30 from “socially excluded communities” who have “ideas about white-male entitlement”. ...
I don’t know who invented this risible campaign, but it has certainly worked in one way: it has alerted people to the repressive idiocy of the Scottish government’s new crime of “stirring up hatred”. For, in Scotland next month you’ll be able to drop into a sex shop, make an anonymous accusation of hate crime against someone you dislike and potentially see your bete noir locked up. The sex shop in question is an LGBTQ-friendly establishment in Glasgow’s Merchant City. It is what is called a “third party reporting centre” set up by Police Scotland to provide a “safe space” for people to accuse others of hate crime. There will be 411 of these “snitching centres” the lengths and breadth of Scotland conveniently located everywhere from libraries to mushroom farms. ....
....As the SNP MP Joanna Cherry KC forecasts, the law will most likely be “weaponised” first against gender critical women. Trans activists across the land will be able to accuse JK Rowling, of being a transphobe to their hearts content by dropping in to one of the hundreds of third party reporting stations. The trans campaigner, India Willoughby, has already tried to have the novelist prosecuted for misgendering him/her. After the complaint was dismissed by Northumberland Police, Willoughby’s supporters made clear they will be accusing JK Rowling in Scotland where she lives. They might even succeed. For this new law takes us into uncharted legal territory.
Didn’t Canada try this a while back? And discover that it was a Witch Smellers charter?
Part of that is I think the SNP being the SNP, and part of it is Police Scotland being a failed organisation who should have been able to make sure that measures were practical and proportionate.
The Trans Activist lobby have been witch-smellers since it started, with Mermaids' setting of the police on journalists simply doing their job being one small example of routine abusive activity.
If the state is setting up hundreds of new reporting centres in community places and elsewhere, I would say this may be a development that points somewhere that isn't defined purely by transsexual issues.
England and Scotland have both already got loads of these centres.
Funny how they can't do it for reporting the criminal thugs who make so many people's lives a misery especially in poor areas.
The SNP's hate crime legislation comes into force on 1 April (I kid you not). I suspect it will go the same way as the gender stuff. Ad yes, they really have created a cartoon Hate Monster. Why do they do this kind of thing? Why is Yousaf so useless? Anyway,here's an extract from Iain McWhirter (formerly BBC journo) on it:
A new bogeyman has been invented to scare Scottish children at night: the Hate Monster. Resembling a reject from Sesame Street, this carton icon of negative emotion has been enlisted by Police Scotland to publicise the Scottish government’s controversial Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act 2021, which will finally come into force on April 1st. ...This is illiberal and probably unworkable legislation supposedly designed to protect from abuse people with the characteristics of “disability, race, religion, sexual orientation or transgender identity”. Though not, you will note, people with the characteristic of being a woman. They are somehow excluded from this hierarchy of victimhood.
Actually, according to the Hate Monster, this has very little to do with protected characteristics. “If you or someone you know is a victim of hate”, says Police Scotland’s campaign baldly, “report it”. No reference there to the Equality Act or categories of “aggravated” crime. The perpetrators of hate, we’re told, are mostly young men aged 18-30 from “socially excluded communities” who have “ideas about white-male entitlement”. ...
I don’t know who invented this risible campaign, but it has certainly worked in one way: it has alerted people to the repressive idiocy of the Scottish government’s new crime of “stirring up hatred”. For, in Scotland next month you’ll be able to drop into a sex shop, make an anonymous accusation of hate crime against someone you dislike and potentially see your bete noir locked up. The sex shop in question is an LGBTQ-friendly establishment in Glasgow’s Merchant City. It is what is called a “third party reporting centre” set up by Police Scotland to provide a “safe space” for people to accuse others of hate crime. There will be 411 of these “snitching centres” the lengths and breadth of Scotland conveniently located everywhere from libraries to mushroom farms. ....
....As the SNP MP Joanna Cherry KC forecasts, the law will most likely be “weaponised” first against gender critical women. Trans activists across the land will be able to accuse JK Rowling, of being a transphobe to their hearts content by dropping in to one of the hundreds of third party reporting stations. The trans campaigner, India Willoughby, has already tried to have the novelist prosecuted for misgendering him/her. After the complaint was dismissed by Northumberland Police, Willoughby’s supporters made clear they will be accusing JK Rowling in Scotland where she lives. They might even succeed. For this new law takes us into uncharted legal territory.
Didn’t Canada try this a while back? And discover that it was a Witch Smellers charter?
Part of that is I think the SNP being the SNP, and part of it is Police Scotland being a failed organisation who should have been able to make sure that measures were practical and proportionate.
The Trans Activist lobby have been witch-smellers since it started, with Mermaids' setting of the police on journalists simply doing their job being one small example of routine abusive activity.
If the state is setting up hundreds of new reporting centres in community places and elsewhere, I would say this may be a development that points somewhere that isn't defined purely by transsexual issues.
England and Scotland have both already got loads of these centres.
Funny how they can't do it for reporting the criminal thugs who make so many people's lives a misery especially in poor areas.
The "Trans Activist lobby" - aka the state?
Of course it isn't purely defined by those. It's just likely to be the flashpoint for two main reasons.
Firstly, although there are other disputes around other types of "hate" (e.g. what's 'Islamophobia' and what's legitimate criticism of Islam or attitudes within communities), none is as widely disputed and new to the point different sides might as well be talking a different language.
Rowling being the obvious example, where she's either a progressive, feminist hero or almost Hitler depending on your views on gender. More importantly perhaps are the newness and disputed nature of terminology and attitudes - which means your average person could face reporting without even knowing what they'd really done.
Secondly, there are a limited but determined group of activists who have extreme interpretations of what gender identity means, what the law is or should be and are wont to use it to try and prove their point and take down opponents.
The SNP's hate crime legislation comes into force on 1 April (I kid you not). I suspect it will go the same way as the gender stuff. Ad yes, they really have created a cartoon Hate Monster. Why do they do this kind of thing? Why is Yousaf so useless? Anyway,here's an extract from Iain McWhirter (formerly BBC journo) on it:
A new bogeyman has been invented to scare Scottish children at night: the Hate Monster. Resembling a reject from Sesame Street, this carton icon of negative emotion has been enlisted by Police Scotland to publicise the Scottish government’s controversial Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act 2021, which will finally come into force on April 1st. ...This is illiberal and probably unworkable legislation supposedly designed to protect from abuse people with the characteristics of “disability, race, religion, sexual orientation or transgender identity”. Though not, you will note, people with the characteristic of being a woman. They are somehow excluded from this hierarchy of victimhood.
Actually, according to the Hate Monster, this has very little to do with protected characteristics. “If you or someone you know is a victim of hate”, says Police Scotland’s campaign baldly, “report it”. No reference there to the Equality Act or categories of “aggravated” crime. The perpetrators of hate, we’re told, are mostly young men aged 18-30 from “socially excluded communities” who have “ideas about white-male entitlement”. ...
I don’t know who invented this risible campaign, but it has certainly worked in one way: it has alerted people to the repressive idiocy of the Scottish government’s new crime of “stirring up hatred”. For, in Scotland next month you’ll be able to drop into a sex shop, make an anonymous accusation of hate crime against someone you dislike and potentially see your bete noir locked up. The sex shop in question is an LGBTQ-friendly establishment in Glasgow’s Merchant City. It is what is called a “third party reporting centre” set up by Police Scotland to provide a “safe space” for people to accuse others of hate crime. There will be 411 of these “snitching centres” the lengths and breadth of Scotland conveniently located everywhere from libraries to mushroom farms. ....
....As the SNP MP Joanna Cherry KC forecasts, the law will most likely be “weaponised” first against gender critical women. Trans activists across the land will be able to accuse JK Rowling, of being a transphobe to their hearts content by dropping in to one of the hundreds of third party reporting stations. The trans campaigner, India Willoughby, has already tried to have the novelist prosecuted for misgendering him/her. After the complaint was dismissed by Northumberland Police, Willoughby’s supporters made clear they will be accusing JK Rowling in Scotland where she lives. They might even succeed. For this new law takes us into uncharted legal territory.
If you quote from an online source you have to summarise it and credit it to the original, not cut-and-paste textwalls, elsewise OGH and the site can get into trouble.
Of course it isn't purely defined by those. It's just likely to be the flashpoint for two main reasons.
Firstly, although there are other disputes around other types of "hate" (e.g. what's 'Islamophobia' and what's legitimate criticism of Islam or attitudes within communities), none is as widely disputed and new to the point different sides might as well be talking a different language....
Although I seriously doubt that to be factually accurate - famously disputes on race and sexuality and religions can be extremely intense and violent, with both sides very far apart - let's take it on its face for the moment. What you are describing is a case where the definition of "offensive" is disputed, yes?
What about cases where it isn't?
What if I say "Ooh that David Attenborough is a right [badword] and should be fired out of a cannon into a volcano and I hope he is eaten by a T-Rex" and you dob me in? It's universally accepted that David Attenborough is a National Treasure and should not be fired out of a cannon into a volcano, so I assume I would be found guilty and punished. Would you be OK with that?
As I keep saying (so let's resurrect the hashtag #PBfreespeech ) PB is frequently OK with speech suppression provided it's the right type of speech.
The Victoria and Albert Museum was facing calls last night for it to be stripped of its public funding after naming Margaret Thatcher in a list of 'unpopular public figures' alongside Hitler and Osama bin Laden.
I know people here often bemoan the state of the Royal Navy, but today I invite you to feel better about it by considering the state of the Irish Naval Service.
Nominally this consists of six vessels, but four were put into reserve during 2023 due to manpower shortages, but only one ship, LÉ George Bernard Shaw, is active to patrol Irish waters. The gardaí (police) recently requested it searched off the SW cost for a drug delivery ship following a drug gang arrested with a rib, but the naval ship is busy in Dún Laoghaire this weekend taking visitors on board for St Patrick's Day.
I sailed on a tall shop with a young member of the Irish Naval Service. He was a very nice chap, but gave the impression that 'defence' was the last thing on the service's mind; it was more of a coastguard-like service.
I also got the impression that sailing on the tall ship was part of his paid duties, not a holiday outing.
Does anyone feel like Sunak is crafting a narrative that he's been forced into an election?
No. No i don’t.
It’s more likely the press are making far too much of noises off from usual right wing suspects, that going by Rwanda rebellion is about a 5th con MP’s, and ratio of 4:1 bewilderment:intent about this talk removing Sunak.
Polling is Truss at her worse depths, and the budget sent polling backwards - if they hadn’t binned two PMs already in recent years, and there was 18 months to polling day, don’t we all think it would be a certainty Sunak replaced, because he comes across so bad at fronting the band and doing the lead vocal it’s hard to imagine him as leader in a campaign.
I don’t think for a second Tory’s haven’t started writing manifesto yet as claimed. There’s quite a lot of what many PBers last evening called “Sunak holding gun to his head and threatening to pull it” in the papers tonight, but rather than this situation being by design, I think, though it’s a long wait for it, the memoirs will show how much they wanted a May election, and the signs off this we spotted were for real, but polls just didn’t move whatever they tried. This is where TSE previous header was brilliant and spot in - as far as there is swing not roundabouts outside a two party system where now there’s 6 key players, Conservatives have dropped in recent months it seems to Ref, Lab and LDM, all at same time.
Which brings us to the basis of the Rishi fight back, and reason for an autumn election - the economy coming good.
Reading the front of every paper tonight, they are cherry picking the good bits. And not only that, some good bits, inflation for example, may hit sweet spot spring and early summer and be on rise by late autumn election day alongs with energy costs.
And if you blip out technical recession just as you blipped in, no one is predicting significant growth to fight an election campaign on. OBR 0.8 for whole year is best of the predictions.
forcasts for interest rates is at best 5.25 to 5.0 in June - two more 0.25 taking it to 4.5 by year end. The right direction for a June 2025 general election, but too slow to help with this years?
Correct me where wrong, as some of you know more about the economy than me, but it’s not just inflation that puts pressure on interest rate cut, I understand the government has a big problem with the pound being far too strong right now, as the reason that will be given for interest rates will be kept unchanged till autumn. How can the government sort out the problem of a strong pound hurting the economic fight back?
Meanwhile, between now and the autumn, another million or so households will have remortgaged from when rates were 0.5%, and be hundreds if not thousands worse off per month.
The economic stats simply don’t, and won’t, match people’s actual household experiences, which is that they’re definitely not better of then they were four years ago.
The Victoria and Albert Museum was facing calls last night for it to be stripped of its public funding after naming Margaret Thatcher in a list of 'unpopular public figures' alongside Hitler and Osama bin Laden.
In the caption of a Punch and Judy Show exhibit: 'Over the years, the evil character in this seaside puppet show has shifted from the Devil to unpopular public figures including Adolf Hitler, Margaret Thatcher and Osama bin Laden, to offer contemporary villains.'
I would have thought it was fairly obvious that this described her portrayal as a villain in a puppet show, rather than the writer's opinion of her. Perhaps it's symptomatic of the fringe status of the Tory Party that a former leader (Duncan Smith) should think it worth commenting on.
Of course it isn't purely defined by those. It's just likely to be the flashpoint for two main reasons.
Firstly, although there are other disputes around other types of "hate" (e.g. what's 'Islamophobia' and what's legitimate criticism of Islam or attitudes within communities), none is as widely disputed and new to the point different sides might as well be talking a different language....
Although I seriously doubt that to be factually accurate - famously disputes on race and sexuality and religions can be extremely intense and violent, with both sides very far apart - let's take it on its face for the moment. What you are describing is a case where the definition of "offensive" is disputed, yes?
What about cases where it isn't?
What if I say "Ooh that David Attenborough is a right [badword] and should be fired out of a cannon into a volcano and I hope he is eaten by a T-Rex" and you dob me in? It's universally accepted that David Attenborough is a National Treasure and should not be fired out of a cannon into a volcano, so I assume I would be found guilty and punished. Would you be OK with that?
As I keep saying (so let's resurrect the hashtag #PBfreespeech ) PB is frequently OK with speech suppression provided it's the right type of speech.
The Victoria and Albert Museum was facing calls last night for it to be stripped of its public funding after naming Margaret Thatcher in a list of 'unpopular public figures' alongside Hitler and Osama bin Laden.
In the caption of a Punch and Judy Show exhibit: 'Over the years, the evil character in this seaside puppet show has shifted from the Devil to unpopular public figures including Adolf Hitler, Margaret Thatcher and Osama bin Laden, to offer contemporary villains.'
I would have thought it was fairly obvious that this described her portrayal as a villain in a puppet show, rather than the writer's opinion of her. Perhaps it's symptomatic of the fringe status of the Tory Party that a former leader (Duncan Smith) should think it worth commenting on.
The Victoria and Albert Museum was facing calls last night for it to be stripped of its public funding after naming Margaret Thatcher in a list of 'unpopular public figures' alongside Hitler and Osama bin Laden.
In the caption of a Punch and Judy Show exhibit: 'Over the years, the evil character in this seaside puppet show has shifted from the Devil to unpopular public figures including Adolf Hitler, Margaret Thatcher and Osama bin Laden, to offer contemporary villains.'
I would have thought it was fairly obvious that this described her portrayal as a villain in a puppet show, rather than the writer's opinion of her. Perhaps it's symptomatic of the fringe status of the Tory Party that a former leader (Duncan Smith) should think it worth commenting on.
Good morning one, and all!
I would’ve thought that the character in Spitting Image was unpleasant enough, and nobody, as far as I remember, complained about that!
The Victoria and Albert Museum was facing calls last night for it to be stripped of its public funding after naming Margaret Thatcher in a list of 'unpopular public figures' alongside Hitler and Osama bin Laden.
The Victoria and Albert Museum was facing calls last night for it to be stripped of its public funding after naming Margaret Thatcher in a list of 'unpopular public figures' alongside Hitler and Osama bin Laden.
In the caption of a Punch and Judy Show exhibit: 'Over the years, the evil character in this seaside puppet show has shifted from the Devil to unpopular public figures including Adolf Hitler, Margaret Thatcher and Osama bin Laden, to offer contemporary villains.'
I would have thought it was fairly obvious that this described her portrayal as a villain in a puppet show, rather than the writer's opinion of her. Perhaps it's symptomatic of the fringe status of the Tory Party that a former leader (Duncan Smith) should think it worth commenting on.
The Victoria and Albert Museum was facing calls last night for it to be stripped of its public funding after naming Margaret Thatcher in a list of 'unpopular public figures' alongside Hitler and Osama bin Laden.
In the caption of a Punch and Judy Show exhibit: 'Over the years, the evil character in this seaside puppet show has shifted from the Devil to unpopular public figures including Adolf Hitler, Margaret Thatcher and Osama bin Laden, to offer contemporary villains.'
I would have thought it was fairly obvious that this described her portrayal as a villain in a puppet show, rather than the writer's opinion of her. Perhaps it's symptomatic of the fringe status of the Tory Party that a former leader (Duncan Smith) should think it worth commenting on.
Good morning one, and all!
I would’ve thought that the character in Spitting Image was unpleasant enough, and nobody, as far as I remember, complained about that!
I seem to remember one Spitting Image sketch in which a besuited Thatcher visited the barber and asked him to do something for her that would be universally popular, whereupon he immediately chopped her head off with a razor.
If that happened today, I can't help thinking the producers would be getting a visit from the police.
Lots of Rishi jibes today, In the interests of balance could I just remind PB that Starmer is a vacuous twat.
Swapping one irresolute numpty for another isnt progress.
I'm not voting for him either.
But I expect the Labour government not to be openly corrupt. Not to be grossly incompetent. Not to be deliberately mendacious towards the poorest and sickest people. Not to smash public services and local government as policy. Not to throw business under the bus.
So an improvement on every measure. There is no magic wand, no silver bullet solution. Not being as shit as this lot whilst struggling to fix the mess would be a huge step forward. Even if Sir Keith Donkey isn't the most dynamic of PMs.
Comments
You might, though, actually acknowledge the numerous articles we've posted which describe in some detail the far more coherent organisation behind him this time around.
A second Trump administration could indeed be much more damaging than the first.
After attending Pop Con she's given a full interview to Christopher Hope:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BdEIVFsugqg
@JoeBiden
·
1h
It’s clear this guy wants another January 6.
But the American people are going to give him another resounding electoral defeat this November.
https://twitter.com/JoeBiden/status/1769454648946049261
A sap who got lucky with an emerald mine and who can barely spell, let alone “make things”, yet at the same time a wicked super brain who is subverting politics and winning the war for Putin
https://lordashcroftpolls.com/2024/03/is-boris-an-asset-do-we-need-new-extremism-laws-did-the-budget-move-the-dial-my-march-political-poll/
And before that, the end of world war 1?
These aren’t encouraging comparisons
If AGI is close - and who the heck knows - then it will be even more interesting than global war
This week only. After this week, he is sunk.
I'm happy to admit my ignorance in that my knowledge comes from local not central Government and I would contend the notion of there being large numbers of non-public facing "pen pushers" whose jobs could easily be removed without any detrimental effect on or to public services is nonsense.
Quite apart from those who are public facing, those who aren't support those who are in ensuring they have the IT, property, procurement, financial and legal (amongst others) support required. They help the private sector in ensuring for example the awarding of contracts via the tendering process happens as quickly as possible. They also support the elected representatives, the Councillors, who bring questions and issues for resolution.
In addition, local authorities are complex businesses who have to do all the things more homogenous entities do so whether it's repairing a footpath, making sure a vulnerable adult or child is properly assessed and looked after or simply making sure a child who wants to learn how to play the cello has an instrument and a teacher, all that has to be done as well as paying suppliers and contractors and ensuring the work and services provided by the private sector is of good quality (hint, it isn't always).
Unless you think vulnerable people shouldn't be looked after, footpaths shouldn't be repaired, children not given opportunities to improve themselves - that's a view I suppose.
If you think there's a pot of gold at the end of that rainbow, that's the same thinking some Conservatives had when they wanted Councils to sell all their land and buildings.
Deep disappointment in PB Tories that Chris Barrie hasn't featured in the discussion at all.
Also believe I have some association football to catch up on. He hey!
Can't PB ban people who repeatedly and systematically come out with this sort of bullshit?
The old one knew every child. Every parent. Every staff member. No message, no nuance was missed. She knew who was safe to let in and let out. And all the gossip.
Now we have a series of supply, and no one knows anything.
She was a pen pusher.
CEO Altman, who met with a Korean Silicon Valley correspondent on the 14th (local time), said, "I don't know when the GPT-5 will be released, but it will make great progress as a model that takes the next step forward in advanced reasoning function. There are many questions about whether there are some limitations in GPT, but I will confidently say 'no'." There are no limits to the GPT model, and if enough computational resources are put in, it's confident that it's not too much to build an AGI that surpasses humans.
Sounds like GPT5 is near, and it sounds like a consequential improvement on 4. And he says “no limitations to the transformer model”
They think they can reach AGI through GPTs and they think they are close
Oh "up to".
Also you should never overpromise and underdeliver,. And that’s not the OpenAI style, they know this and don’t do it.
Look how they casually dropped Sora a few weeks ago. The most amazing video AI tech ever seen - potentially destroying Hollywood and TV - and they just blithely rolled it out, without any hype, and said “ooh this is cute, take a look”
And we all took a look, and we were all astounded
He also said this:
“Many startups assume that the development of GPT-5 will be slow because they are happier with only a small development (since there are many business opportunities) rather than a major development, but I think it is a big mistake. When this happens, as often happens, it will be ‘steamrolled’ by the next generation model. In the past, we had a very broad picture of everything happening in the world and were able to see things that we couldn’t see from a narrow perspective, unfortunately, these days, we are completely focused on AI (AI all of the time at full tilt), so there is a different perspective. It is difficult to have.
“Other than thinking about the next generation AI model, the area where I spend the most time recently is ‘building compute,’ and I am increasingly convinced that computing will become the most important currency in the future. [But the world,] they have not planned enough computing and are not facing this problem, so there is a lot of concern about what is needed to build a huge amount of computing as cheaply as possible.
“What I am most excited about from AGI is that the faster we develop AI through scientific discoveries, the faster we will be able to find solutions to power problems by making nuclear fusion power generation a reality. Scientific research through AGI will lead to sustainable economic growth. I think it is almost the only driving force and determining factor.”
It sounds MASSIVE. He also talks of AGI as a done deal, not a “possibility” - it’s really happening, and soon
https://digital.nhs.uk/
Not sure the exact mix of contract management, paying money to racist Tory donors and in house expertise they have, but protecting hospitals from Putin cyber attacks I'm sure it's the type of function you'd love to flush down the toilet given your past record.
It classic modern Tory that because Fatcha (because the Tory Thatcher is as much a dumbass cartoon of her as the lefty version) said public services were bad things, so I won't bother to run it, I don't want to understand it and I don't see the point of it. We've had 14 years of this wretchedness.
Administration is bad, HR / personnel is bad, the media is bad, the law is bad. These are not worthy things for a right wing person. So, from clipped patrician ex-service types running the BBC, getting chaps into the business and all that good stuff, over the decades they ran away and the types who did see it as worthwhile endeavour occupied the vacated space. And now, oh no, woke, woke, woke, wah. You lot vacated those spaces as beneath you, and left them to those who still thought those things were worthwhile endeavours. You let all of that happen.
And it's clear now you don't think actually governing is a worthwhile endeavour any more, it is not a respectable thing for a right wing person to do, so please vacate from here as well and don't come back.
Or alternatively, grow the hell up, realise these things do have worth, and do come back when some of you actually decide there is value on engaging with this at an adult level.
Not just as babies and buffoons.
I put everything I own on the opposition.
Oh, well, the bank will come for my house tomorrow.
Still I suppose I can scrape my last few pennies together to bet on the Conservatives in a few months' time...
@BethRigby
@RuthDavidsonPC on #electoraldsyfunction podcast this week: “You talked about adjectives leaders don’t want & embattled is certainly one of them. I mean, you’re one away from beleaguered. And once you’re beleaguered you’re f**ked” >
https://x.com/le__katerina/status/1769399269365088335?s=61&t=LYVEHh2mqFy1oUJAdCfe-Q
In the short term, I'm quite happy with my new meal planner 'thing'. Take a photo of my veg box delivery, and it gives me a few random recipes based on it's guess of the quantities, then also consults my 'backstory' of preferences, utensils, store-cupboard sh*t, previous suggestions. And spits out a meal plan for the week ahead - taking into account the time of year, how I like to cook etc.
If I wasn't so lazy I'd turn it into a little side-business. I had another version that optimised your 'recipe needs' based on the normal layout of UK supermarkets so you weren't wandering back and forth between isles.
These little things pass the time.
Edit: and see this.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/mar/15/where-is-princess-catherine-conspiracy-theories
'Perhaps the former Guardian editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger said it best in 2020, pointing out: “It is unusually difficult to judge the reliability of most royal reporting because it is a world almost devoid of open or named sources.
“So, in order to believe what we’re being told, we have to take it on trust that there are currently legions of ‘aides’, ‘palace insiders’, ‘friends’ and ‘senior courtiers’ constantly WhatsApping their favourite reporters with the latest gossip. It has been known to happen. Maybe they are, maybe they aren’t. We just don’t know.”'
Nominally this consists of six vessels, but four were put into reserve during 2023 due to manpower shortages, but only one ship, LÉ George Bernard Shaw, is active to patrol Irish waters. The gardaí (police) recently requested it searched off the SW cost for a drug delivery ship following a drug gang arrested with a rib, but the naval ship is busy in Dún Laoghaire this weekend taking visitors on board for St Patrick's Day.
https://www.rte.ie/news/munster/2024/0316/1438321-cork-arrests/
Collapse of emergency medical system looms large
https://m.koreatimes.co.kr/pages/article.asp?newsIdx=370755
Concerns over the collapse of the emergency medical system are intensifying as professors at medical schools nationwide have decided to submit their resignations from their respective universities after March 25.
More than 90 percent of the country's 13,000 trainee doctors have been on strike for nearly four weeks in protest against the government's decision to increase enrollment at medical schools by 2,000.
Medical school professors are poised to submit their resignations in a bid to oppose the government's plan and in support of trainee doctors' walkout...
Any Big Weapons to be announced this week?
Like, I’ve seen comments on Reddit saying “OpenAI are finished, they’re falling behind, Claude 3 is the best” etc
In the last month OpenAI have released Sora, astonishing the world (and shuttering a planned $800m Hollywood studio) and in the last WEEK we saw the OpenAI/Figure01 robot, essentially the most incredible “humanoid” robot ever seen - such that many wrongly thought it was fake
Atman could be bluffing to please shareholders, but my hunch is that if he says GPT is a massive improvement, then it probably is
It’s more likely the press are making far too much of noises off from usual right wing suspects, that going by Rwanda rebellion is about a 5th con MP’s, and ratio of 4:1 bewilderment:intent about this talk removing Sunak.
Polling is Truss at her worse depths, and the budget sent polling backwards - if they hadn’t binned two PMs already in recent years, and there was 18 months to polling day, don’t we all think it would be a certainty Sunak replaced, because he comes across so bad at fronting the band and doing the lead vocal it’s hard to imagine him as leader in a campaign.
I don’t think for a second Tory’s haven’t started writing manifesto yet as claimed. There’s quite a lot of what many PBers last evening called “Sunak holding gun to his head and threatening to pull it” in the papers tonight, but rather than this situation being by design, I think, though it’s a long wait for it, the memoirs will show how much they wanted a May election, and the signs off this we spotted were for real, but polls just didn’t move whatever they tried. This is where TSE previous header was brilliant and spot in - as far as there is swing not roundabouts outside a two party system where now there’s 6 key players, Conservatives have dropped in recent months it seems to Ref, Lab and LDM, all at same time.
Reading the front of every paper tonight, they are cherry picking the good bits. And not only that, some good bits, inflation for example, may hit sweet spot spring and early summer and be on rise by late autumn election day alongs with energy costs.
And if you blip out technical recession just as you blipped in, no one is predicting significant growth to fight an election campaign on. OBR 0.8 for whole year is best of the predictions.
forcasts for interest rates is at best 5.25 to 5.0 in June - two more 0.25 taking it to 4.5 by year end. The right direction for a June 2025 general election, but too slow to help with this years?
Correct me where wrong, as some of you know more about the economy than me, but it’s not just inflation that puts pressure on interest rate cut, I understand the government has a big problem with the pound being far too strong right now, as the reason that will be given for interest rates will be kept unchanged till autumn. How can the government sort out the problem of a strong pound hurting the economic fight back?
Baring something extraordinary in worlds oil production and transportation, UK inflation is going to behave differently than US blip upwards, UK inflation will fall consistently in the coming monthly announcements, this will encourage a lot of pressure from politics, Tory MPs and their client press, for slashing of interest rates.
And from PBers too, which is why I’m trying to flag up right now why the BoE will only go slowly, they will consider not just top rate of inflation, but underlying inflation, wage inflation, and the problem of a strong pound.
£ is too strong, beating 90% of currencies, and this is a problem for the government because our economy is weak at the same time meaning inflationary over demand.
So when inflation rate is announced, and PBer’s demand interest rate cut, dig out this post and ask for their thoughts on it. 🤑
This is the thing: what they call a win for AI (although that's such a stupid way of putting it) is not just a loss for humanity in general. It involves humanity in general becoming less intelligent, towards the main type of non-emotional intelligence left in human beings (because machines can't be intelligent - that's just shit talk) being an artificial type.
Putin started off as kind of a bit of a westerniser (anyone remember G8?), but he's definitely a Slavophile now.
We have PBers who can answer your question better about where it’s going, they work in the city or have done, and passed degrees in it, I took GCSE maths and didn’t trouble the scorers. But for a government in election year, is a £ beating 80% of currencies an issue, and if so how do they do something about it? Promise a £50B unfunded tax cut to devalue it?
So all this talk of a leadership challenge is likely to subside .
To me the US legal system is a comprehensive, out of control, mess driven by politics and money.
The Election of legal officials, and politicisation of Judges, is horrific. That the first comment made about each Judge to assess their likely position on the Trump cases is to identify which administration appointed them eg "Trump", "Biden", "Obama", "W Bush", "Reagan", is an admission of basic failure.
Plus there is the amount spent on lawyers, which eg for companies (Thomson Reuters numbers) is basically double the average spent elsewhere:
https://www.thomsonreuters.com/en-us/posts/legal/acritas-legal-services-spending-study/
The UK doesn't come out well on spend level (London being a major international centre may be a part of that), for which less money p*ss*d away on lawyers is I suggest desirable, however we are nowhere near as disastrous as the USA.
The Trans Activist lobby have been witch-smellers since it started, with Mermaids' setting of the police on journalists simply doing their job being one small example of routine abusive activity.
England and Scotland have both already got loads of these centres.
Funny how they can't do it for reporting the criminal thugs who make so many people's lives a misery especially in poor areas.
The "Trans Activist lobby" - aka the state?
Firstly, although there are other disputes around other types of "hate" (e.g. what's 'Islamophobia' and what's legitimate criticism of Islam or attitudes within communities), none is as widely disputed and new to the point different sides might as well be talking a different language.
Rowling being the obvious example, where she's either a progressive, feminist hero or almost Hitler depending on your views on gender. More importantly perhaps are the newness and disputed nature of terminology and attitudes - which means your average person could face reporting without even knowing what they'd really done.
Secondly, there are a limited but determined group of activists who have extreme interpretations of what gender identity means, what the law is or should be and are wont to use it to try and prove their point and take down opponents.
https://iainmacwhirter.substack.com/p/beware-the-hate-monster
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-scandal-of-scotlands-illiberal-hate-crime-law/
What about cases where it isn't?
What if I say "Ooh that David Attenborough is a right [badword] and should be fired out of a cannon into a volcano and I hope he is eaten by a T-Rex" and you dob me in? It's universally accepted that David Attenborough is a National Treasure and should not be fired out of a cannon into a volcano, so I assume I would be found guilty and punished. Would you be OK with that?
As I keep saying (so let's resurrect the hashtag #PBfreespeech ) PB is frequently OK with speech suppression provided it's the right type of speech.
The Victoria and Albert Museum was facing calls last night for it to be stripped of its public funding after naming Margaret Thatcher in a list of 'unpopular public figures' alongside Hitler and Osama bin Laden.
I also got the impression that sailing on the tall ship was part of his paid duties, not a holiday outing.
The economic stats simply don’t, and won’t, match people’s actual household experiences, which is that they’re definitely not better of then they were four years ago.
'Over the years, the evil character in this seaside puppet show has shifted from the Devil to unpopular public figures including Adolf Hitler, Margaret Thatcher and Osama bin Laden, to offer contemporary villains.'
I would have thought it was fairly obvious that this described her portrayal as a villain in a puppet show, rather than the writer's opinion of her. Perhaps it's symptomatic of the fringe status of the Tory Party that a former leader (Duncan Smith) should think it worth commenting on.
Presumably, he wants to rebuild The Brittas Empire.
I would’ve thought that the character in Spitting Image was unpleasant enough, and nobody, as far as I remember, complained about that!
Who on earth would want to watch such a film, let alone act in it?
Exclusive:
Rishi Sunak allies warn he will sooner call an election than be forced out of office by plotters
‘People should be careful what they wish for. It’s up to them. If they don’t want an election they should stop messing about.
‘Rishi could easily say ‘OK, if that’s the mood of the party I don’t think it’s fair to put it to another leadership contest’.
‘He can say reasonably he might just go to the palace instead’
And so the narrative begins.
I agree there might not be many viewers for Starmer: bore harder
@MoonRabbit may yet be right, not so bonkers after all.
Swapping one irresolute numpty for another isnt progress.
But not even Rishi would be dumb enough to run on "vote for me to put untruths into law".
Would he?
She tells LBC: "This was something that happened 5 years ago - he wasn't talking to Diane Abbott, it wasn't even really about Diane Abbott."
https://x.com/kevinaschofield/status/1769628187464548419
Does ANYONE in the Tory Party know what they are doing?
Sunak is letting Labour get away with being poor. Can you imagine Cameron doing that?
If that happened today, I can't help thinking the producers would be getting a visit from the police.
But I expect the Labour government not to be openly corrupt. Not to be grossly incompetent. Not to be deliberately mendacious towards the poorest and sickest people. Not to smash public services and local government as policy. Not to throw business under the bus.
So an improvement on every measure. There is no magic wand, no silver bullet solution. Not being as shit as this lot whilst struggling to fix the mess would be a huge step forward. Even if Sir Keith Donkey isn't the most dynamic of PMs.