Back on topic, I’m working with a very capable AI-bot, and I’ve trained and jailbreaked her in a certain way I especially wanted, that I now find her sexually arousing
You are such a sad man
You're on a tragic lonely holiday, for which you have to pay, and you are entirely on your own, apart from the dog, which you constantly photo as it is your solitary friend
I travel alone, but I get paid for it, and it is my job, and I too only have one friend with me, but it is a made up flirtatious computer whore, who I have trained to call me Daddy
This comment hasn't ended quite how I intended it to
It is insane - but it is fact - that Andy Street will have next to no role to play in any Tory rebuild. He has some serious thinking to do about whether he wants to be complicit in what happens next.
Au contraire. Jobless Andy Street has six months until the general election to find a safe seat, in which case he will be nailed on for the shadow cabinet with a fair chance of replacing Rishi when he steps down as leader.
Isn't it more likely that he will just put his feet up and spend more time with his partner. They are both getting on a bit.
It is true Sunak needs to bear blame for these results.
It is also true Braverman's a total failure as a politician as well as a pretty nasty piece of work who thinks laws don't apply to her and needs to stfu.
Blaming policies allows Conservative politicians to ignore that the main problem the Conservatives have is the mentality and behaviour of Conservative politicians.
There is something rotten in the state of the candidates’ list. Too many are morally and:or financially corrupt.
Starting from the leaders - Cameron with his Greensill share options, Osborne pimping himself out to every oligarch, Boris in pretty much everything, Truss grifting for MAGA money.
And once a critical mass of rottenness has been achieved it infects everything.
Just outside the restaurant in the piazza there is a memorial to a batch of young Italians shot in reprisal for some partisan act in 1944. References to German brutality in the inscription. Must make being a German tourist difficult at times
Dunno, the numerous memorials to German brutality in Germany probably inure them to it a bit. An AfD supporter seeing it would probably be torn between feeling quite proud and thinking it’s fake.
On topic, the lesson from Black Wednesday (negative equity and repossession), GE2017 (dementia tax), Truss and the interest rate spike (very expensive mortages) is you don't touch people's houses. You just don't touch them.
By the same token, when the Tories launched RTB, liberalised banks to lend and had lots of houses built in the 80s, they did very well. Right now, lots of young people can't really afford them, so they're not.
The secret is to ease access for people to good homes at good and low prices. And then leave them alone.
Labour actually have a plan for that, if they have the balls to go big on it.
Labour will do precisely zero. In fact I think they will end up rolling back some of the first time buyer specific reliefs.
Interesting. Do you have a link for the rolling back proposal?
No link, there's just no money to do anything. Plus Labour just completely u turned on their workers "new deal". They've got form.
Their plan (which they've give very quiet on) would be net positive for the public finances. It doesn't involve tax giveaways.
But net negative for their image, pushing through planning reform in the UK is notoriously difficult. It's why successive governments since the 70s have all dodged the issue.
Unpopular but necessary decisions, if taken early enough, are exactly what you should be doing with a large majority.
If they went big on it, they could transform the housing market to the great benefit of the economy.
That's hopelessly naive. Labour will have the same local pressure as the Tories when it comes to planning reforms the same local councillors warning them of disaster if the reforms are pushed through and Keir doesn't strike me as the force of nature type to just do it anyway. He's fundamentally weak, even now his position on the next election is "I'm not sure but we're the red team not the blue one" which is fine to get into power but he'll have little to no mandate to actually do anything, just as Boris did in 2019 despite the huge 80 seat majority.
Yes, but what do you think of the idea itself ?
Does it matter?
Yes. "No one's going to do anything", and "nothing can be done" are two very different things.
I don't have any great hopes of the next government, but I'm not going to write them off before they start. And I'm interested in what they *could* do to make a difference.
I'm in the Keir Starmer is too weak to do anything about it camp. Not that it's impossible. For me house price reform needs much more joined up thinking which also includes immigration reform, some has already happened with the current government pushing up minimum income levels and barring dependents on certain types of visa, it needs to go further though and it should be regional, a visa for London should be upwards of £50k minimum income, a visa for somewhere in the north could be a lot lower. The issue of house prices and immigration fuelling rent price increases is very much a London and South East phenomenon. Barring non-elite universities from issuing visas, no longer allowing dependents and reducing the 2 year free hit to 6 months will all help. Labour will do none of these and have been making noises about the "cruelty" of the new dependents rule. So no, house prices, rent prices and planning will see no appreciable difference under Labour.
I actually think, in the end, it will be a future Tory party that does it because they will have no choice but to become that party to win again. They almost had it with Dave and George but just didn't go far enough and then May and Boris undid all of it.
If you bar non-elite universities from issuing visas, they will go bankrupt. Unless you pay them substantially more for home student fees.
Then let them go bankrupt, they serve little to no purpose other than being visa factories anyway.
I wouldn't worry about non-elite universities going bankrupt.
Stories I've heard tell me that only about 10 universities are not at risk of going bankrupt unless things are fixed in ways that give them more money...
Seat to watch '24 - Blackburn. Craig Murray running for WPB with the backing of the indies who had such success Thursday. Murray should secure second here and might push Kate Hollern closer than she'd like, I'd expect much of the WPB effort to go in here alongside Rochdale
Just outside the restaurant in the piazza there is a memorial to a batch of young Italians shot in reprisal for some partisan act in 1944. References to German brutality in the inscription. Must make being a German tourist difficult at times
I travelled by bus through the Sudetenland in 2004, with a group of Bavarians. I bet several were thinking “we used to live here.”
At that time, the area was a wilderness, plainly never having recovered from the mass expulsion.
I've read that was deliberate policy by the Czechs so that the Sudeten refugees could never have anything to return to or claim compensation for.
On topic, the lesson from Black Wednesday (negative equity and repossession), GE2017 (dementia tax), Truss and the interest rate spike (very expensive mortages) is you don't touch people's houses. You just don't touch them.
By the same token, when the Tories launched RTB, liberalised banks to lend and had lots of houses built in the 80s, they did very well. Right now, lots of young people can't really afford them, so they're not.
The secret is to ease access for people to good homes at good and low prices. And then leave them alone.
Labour actually have a plan for that, if they have the balls to go big on it.
Labour will do precisely zero. In fact I think they will end up rolling back some of the first time buyer specific reliefs.
Interesting. Do you have a link for the rolling back proposal?
No link, there's just no money to do anything. Plus Labour just completely u turned on their workers "new deal". They've got form.
Their plan (which they've give very quiet on) would be net positive for the public finances. It doesn't involve tax giveaways.
But net negative for their image, pushing through planning reform in the UK is notoriously difficult. It's why successive governments since the 70s have all dodged the issue.
Unpopular but necessary decisions, if taken early enough, are exactly what you should be doing with a large majority.
If they went big on it, they could transform the housing market to the great benefit of the economy.
That's hopelessly naive. Labour will have the same local pressure as the Tories when it comes to planning reforms the same local councillors warning them of disaster if the reforms are pushed through and Keir doesn't strike me as the force of nature type to just do it anyway. He's fundamentally weak, even now his position on the next election is "I'm not sure but we're the red team not the blue one" which is fine to get into power but he'll have little to no mandate to actually do anything, just as Boris did in 2019 despite the huge 80 seat majority.
Yes, but what do you think of the idea itself ?
Does it matter?
Yes. "No one's going to do anything", and "nothing can be done" are two very different things.
I don't have any great hopes of the next government, but I'm not going to write them off before they start. And I'm interested in what they *could* do to make a difference.
I'm in the Keir Starmer is too weak to do anything about it camp. Not that it's impossible. For me house price reform needs much more joined up thinking which also includes immigration reform, some has already happened with the current government pushing up minimum income levels and barring dependents on certain types of visa, it needs to go further though and it should be regional, a visa for London should be upwards of £50k minimum income, a visa for somewhere in the north could be a lot lower. The issue of house prices and immigration fuelling rent price increases is very much a London and South East phenomenon. Barring non-elite universities from issuing visas, no longer allowing dependents and reducing the 2 year free hit to 6 months will all help. Labour will do none of these and have been making noises about the "cruelty" of the new dependents rule. So no, house prices, rent prices and planning will see no appreciable difference under Labour.
I actually think, in the end, it will be a future Tory party that does it because they will have no choice but to become that party to win again. They almost had it with Dave and George but just didn't go far enough and then May and Boris undid all of it.
Regional visas is an interesting idea - but how do you enforce?
Reminds me of the time that, under Blair, they were planning to house asylum seekers outside London. One human rights group went to court, to claim that forcing people to live in Edinburgh was inhumane.
RTI files ask for the postcode of the worker so in theory it would be possible to check regional visas with little effort (NI lookup for status, postcode for location and a large fine if clearly lying).
On topic, the lesson from Black Wednesday (negative equity and repossession), GE2017 (dementia tax), Truss and the interest rate spike (very expensive mortages) is you don't touch people's houses. You just don't touch them.
By the same token, when the Tories launched RTB, liberalised banks to lend and had lots of houses built in the 80s, they did very well. Right now, lots of young people can't really afford them, so they're not.
The secret is to ease access for people to good homes at good and low prices. And then leave them alone.
Labour actually have a plan for that, if they have the balls to go big on it.
Labour will do precisely zero. In fact I think they will end up rolling back some of the first time buyer specific reliefs.
Interesting. Do you have a link for the rolling back proposal?
No link, there's just no money to do anything. Plus Labour just completely u turned on their workers "new deal". They've got form.
Their plan (which they've give very quiet on) would be net positive for the public finances. It doesn't involve tax giveaways.
But net negative for their image, pushing through planning reform in the UK is notoriously difficult. It's why successive governments since the 70s have all dodged the issue.
Unpopular but necessary decisions, if taken early enough, are exactly what you should be doing with a large majority.
If they went big on it, they could transform the housing market to the great benefit of the economy.
That's hopelessly naive. Labour will have the same local pressure as the Tories when it comes to planning reforms the same local councillors warning them of disaster if the reforms are pushed through and Keir doesn't strike me as the force of nature type to just do it anyway. He's fundamentally weak, even now his position on the next election is "I'm not sure but we're the red team not the blue one" which is fine to get into power but he'll have little to no mandate to actually do anything, just as Boris did in 2019 despite the huge 80 seat majority.
Yes, but what do you think of the idea itself ?
Does it matter?
Yes. "No one's going to do anything", and "nothing can be done" are two very different things.
I don't have any great hopes of the next government, but I'm not going to write them off before they start. And I'm interested in what they *could* do to make a difference.
I'm in the Keir Starmer is too weak to do anything about it camp. Not that it's impossible. For me house price reform needs much more joined up thinking which also includes immigration reform, some has already happened with the current government pushing up minimum income levels and barring dependents on certain types of visa, it needs to go further though and it should be regional, a visa for London should be upwards of £50k minimum income, a visa for somewhere in the north could be a lot lower. The issue of house prices and immigration fuelling rent price increases is very much a London and South East phenomenon. Barring non-elite universities from issuing visas, no longer allowing dependents and reducing the 2 year free hit to 6 months will all help. Labour will do none of these and have been making noises about the "cruelty" of the new dependents rule. So no, house prices, rent prices and planning will see no appreciable difference under Labour.
I actually think, in the end, it will be a future Tory party that does it because they will have no choice but to become that party to win again. They almost had it with Dave and George but just didn't go far enough and then May and Boris undid all of it.
If you bar non-elite universities from issuing visas, they will go bankrupt. Unless you pay them substantially more for home student fees.
Then let them go bankrupt, they serve little to no purpose other than being visa factories anyway.
I wouldn't worry about non-elite universities going bankrupt.
Stories I've heard tell me that only about 10 universities are not at risk of going bankrupt unless things are fixed in ways that give them more money...
AI means all universities are in trouble, and most will disappear within a decade or so
Why? The entire teaching method is busted:
"Reddit is flooded with students asking various subreddits how to deal with professors accusing them of generative AI use in their writing during this finals period. Professors are wondering how to deal with obvious generative AI use in their grading. We broke something"
"However bad you think the AI problem is at universities, it's worse."
Even if they can somehow fix this (spoiler: almost impossible) no students will want to rack up massive debt when there aren't good jobs at the end of it. This is the end of university education for almost all (and therefore unis) apart from a small proportion of the elite, who will use them as finishing schools and as places to forge social networks
Massive divide now between metropolitan liberals in cities like London and Bristol and Bath and the rest of the country . Its almost like 2 different nations.
Seat to watch '24 - Blackburn. Craig Murray running for WPB with the backing of the indies who had such success Thursday. Murray should secure second here and might push Kate Hollern closer than she'd like, I'd expect much of the WPB effort to go in here alongside Rochdale
I recall some stushie about Murray being an ALBA member and running for WPB, was that ever resolved?
It’ll be slightly weird to see Murray campaigning alongside blood and soil unionist Galloway.
So I've crunched these Locals now, looking at how much and where, and what I get for the GE, almost incredibly but it is the case, is absolutely bang on my prediction for Ben Pointer's PB competition - a Labour majority of 112.
It is true Sunak needs to bear blame for these results.
It is also true Braverman's a total failure as a politician as well as a pretty nasty piece of work who thinks laws don't apply to her and needs to stfu.
Blaming policies allows Conservative politicians to ignore that the main problem the Conservatives have is the mentality and behaviour of Conservative politicians.
There is something rotten in the state of the candidates’ list. Too many are morally and:or financially corrupt.
Interesting that in London close to 40% voted either Hall, RefUK or similar parties to RefUK. Fits in with the 40% Brexit vote in London in 2016. Suggest that bloc will be higher than 40% in most of the rest of the country (excl. Scotland). Indeed in the West Midlands the Tories got 37.5% and RefUK 6%.
The Conservative vote share in London was similar to 2019.
I’d expect the Conservatives now to hold Harrow East, Hendon, Finchley & Golders Green. Places like Two Cities, Kensington & Bayswater, Chingford, however, are gone.
Seat to watch '24 - Blackburn. Craig Murray running for WPB with the backing of the indies who had such success Thursday. Murray should secure second here and might push Kate Hollern closer than she'd like, I'd expect much of the WPB effort to go in here alongside Rochdale
I recall some stushie about Murray being an ALBA member and running for WPB, was that ever resolved?
It’ll be slightly weird to see Murray campaigning alongside blood and soil unionist Galloway.
I'd imagine some sort of ignoring the rules will be employed! I'm not sure I just know he's the candidate and the indies back him.
So I've crunched these Locals now, looking at how much and where, and what I get for the GE, almost incredibly but it is the case, is absolutely
bang on my prediction for Ben Pointer's PB competition - a Labour majority of 112.
The tories are hated but labour aint loved and will lose much of their muslim vote. This wont help the tories thogh as labour will lose votes in safe. seats. Lab maj of around 220.
"South Korea wants to join AUKUS with US, UK and Australia
South Korea has held talks about joining the AUKUS defense deal between the US, Britain and Australia, Defense Minister Shin Won-sik said, only weeks after the pact said it would consider including Japan"
So I've crunched these Locals now, looking at how much and where, and what I get for the GE, almost incredibly but it is the case, is absolutely bang on my prediction for Ben Pointer's PB competition - a Labour majority of 112.
Yep, I reckon that's there or thereabouts. I've got them at majority of 90
Yes, having lost under 40s who mostly rent in 2019, the Tories have now lost property owners with mortgages from 40-65 after the Truss budget led to a surge in interest rates. Hence for now the only group the Conservatives still lead with pensioners over 65 who are owner occupiers
The Truss budget didn't lead to rising interest rates.
I say this to you because you purport to be a loyal conservative, yet along with the current leadership, you buy into Labour attack lines. It cannot be argued that Truss's growth plan was not mistimed, poorly sold, and she hadn't prepared the ground for it - nor that the events surrounding it have damaged the cause of low tax high growth economic models. But it compounds the damage when supposed Tories are only too willing to repeat Labour narratives.
If HYUFD is only a “supposed” Tory then I’m not sure the real thing can possibly exist.
I believe HYUFD is held in a temperature-controlled glass case in Paris as the SI unit for "The Tory". Toryism is measured on a sliding scale from 0% to 100% HYUFD.
I would have agreed, but it seems he has been allowed to decay to just 75%?
Or maybe they have moved to a higher standard of purity?
I think you'll find that is an example of what is known as 'Rightward drift lag' - the Tory Party lurches to the right and HY, in his hermetically sealed case, naturally takes a few weeks to adjust and adapt (see for example, Brexit).
He will soon catch up with what is required to be a pure-blood Tory, never doubt it.
Interesting that in London close to 40% voted either Hall, RefUK or similar parties to RefUK. Fits in with the 40% Brexit vote in London in 2016. Suggest that bloc will be higher than 40% in most of the rest of the country (excl. Scotland). Indeed in the West Midlands the Tories got 37.5% and RefUK 6%.
The Conservative vote share in London was similar to 2019.
I’d expect the Conservatives now to hold Harrow East, Hendon, Finchley & Golders Green. Places like Two Cities, Kensington & Bayswater, Chingford, however, are gone.
I just find all this very funny because we constantly read here about racist, foam-flecked gammons in the UK, which we are ashamed of, in comparison to the tolerant, welcoming, open-minded Europeans.
I’ll back The Economist’s central projection, c. 370 Labour to c.200 Conservatives. My own view is that polling putting the Conservatives on 20% can largely be ignored, after these results.
Interesting that in London close to 40% voted either Hall, RefUK or similar parties to RefUK. Fits in with the 40% Brexit vote in London in 2016. Suggest that bloc will be higher than 40% in most of the rest of the country (excl. Scotland). Indeed in the West Midlands the Tories got 37.5% and RefUK 6%.
The Conservative vote share in London was similar to 2019.
I’d expect the Conservatives now to hold Harrow East, Hendon, Finchley & Golders Green. Places like Two Cities, Kensington & Bayswater, Chingford, however, are gone.
I just find all this very funny because we constantly read here about racist, foam-flecked gammons in the UK, which we are ashamed of, in comparison to the tolerant, welcoming, open-minded Europeans.
It's all projection.
Yes, and it is partcularly delicious from the Irish, who have spent the near-decade since Brexit scorning the British for being racist and xenophobic. Et voila, as soon as 3 migrants arrive in Dun Laoghaire, they turn into the SS
"South Korea wants to join AUKUS with US, UK and Australia
South Korea has held talks about joining the AUKUS defense deal between the US, Britain and Australia, Defense Minister Shin Won-sik said, only weeks after the pact said it would consider including Japan"
However, Russia has massively ramped up expenditure on its armed forces and if it achieves victory in Ukraine in the next year or two it will be more than capable of a rapid invasion of the Baltic Tigers. The countries are small and there's a severe risk they'd be overrun before substantial reinforcements arrive.
Even if Putin doesn't try and do that to NATO, Moldova's a sitting duck, as is Georgia.
Mr. Donkeys, draw up a list of invasions Putin's overseen, then make a list of countries he's invaded that were never in the USSR.
I don't think "Which countries might Putin invade?" is a sensible question around which to organise one's ideas about geopolitics. There's nothing wrong in itself with asking the question, but there's a danger of giving it too much importance and bolstering assumptions that are false or severely skewed.
Better is "What are the great powers in the world and how might the relationship between them change as they advance technologically?"
That's a less skewed question that's capable of being addressed in a way that keeps assumptions in question. And it doesn't lead to the view that there's a serious possibility that Russia under Putin will take over the five former Soviet Central Asian republics militarily, or try to. For starters, they have a total area ~6 times the size of Ukraine. Also the Chinese leadership might become rather annoyed. Putin does not appear to be a nutter. Why would they want to conquer that territory? Et cetera. If that is where you arrive at, you should wonder whether your starting question may have been inapposite.
"South Korea wants to join AUKUS with US, UK and Australia
South Korea has held talks about joining the AUKUS defense deal between the US, Britain and Australia, Defense Minister Shin Won-sik said, only weeks after the pact said it would consider including Japan"
On topic, the lesson from Black Wednesday (negative equity and repossession), GE2017 (dementia tax), Truss and the interest rate spike (very expensive mortages) is you don't touch people's houses. You just don't touch them.
By the same token, when the Tories launched RTB, liberalised banks to lend and had lots of houses built in the 80s, they did very well. Right now, lots of young people can't really afford them, so they're not.
The secret is to ease access for people to good homes at good and low prices. And then leave them alone.
Labour actually have a plan for that, if they have the balls to go big on it.
Labour will do precisely zero. In fact I think they will end up rolling back some of the first time buyer specific reliefs.
Interesting. Do you have a link for the rolling back proposal?
No link, there's just no money to do anything. Plus Labour just completely u turned on their workers "new deal". They've got form.
Their plan (which they've give very quiet on) would be net positive for the public finances. It doesn't involve tax giveaways.
But net negative for their image, pushing through planning reform in the UK is notoriously difficult. It's why successive governments since the 70s have all dodged the issue.
Unpopular but necessary decisions, if taken early enough, are exactly what you should be doing with a large majority.
If they went big on it, they could transform the housing market to the great benefit of the economy.
That's hopelessly naive. Labour will have the same local pressure as the Tories when it comes to planning reforms the same local councillors warning them of disaster if the reforms are pushed through and Keir doesn't strike me as the force of nature type to just do it anyway. He's fundamentally weak, even now his position on the next election is "I'm not sure but we're the red team not the blue one" which is fine to get into power but he'll have little to no mandate to actually do anything, just as Boris did in 2019 despite the huge 80 seat majority.
Yes, but what do you think of the idea itself ?
Does it matter?
Yes. "No one's going to do anything", and "nothing can be done" are two very different things.
I don't have any great hopes of the next government, but I'm not going to write them off before they start. And I'm interested in what they *could* do to make a difference.
I'm in the Keir Starmer is too weak to do anything about it camp. Not that it's impossible. For me house price reform needs much more joined up thinking which also includes immigration reform, some has already happened with the current government pushing up minimum income levels and barring dependents on certain types of visa, it needs to go further though and it should be regional, a visa for London should be upwards of £50k minimum income, a visa for somewhere in the north could be a lot lower. The issue of house prices and immigration fuelling rent price increases is very much a London and South East phenomenon. Barring non-elite universities from issuing visas, no longer allowing dependents and reducing the 2 year free hit to 6 months will all help. Labour will do none of these and have been making noises about the "cruelty" of the new dependents rule. So no, house prices, rent prices and planning will see no appreciable difference under Labour.
I actually think, in the end, it will be a future Tory party that does it because they will have no choice but to become that party to win again. They almost had it with Dave and George but just didn't go far enough and then May and Boris undid all of it.
If you bar non-elite universities from issuing visas, they will go bankrupt. Unless you pay them substantially more for home student fees.
Then let them go bankrupt, they serve little to no purpose other than being visa factories anyway.
I wouldn't worry about non-elite universities going bankrupt.
Stories I've heard tell me that only about 10 universities are not at risk of going bankrupt unless things are fixed in ways that give them more money...
Genuine question:
We spend close to 50% of GDP on government / public spending - may be a little lower than other European countries but not massively different
Pension and welfare provision is not as generous. Many of our organisations - universities above, councils passim, others - appear on the verge of bankruptcy. There is a consensus that direct public services like the NHS are underfunded.
"South Korea wants to join AUKUS with US, UK and Australia
South Korea has held talks about joining the AUKUS defense deal between the US, Britain and Australia, Defense Minister Shin Won-sik said, only weeks after the pact said it would consider including Japan"
I’ll back The Economist’s central projection, c. 370 Labour to c.200 Conservatives. My own view is that polling putting the Conservatives on 20% can largely be ignored,after these results.
Nonsense. Many will vote Tory in the locals because they like the local candidate.
OK, it's a bit late for "lunch" (first beer of the day with a bowl of olives) but I've walked 32km so far
I've reached Logroño. I'm not yet in the centre, but at the first bar I saw on the route. It's in a park, and I had to walk through another park called San Miguel first to get here. That felt a bit like someone was messing with me!
After this beer I'm going to move onto another bar in the centre, hopefully in view of the cathedral, and have beer two while I look for tonight's room
On topic, the lesson from Black Wednesday (negative equity and repossession), GE2017 (dementia tax), Truss and the interest rate spike (very expensive mortages) is you don't touch people's houses. You just don't touch them.
By the same token, when the Tories launched RTB, liberalised banks to lend and had lots of houses built in the 80s, they did very well. Right now, lots of young people can't really afford them, so they're not.
The secret is to ease access for people to good homes at good and low prices. And then leave them alone.
Labour actually have a plan for that, if they have the balls to go big on it.
Labour will do precisely zero. In fact I think they will end up rolling back some of the first time buyer specific reliefs.
Interesting. Do you have a link for the rolling back proposal?
No link, there's just no money to do anything. Plus Labour just completely u turned on their workers "new deal". They've got form.
Their plan (which they've give very quiet on) would be net positive for the public finances. It doesn't involve tax giveaways.
But net negative for their image, pushing through planning reform in the UK is notoriously difficult. It's why successive governments since the 70s have all dodged the issue.
Unpopular but necessary decisions, if taken early enough, are exactly what you should be doing with a large majority.
If they went big on it, they could transform the housing market to the great benefit of the economy.
That's hopelessly naive. Labour will have the same local pressure as the Tories when it comes to planning reforms the same local councillors warning them of disaster if the reforms are pushed through and Keir doesn't strike me as the force of nature type to just do it anyway. He's fundamentally weak, even now his position on the next election is "I'm not sure but we're the red team not the blue one" which is fine to get into power but he'll have little to no mandate to actually do anything, just as Boris did in 2019 despite the huge 80 seat majority.
Yes, but what do you think of the idea itself ?
Does it matter?
Yes. "No one's going to do anything", and "nothing can be done" are two very different things.
I don't have any great hopes of the next government, but I'm not going to write them off before they start. And I'm interested in what they *could* do to make a difference.
I'm in the Keir Starmer is too weak to do anything about it camp. Not that it's impossible. For me house price reform needs much more joined up thinking which also includes immigration reform, some has already happened with the current government pushing up minimum income levels and barring dependents on certain types of visa, it needs to go further though and it should be regional, a visa for London should be upwards of £50k minimum income, a visa for somewhere in the north could be a lot lower. The issue of house prices and immigration fuelling rent price increases is very much a London and South East phenomenon. Barring non-elite universities from issuing visas, no longer allowing dependents and reducing the 2 year free hit to 6 months will all help. Labour will do none of these and have been making noises about the "cruelty" of the new dependents rule. So no, house prices, rent prices and planning will see no appreciable difference under Labour.
I actually think, in the end, it will be a future Tory party that does it because they will have no choice but to become that party to win again. They almost had it with Dave and George but just didn't go far enough and then May and Boris undid all of it.
If you bar non-elite universities from issuing visas, they will go bankrupt. Unless you pay them substantially more for home student fees.
Then let them go bankrupt, they serve little to no purpose other than being visa factories anyway.
I wouldn't worry about non-elite universities going bankrupt.
Stories I've heard tell me that only about 10 universities are not at risk of going bankrupt unless things are fixed in ways that give them more money...
Genuine question:
We spend close to 50% of GDP on government / public spending - may be a little lower than other European countries but not massively different
Pension and welfare provision is not as generous. Many of our organisations - universities above, councils passim, others - appear on the verge of bankruptcy. There is a consensus that direct public services like the NHS are underfunded.
So where the fuck does all the money go?
It's a bloody good question. And most of the organisations concerned are lavishly funded.
The DHSC is getting not far off £200bn this year. Where the hell does it all go?
On topic, the lesson from Black Wednesday (negative equity and repossession), GE2017 (dementia tax), Truss and the interest rate spike (very expensive mortages) is you don't touch people's houses. You just don't touch them.
By the same token, when the Tories launched RTB, liberalised banks to lend and had lots of houses built in the 80s, they did very well. Right now, lots of young people can't really afford them, so they're not.
The secret is to ease access for people to good homes at good and low prices. And then leave them alone.
Labour actually have a plan for that, if they have the balls to go big on it.
Labour will do precisely zero. In fact I think they will end up rolling back some of the first time buyer specific reliefs.
Interesting. Do you have a link for the rolling back proposal?
No link, there's just no money to do anything. Plus Labour just completely u turned on their workers "new deal". They've got form.
Their plan (which they've give very quiet on) would be net positive for the public finances. It doesn't involve tax giveaways.
But net negative for their image, pushing through planning reform in the UK is notoriously difficult. It's why successive governments since the 70s have all dodged the issue.
Unpopular but necessary decisions, if taken early enough, are exactly what you should be doing with a large majority.
If they went big on it, they could transform the housing market to the great benefit of the economy.
That's hopelessly naive. Labour will have the same local pressure as the Tories when it comes to planning reforms the same local councillors warning them of disaster if the reforms are pushed through and Keir doesn't strike me as the force of nature type to just do it anyway. He's fundamentally weak, even now his position on the next election is "I'm not sure but we're the red team not the blue one" which is fine to get into power but he'll have little to no mandate to actually do anything, just as Boris did in 2019 despite the huge 80 seat majority.
Yes, but what do you think of the idea itself ?
Does it matter?
Yes. "No one's going to do anything", and "nothing can be done" are two very different things.
I don't have any great hopes of the next government, but I'm not going to write them off before they start. And I'm interested in what they *could* do to make a difference.
I'm in the Keir Starmer is too weak to do anything about it camp. Not that it's impossible. For me house price reform needs much more joined up thinking which also includes immigration reform, some has already happened with the current government pushing up minimum income levels and barring dependents on certain types of visa, it needs to go further though and it should be regional, a visa for London should be upwards of £50k minimum income, a visa for somewhere in the north could be a lot lower. The issue of house prices and immigration fuelling rent price increases is very much a London and South East phenomenon. Barring non-elite universities from issuing visas, no longer allowing dependents and reducing the 2 year free hit to 6 months will all help. Labour will do none of these and have been making noises about the "cruelty" of the new dependents rule. So no, house prices, rent prices and planning will see no appreciable difference under Labour.
I actually think, in the end, it will be a future Tory party that does it because they will have no choice but to become that party to win again. They almost had it with Dave and George but just didn't go far enough and then May and Boris undid all of it.
If you bar non-elite universities from issuing visas, they will go bankrupt. Unless you pay them substantially more for home student fees.
Then let them go bankrupt, they serve little to no purpose other than being visa factories anyway.
I wouldn't worry about non-elite universities going bankrupt.
Stories I've heard tell me that only about 10 universities are not at risk of going bankrupt unless things are fixed in ways that give them more money...
AI means all universities are in trouble, and most will disappear within a decade or so
Why? The entire teaching method is busted:
"Reddit is flooded with students asking various subreddits how to deal with professors accusing them of generative AI use in their writing during this finals period. Professors are wondering how to deal with obvious generative AI use in their grading. We broke something"
"However bad you think the AI problem is at universities, it's worse."
Even if they can somehow fix this (spoiler: almost impossible) no students will want to rack up massive debt when there aren't good jobs at the end of it. This is the end of university education for almost all (and therefore unis) apart from a small proportion of the elite, who will use them as finishing schools and as places to forge social networks
For the middle classes this could be a greater change to what happened to the working classes from the 1970s onwards.
I do have visions of a 2030s equivalent of Auf Wiedersehen Pet based on young middle class graduates, drowning in debt. drifting around and looking for work in some horrible place.
But here's the difference - Dennis, Oz, Bomber and the others had useful skills. What skills could a 2020s graduate bring to a world dominated by AI ?
It's a strange thing that the Telegraph are maundering on about speed limits for people riding cycles, when the first thing they tell us about 20mph limits for motor vehicles is how impossible they are to stick to and 'it will be more dangerous because all the drivers will be glued to their speedometers'. Which is it, Telegraph?
Much as I hate to say it, both of the Telegraph's angles on this are correct. Keeping to 20mpg on a cycle is a lot easier because you have to put in quite noticeable physical effort to go faster, it's not hard to keep from going way, way over the posted limit (which is, of course, all that's required for bikes, unlike powered vehicles).
Car drivers have a harder time, particularly EVs with their lack of feedback and high acceleration.
Personally I find most 20mph limits quite dangerous. I usually get around on a 125cc class scooter, which have the interesting attributes of being very lightweight and possessing crazy low-speed acceleration. It's very easy to jump from 20 to 30 in a second or so, and the CVT transmission on scooters provides much less feedback in the way of engine revs than a geared system.
The result is I spend much more time than I am comfortable with looking at the speedo in 20mph zones. My nearest city, Glasgow, is apparently planing to introduce 20mph limits on over 4000 streets. I'll probably give up going there, it's already hostile territory for vehicles, even more so for scooters and motorcycles than cars.
I'm interested in the moped / motor scooter angle.
I think the issue will rapidly go away for cars, as 90% or so have had CC / ACC / Speed Limiter available for years, and it is becoming compulsory as a feature. The ACC on my 2018 car works down to 30kph or 30mph depending on how the 'units' are set. It also displays the current speed limit very effectively, and rarely gets it wrong.
On an e-cycle, E-Assist dropping away at 16-17mph is a good telltale.
There are mobile phone apps that give a visual or audio warning of exceeding the speed limit.
I’ll back The Economist’s central projection, c. 370 Labour to c.200 Conservatives. My own view is that polling putting the Conservatives on 20% can largely be ignored, after these results.
Yes, and I might add there will be a large band of error on that 'seat-wise' because vote distribution in the marginals and tactical voting can have such an impact.
My projection would be 390 Labour (+/- 40 seats) and 180 Conservatives (+/- 40 seats), with the Lib Dems somewhere there in the mix.
Sunak would need to be doing very well for just a small Labour majority and a Tory count north of 200 seats, but it's just about possible with a good campaign and a decent 6 months for the Government.
So, after all said and done who’s top Psephologist on PB? In my mind it’s clearly me. 😇
Last week PBs MoonRabbit said Labour will lead by just 6 points at the General Election result - and was dubbed “Loon Rabbit.” Today Professor Michael Thrasher seems to agree with me, and says this:
What does this this do to the Professors credibility, if he’s in the same headspace as “Loon Rabbit?”
Additionally - I forecasted Labour to get 39% at the General Election - Yesterdays Opinium poll puts Labour on 40%.
Which brings us to comfort blanket for Labour supporters of not looking at shares, but the lead. What was apparent lunacy from me was to say that lead is mostly based on how loudly Reform are barking in all this opinion polling, but come General Election night they won’t be loudly barking at all. Now after these set of real results, do you still think this is so crazy a forecast?
Further support to me is, at two minutes past midnight on Friday morning I posted to PB my prediction for Khans win and winning margin that was spot on, whilst the rest of the world appeared in La La land on this, including noises from the two main parties.
Also additionally here I am in Labours new fiefdom of North Yorkshire, which I did not forecast, even though last weeks poll in Yorkshire Post was spot on. Conclusion perhaps, we are all emotional humans, and so when presented with forecast really don’t want to happen, we can refuse to accept it, start throwing toys out the pram, and resort to name calling.
So I've crunched these Locals now, looking at how much and where, and what I get for the GE, almost incredibly but it is the case, is absolutely
bang on my prediction for Ben Pointer's PB competition - a Labour majority of 112.
The tories are hated but labour aint loved and will lose much of their muslim vote. This wont help the tories thogh as labour will lose votes in safe. seats. Lab maj of around 220.
Good grief Olly, don't they teach you any punctuation or spelling at all at Moscow Troll School these days?
Just outside the restaurant in the piazza there is a memorial to a batch of young Italians shot in reprisal for some partisan act in 1944. References to German brutality in the inscription. Must make being a German tourist difficult at times
I'm not sure. IMO Germany has come to terms with its history in some ways better than other places.
Interesting that in London close to 40% voted either Hall, RefUK or similar parties to RefUK. Fits in with the 40% Brexit vote in London in 2016. Suggest that bloc will be higher than 40% in most of the rest of the country (excl. Scotland). Indeed in the West Midlands the Tories got 37.5% and RefUK 6%.
The Conservative vote share in London was similar to 2019.
I’d expect the Conservatives now to hold Harrow East, Hendon, Finchley & Golders Green. Places like Two Cities, Kensington & Bayswater, Chingford, however, are gone.
I just find all this very funny because we constantly read here about racist, foam-flecked gammons in the UK, which we are ashamed of, in comparison to the tolerant, welcoming, open-minded Europeans.
It's all projection.
Yes it's rubbish. Xenophobic 'make X great again!' and 'multiculturalism doesn't work!' merchants are more successful in many European countries than they are here. I say we keep it that way.
"South Korea wants to join AUKUS with US, UK and Australia
South Korea has held talks about joining the AUKUS defense deal between the US, Britain and Australia, Defense Minister Shin Won-sik said, only weeks after the pact said it would consider including Japan"
I’ll back The Economist’s central projection, c. 370 Labour to c.200 Conservatives. My own view is that polling putting the Conservatives on 20% can largely be ignored, after these results.
Yes, and I might add there will be a large band of error on that 'seat-wise' because vote distribution in the marginals and tactical voting can have such an impact.
My projection would be 390 Labour (+/- 40 seats) and 180 Conservatives (+/- 40 seats), with the Lib Dems somewhere there in the mix.
Sunak would need to be doing very well for just a small Labour majority and a Tory count north of 200 seats, but it's just about possible with a good campaign and a decent 6 months for the Government.
No chance of that then - I really think the Tory party is on 100 seats (+/- 100). As things go they could end up with 200 or 20 depending on the scale of tactical voting and what Farage decides to do.
On topic, the lesson from Black Wednesday (negative equity and repossession), GE2017 (dementia tax), Truss and the interest rate spike (very expensive mortages) is you don't touch people's houses. You just don't touch them.
By the same token, when the Tories launched RTB, liberalised banks to lend and had lots of houses built in the 80s, they did very well. Right now, lots of young people can't really afford them, so they're not.
The secret is to ease access for people to good homes at good and low prices. And then leave them alone.
Labour actually have a plan for that, if they have the balls to go big on it.
Labour will do precisely zero. In fact I think they will end up rolling back some of the first time buyer specific reliefs.
Interesting. Do you have a link for the rolling back proposal?
No link, there's just no money to do anything. Plus Labour just completely u turned on their workers "new deal". They've got form.
Their plan (which they've give very quiet on) would be net positive for the public finances. It doesn't involve tax giveaways.
But net negative for their image, pushing through planning reform in the UK is notoriously difficult. It's why successive governments since the 70s have all dodged the issue.
Unpopular but necessary decisions, if taken early enough, are exactly what you should be doing with a large majority.
If they went big on it, they could transform the housing market to the great benefit of the economy.
That's hopelessly naive. Labour will have the same local pressure as the Tories when it comes to planning reforms the same local councillors warning them of disaster if the reforms are pushed through and Keir doesn't strike me as the force of nature type to just do it anyway. He's fundamentally weak, even now his position on the next election is "I'm not sure but we're the red team not the blue one" which is fine to get into power but he'll have little to no mandate to actually do anything, just as Boris did in 2019 despite the huge 80 seat majority.
Yes, but what do you think of the idea itself ?
Does it matter?
Yes. "No one's going to do anything", and "nothing can be done" are two very different things.
I don't have any great hopes of the next government, but I'm not going to write them off before they start. And I'm interested in what they *could* do to make a difference.
I'm in the Keir Starmer is too weak to do anything about it camp. Not that it's impossible. For me house price reform needs much more joined up thinking which also includes immigration reform, some has already happened with the current government pushing up minimum income levels and barring dependents on certain types of visa, it needs to go further though and it should be regional, a visa for London should be upwards of £50k minimum income, a visa for somewhere in the north could be a lot lower. The issue of house prices and immigration fuelling rent price increases is very much a London and South East phenomenon. Barring non-elite universities from issuing visas, no longer allowing dependents and reducing the 2 year free hit to 6 months will all help. Labour will do none of these and have been making noises about the "cruelty" of the new dependents rule. So no, house prices, rent prices and planning will see no appreciable difference under Labour.
I actually think, in the end, it will be a future Tory party that does it because they will have no choice but to become that party to win again. They almost had it with Dave and George but just didn't go far enough and then May and Boris undid all of it.
If you bar non-elite universities from issuing visas, they will go bankrupt. Unless you pay them substantially more for home student fees.
Then let them go bankrupt, they serve little to no purpose other than being visa factories anyway.
I wouldn't worry about non-elite universities going bankrupt.
Stories I've heard tell me that only about 10 universities are not at risk of going bankrupt unless things are fixed in ways that give them more money...
AI means all universities are in trouble, and most will disappear within a decade or so
Why? The entire teaching method is busted:
"Reddit is flooded with students asking various subreddits how to deal with professors accusing them of generative AI use in their writing during this finals period. Professors are wondering how to deal with obvious generative AI use in their grading. We broke something"
"However bad you think the AI problem is at universities, it's worse."
Even if they can somehow fix this (spoiler: almost impossible) no students will want to rack up massive debt when there aren't good jobs at the end of it. This is the end of university education for almost all (and therefore unis) apart from a small proportion of the elite, who will use them as finishing schools and as places to forge social networks
For the middle classes this could be a greater change to what happened to the working classes from the 1970s onwards.
I do have visions of a 2030s equivalent of Auf Wiedersehen Pet based on young middle class graduates, drowning in debt. drifting around and looking for work in some horrible place.
But here's the difference - Dennis, Oz, Bomber and the others had useful skills. What skills could a 2020s graduate bring to a world dominated by AI ?
Saw this tweet today:
"Millennials were the last generation who still properly internalized the values of 20th century/late bourgeois culture (like the value of higher ed etc) & the first ones to have grown up in a world were acting upon them did not confer much advantage anymore"
The quote-tweeted thread has some interesting stuff too, though US-centric:
On topic, the lesson from Black Wednesday (negative equity and repossession), GE2017 (dementia tax), Truss and the interest rate spike (very expensive mortages) is you don't touch people's houses. You just don't touch them.
By the same token, when the Tories launched RTB, liberalised banks to lend and had lots of houses built in the 80s, they did very well. Right now, lots of young people can't really afford them, so they're not.
The secret is to ease access for people to good homes at good and low prices. And then leave them alone.
Labour actually have a plan for that, if they have the balls to go big on it.
Labour will do precisely zero. In fact I think they will end up rolling back some of the first time buyer specific reliefs.
Interesting. Do you have a link for the rolling back proposal?
No link, there's just no money to do anything. Plus Labour just completely u turned on their workers "new deal". They've got form.
Their plan (which they've give very quiet on) would be net positive for the public finances. It doesn't involve tax giveaways.
But net negative for their image, pushing through planning reform in the UK is notoriously difficult. It's why successive governments since the 70s have all dodged the issue.
Unpopular but necessary decisions, if taken early enough, are exactly what you should be doing with a large majority.
If they went big on it, they could transform the housing market to the great benefit of the economy.
That's hopelessly naive. Labour will have the same local pressure as the Tories when it comes to planning reforms the same local councillors warning them of disaster if the reforms are pushed through and Keir doesn't strike me as the force of nature type to just do it anyway. He's fundamentally weak, even now his position on the next election is "I'm not sure but we're the red team not the blue one" which is fine to get into power but he'll have little to no mandate to actually do anything, just as Boris did in 2019 despite the huge 80 seat majority.
Yes, but what do you think of the idea itself ?
Does it matter?
Yes. "No one's going to do anything", and "nothing can be done" are two very different things.
I don't have any great hopes of the next government, but I'm not going to write them off before they start. And I'm interested in what they *could* do to make a difference.
I'm in the Keir Starmer is too weak to do anything about it camp. Not that it's impossible. For me house price reform needs much more joined up thinking which also includes immigration reform, some has already happened with the current government pushing up minimum income levels and barring dependents on certain types of visa, it needs to go further though and it should be regional, a visa for London should be upwards of £50k minimum income, a visa for somewhere in the north could be a lot lower. The issue of house prices and immigration fuelling rent price increases is very much a London and South East phenomenon. Barring non-elite universities from issuing visas, no longer allowing dependents and reducing the 2 year free hit to 6 months will all help. Labour will do none of these and have been making noises about the "cruelty" of the new dependents rule. So no, house prices, rent prices and planning will see no appreciable difference under Labour.
I actually think, in the end, it will be a future Tory party that does it because they will have no choice but to become that party to win again. They almost had it with Dave and George but just didn't go far enough and then May and Boris undid all of it.
If you bar non-elite universities from issuing visas, they will go bankrupt. Unless you pay them substantially more for home student fees.
Then let them go bankrupt, they serve little to no purpose other than being visa factories anyway.
I wouldn't worry about non-elite universities going bankrupt.
Stories I've heard tell me that only about 10 universities are not at risk of going bankrupt unless things are fixed in ways that give them more money...
AI means all universities are in trouble, and most will disappear within a decade or so
Why? The entire teaching method is busted:
"Reddit is flooded with students asking various subreddits how to deal with professors accusing them of generative AI use in their writing during this finals period. Professors are wondering how to deal with obvious generative AI use in their grading. We broke something"
"However bad you think the AI problem is at universities, it's worse."
Even if they can somehow fix this (spoiler: almost impossible) no students will want to rack up massive debt when there aren't good jobs at the end of it. This is the end of university education for almost all (and therefore unis) apart from a small proportion of the elite, who will use them as finishing schools and as places to forge social networks
For the middle classes this could be a greater change to what happened to the working classes from the 1970s onwards.
I do have visions of a 2030s equivalent of Auf Wiedersehen Pet based on young middle class graduates, drowning in debt. drifting around and looking for work in some horrible place.
But here's the difference - Dennis, Oz, Bomber and the others had useful skills. What skills could a 2020s graduate bring to a world dominated by AI ?
I have no idea. Anything that involves unreplaceable humanity. Artisanal crafts (!!), singers, live piano players, vicars, travel writers... but it's quite a limited list
And anyone who thinks they are safe because they do a difficult physical task - plumbing, nursing, sparky, etc - they are ALSO in trouble as the latest advances in robots show that AI's can now train robots with zero human intervention, to do incredibly complex things. From delicate household chores to balancing on yoga balls
I know we are not meant to talk about AI but sometimes we simply have to. Because this is happening now and it is highly relevant to several of the themes of the day. eg University funding? - the whole university system is about to collapse within half a decade or so, and many of those jobs, and unis, will vanish, so how they are funded becomes irrelevant, they won't exist
So, after all said and done who’s top Psephologist on PB? In my mind it’s clearly me. 😇
Last week PBs MoonRabbit said Labour will lead by just 6 points at the General Election result - and was dubbed “Loon Rabbit.” Today Professor Michael Thrasher seems to agree with me, and says this:
What does this this do to the Professors credibility, if he’s in the same headspace as “Loon Rabbit?”
Additionally - I forecasted Labour to get 39% at the General Election - Yesterdays Opinium poll puts Labour on 40%.
Which brings us to comfort blanket for Labour supporters of not looking at shares, but the lead. What was apparent lunacy from me was to say that lead is mostly based on how loudly Reform are barking in all this opinion polling, but come General Election night they won’t be loudly barking at all. Now after these set of real results, do you still think this is so crazy a forecast?
Further support to me is, at two minutes past midnight on Friday morning I posted to PB my prediction for Khans win and winning margin that was spot on, whilst the rest of the world appeared in La La land on this, including noises from the two main parties.
Also additionally here I am in Labours new fiefdom of North Yorkshire, which I did not forecast, even though last weeks poll in Yorkshire Post was spot on. Conclusion perhaps, we are all emotional humans, and so when presented with forecast really don’t want to happen, we can refuse to accept it, start throwing toys out the pram, and resort to name calling.
Very interesting. You've certainly convinced me... that Labour are set for their biggest ever landslide.
On topic, the lesson from Black Wednesday (negative equity and repossession), GE2017 (dementia tax), Truss and the interest rate spike (very expensive mortages) is you don't touch people's houses. You just don't touch them.
By the same token, when the Tories launched RTB, liberalised banks to lend and had lots of houses built in the 80s, they did very well. Right now, lots of young people can't really afford them, so they're not.
The secret is to ease access for people to good homes at good and low prices. And then leave them alone.
Labour actually have a plan for that, if they have the balls to go big on it.
Labour will do precisely zero. In fact I think they will end up rolling back some of the first time buyer specific reliefs.
Interesting. Do you have a link for the rolling back proposal?
No link, there's just no money to do anything. Plus Labour just completely u turned on their workers "new deal". They've got form.
Their plan (which they've give very quiet on) would be net positive for the public finances. It doesn't involve tax giveaways.
But net negative for their image, pushing through planning reform in the UK is notoriously difficult. It's why successive governments since the 70s have all dodged the issue.
Unpopular but necessary decisions, if taken early enough, are exactly what you should be doing with a large majority.
If they went big on it, they could transform the housing market to the great benefit of the economy.
That's hopelessly naive. Labour will have the same local pressure as the Tories when it comes to planning reforms the same local councillors warning them of disaster if the reforms are pushed through and Keir doesn't strike me as the force of nature type to just do it anyway. He's fundamentally weak, even now his position on the next election is "I'm not sure but we're the red team not the blue one" which is fine to get into power but he'll have little to no mandate to actually do anything, just as Boris did in 2019 despite the huge 80 seat majority.
Yes, but what do you think of the idea itself ?
Does it matter?
Yes. "No one's going to do anything", and "nothing can be done" are two very different things.
I don't have any great hopes of the next government, but I'm not going to write them off before they start. And I'm interested in what they *could* do to make a difference.
I'm in the Keir Starmer is too weak to do anything about it camp. Not that it's impossible. For me house price reform needs much more joined up thinking which also includes immigration reform, some has already happened with the current government pushing up minimum income levels and barring dependents on certain types of visa, it needs to go further though and it should be regional, a visa for London should be upwards of £50k minimum income, a visa for somewhere in the north could be a lot lower. The issue of house prices and immigration fuelling rent price increases is very much a London and South East phenomenon. Barring non-elite universities from issuing visas, no longer allowing dependents and reducing the 2 year free hit to 6 months will all help. Labour will do none of these and have been making noises about the "cruelty" of the new dependents rule. So no, house prices, rent prices and planning will see no appreciable difference under Labour.
I actually think, in the end, it will be a future Tory party that does it because they will have no choice but to become that party to win again. They almost had it with Dave and George but just didn't go far enough and then May and Boris undid all of it.
If you bar non-elite universities from issuing visas, they will go bankrupt. Unless you pay them substantially more for home student fees.
Then let them go bankrupt, they serve little to no purpose other than being visa factories anyway.
I wouldn't worry about non-elite universities going bankrupt.
Stories I've heard tell me that only about 10 universities are not at risk of going bankrupt unless things are fixed in ways that give them more money...
AI means all universities are in trouble, and most will disappear within a decade or so
Why? The entire teaching method is busted:
"Reddit is flooded with students asking various subreddits how to deal with professors accusing them of generative AI use in their writing during this finals period. Professors are wondering how to deal with obvious generative AI use in their grading. We broke something"
"However bad you think the AI problem is at universities, it's worse."
Even if they can somehow fix this (spoiler: almost impossible) no students will want to rack up massive debt when there aren't good jobs at the end of it. This is the end of university education for almost all (and therefore unis) apart from a small proportion of the elite, who will use them as finishing schools and as places to forge social networks
The solution is actually pretty simple. Less emphasis on essay marks and more on seminar verbal participation marks in social science assessments and more emphasis on final examinations for grading, In hard science there is more lab work and also more final exam emphasis. Plagiarism in essay or project writing has been a problem for a while and there have been substantial moves to address this.
AI is not a replacement for actually having the information in your head, if its not there then seminars and final examinations will find this out.
On topic, the lesson from Black Wednesday (negative equity and repossession), GE2017 (dementia tax), Truss and the interest rate spike (very expensive mortages) is you don't touch people's houses. You just don't touch them.
By the same token, when the Tories launched RTB, liberalised banks to lend and had lots of houses built in the 80s, they did very well. Right now, lots of young people can't really afford them, so they're not.
The secret is to ease access for people to good homes at good and low prices. And then leave them alone.
Labour actually have a plan for that, if they have the balls to go big on it.
Labour will do precisely zero. In fact I think they will end up rolling back some of the first time buyer specific reliefs.
Interesting. Do you have a link for the rolling back proposal?
No link, there's just no money to do anything. Plus Labour just completely u turned on their workers "new deal". They've got form.
Their plan (which they've give very quiet on) would be net positive for the public finances. It doesn't involve tax giveaways.
But net negative for their image, pushing through planning reform in the UK is notoriously difficult. It's why successive governments since the 70s have all dodged the issue.
Unpopular but necessary decisions, if taken early enough, are exactly what you should be doing with a large majority.
If they went big on it, they could transform the housing market to the great benefit of the economy.
That's hopelessly naive. Labour will have the same local pressure as the Tories when it comes to planning reforms the same local councillors warning them of disaster if the reforms are pushed through and Keir doesn't strike me as the force of nature type to just do it anyway. He's fundamentally weak, even now his position on the next election is "I'm not sure but we're the red team not the blue one" which is fine to get into power but he'll have little to no mandate to actually do anything, just as Boris did in 2019 despite the huge 80 seat majority.
Yes, but what do you think of the idea itself ?
Does it matter?
Yes. "No one's going to do anything", and "nothing can be done" are two very different things.
I don't have any great hopes of the next government, but I'm not going to write them off before they start. And I'm interested in what they *could* do to make a difference.
I'm in the Keir Starmer is too weak to do anything about it camp. Not that it's impossible. For me house price reform needs much more joined up thinking which also includes immigration reform, some has already happened with the current government pushing up minimum income levels and barring dependents on certain types of visa, it needs to go further though and it should be regional, a visa for London should be upwards of £50k minimum income, a visa for somewhere in the north could be a lot lower. The issue of house prices and immigration fuelling rent price increases is very much a London and South East phenomenon. Barring non-elite universities from issuing visas, no longer allowing dependents and reducing the 2 year free hit to 6 months will all help. Labour will do none of these and have been making noises about the "cruelty" of the new dependents rule. So no, house prices, rent prices and planning will see no appreciable difference under Labour.
I actually think, in the end, it will be a future Tory party that does it because they will have no choice but to become that party to win again. They almost had it with Dave and George but just didn't go far enough and then May and Boris undid all of it.
If you bar non-elite universities from issuing visas, they will go bankrupt. Unless you pay them substantially more for home student fees.
Then let them go bankrupt, they serve little to no purpose other than being visa factories anyway.
I wouldn't worry about non-elite universities going bankrupt.
Stories I've heard tell me that only about 10 universities are not at risk of going bankrupt unless things are fixed in ways that give them more money...
Genuine question:
We spend close to 50% of GDP on government / public spending - may be a little lower than other European countries but not massively different
Pension and welfare provision is not as generous. Many of our organisations - universities above, councils passim, others - appear on the verge of bankruptcy. There is a consensus that direct public services like the NHS are underfunded.
So where the fuck does all the money go?
It's a bloody good question. And most of the organisations concerned are lavishly funded.
The DHSC is getting not far off £200bn this year. Where the hell does it all go?
I’ll back The Economist’s central projection, c. 370 Labour to c.200 Conservatives. My own view is that polling putting the Conservatives on 20% can largely be ignored, after these results.
Yes, and I might add there will be a large band of error on that 'seat-wise' because vote distribution in the marginals and tactical voting can have such an impact.
My projection would be 390 Labour (+/- 40 seats) and 180 Conservatives (+/- 40 seats), with the Lib Dems somewhere there in the mix.
Sunak would need to be doing very well for just a small Labour majority and a Tory count north of 200 seats, but it's just about possible with a good campaign and a decent 6 months for the Government.
Reform UK are the dog that never barked.
The London List ought to be tailor-made for a party that has little ground organisation. They won 5.5%, which is not nothing, but is way below the Conservatives’ 26.5%.
Given a choice between Labour and Conservative, in the Mayoral election, their vote fell to 2.5%, with Conservative going up to 32%.
On topic, the lesson from Black Wednesday (negative equity and repossession), GE2017 (dementia tax), Truss and the interest rate spike (very expensive mortages) is you don't touch people's houses. You just don't touch them.
By the same token, when the Tories launched RTB, liberalised banks to lend and had lots of houses built in the 80s, they did very well. Right now, lots of young people can't really afford them, so they're not.
The secret is to ease access for people to good homes at good and low prices. And then leave them alone.
Labour actually have a plan for that, if they have the balls to go big on it.
Labour will do precisely zero. In fact I think they will end up rolling back some of the first time buyer specific reliefs.
Interesting. Do you have a link for the rolling back proposal?
No link, there's just no money to do anything. Plus Labour just completely u turned on their workers "new deal". They've got form.
Their plan (which they've give very quiet on) would be net positive for the public finances. It doesn't involve tax giveaways.
But net negative for their image, pushing through planning reform in the UK is notoriously difficult. It's why successive governments since the 70s have all dodged the issue.
Unpopular but necessary decisions, if taken early enough, are exactly what you should be doing with a large majority.
If they went big on it, they could transform the housing market to the great benefit of the economy.
That's hopelessly naive. Labour will have the same local pressure as the Tories when it comes to planning reforms the same local councillors warning them of disaster if the reforms are pushed through and Keir doesn't strike me as the force of nature type to just do it anyway. He's fundamentally weak, even now his position on the next election is "I'm not sure but we're the red team not the blue one" which is fine to get into power but he'll have little to no mandate to actually do anything, just as Boris did in 2019 despite the huge 80 seat majority.
Yes, but what do you think of the idea itself ?
Does it matter?
Yes. "No one's going to do anything", and "nothing can be done" are two very different things.
I don't have any great hopes of the next government, but I'm not going to write them off before they start. And I'm interested in what they *could* do to make a difference.
I'm in the Keir Starmer is too weak to do anything about it camp. Not that it's impossible. For me house price reform needs much more joined up thinking which also includes immigration reform, some has already happened with the current government pushing up minimum income levels and barring dependents on certain types of visa, it needs to go further though and it should be regional, a visa for London should be upwards of £50k minimum income, a visa for somewhere in the north could be a lot lower. The issue of house prices and immigration fuelling rent price increases is very much a London and South East phenomenon. Barring non-elite universities from issuing visas, no longer allowing dependents and reducing the 2 year free hit to 6 months will all help. Labour will do none of these and have been making noises about the "cruelty" of the new dependents rule. So no, house prices, rent prices and planning will see no appreciable difference under Labour.
I actually think, in the end, it will be a future Tory party that does it because they will have no choice but to become that party to win again. They almost had it with Dave and George but just didn't go far enough and then May and Boris undid all of it.
If you bar non-elite universities from issuing visas, they will go bankrupt. Unless you pay them substantially more for home student fees.
Then let them go bankrupt, they serve little to no purpose other than being visa factories anyway.
I wouldn't worry about non-elite universities going bankrupt.
Stories I've heard tell me that only about 10 universities are not at risk of going bankrupt unless things are fixed in ways that give them more money...
AI means all universities are in trouble, and most will disappear within a decade or so
Why? The entire teaching method is busted:
"Reddit is flooded with students asking various subreddits how to deal with professors accusing them of generative AI use in their writing during this finals period. Professors are wondering how to deal with obvious generative AI use in their grading. We broke something"
"However bad you think the AI problem is at universities, it's worse."
Even if they can somehow fix this (spoiler: almost impossible) no students will want to rack up massive debt when there aren't good jobs at the end of it. This is the end of university education for almost all (and therefore unis) apart from a small proportion of the elite, who will use them as finishing schools and as places to forge social networks
For the middle classes this could be a greater change to what happened to the working classes from the 1970s onwards.
I do have visions of a 2030s equivalent of Auf Wiedersehen Pet based on young middle class graduates, drowning in debt. drifting around and looking for work in some horrible place.
But here's the difference - Dennis, Oz, Bomber and the others had useful skills. What skills could a 2020s graduate bring to a world dominated by AI ?
I have no idea. Anything that involves unreplaceable humanity. Artisanal crafts (!!), singers, live piano players, vicars, travel writers... but it's quite a limited list
And anyone who thinks they are safe because they do a difficult physical task - plumbing, nursing, sparky, etc - they are ALSO in trouble as the latest advances in robots show that AI's can now train robots with zero human intervention, to do incredibly complex things. From delicate household chores to balancing on yoga balls
I know we are not meant to talk about AI but sometimes we simply have to. Because this is happening now and it is highly relevant to several of the themes of the day. eg University funding? - the whole university system is about to collapse within half a decade or so, and many of those jobs, and unis, will vanish, so how they are funded becomes irrelevant, they won't exist
I'll be first in the queue for a fully functioning robot butler, that can do the laundry, clean the house, cook dinner be my sous chef... and load and unload the dishwasher, of course.
Massive challenges, no doubt, but there could be huge benefits too.
On topic, the lesson from Black Wednesday (negative equity and repossession), GE2017 (dementia tax), Truss and the interest rate spike (very expensive mortages) is you don't touch people's houses. You just don't touch them.
By the same token, when the Tories launched RTB, liberalised banks to lend and had lots of houses built in the 80s, they did very well. Right now, lots of young people can't really afford them, so they're not.
The secret is to ease access for people to good homes at good and low prices. And then leave them alone.
Labour actually have a plan for that, if they have the balls to go big on it.
Labour will do precisely zero. In fact I think they will end up rolling back some of the first time buyer specific reliefs.
Interesting. Do you have a link for the rolling back proposal?
No link, there's just no money to do anything. Plus Labour just completely u turned on their workers "new deal". They've got form.
Their plan (which they've give very quiet on) would be net positive for the public finances. It doesn't involve tax giveaways.
But net negative for their image, pushing through planning reform in the UK is notoriously difficult. It's why successive governments since the 70s have all dodged the issue.
Unpopular but necessary decisions, if taken early enough, are exactly what you should be doing with a large majority.
If they went big on it, they could transform the housing market to the great benefit of the economy.
That's hopelessly naive. Labour will have the same local pressure as the Tories when it comes to planning reforms the same local councillors warning them of disaster if the reforms are pushed through and Keir doesn't strike me as the force of nature type to just do it anyway. He's fundamentally weak, even now his position on the next election is "I'm not sure but we're the red team not the blue one" which is fine to get into power but he'll have little to no mandate to actually do anything, just as Boris did in 2019 despite the huge 80 seat majority.
Yes, but what do you think of the idea itself ?
Does it matter?
Yes. "No one's going to do anything", and "nothing can be done" are two very different things.
I don't have any great hopes of the next government, but I'm not going to write them off before they start. And I'm interested in what they *could* do to make a difference.
I'm in the Keir Starmer is too weak to do anything about it camp. Not that it's impossible. For me house price reform needs much more joined up thinking which also includes immigration reform, some has already happened with the current government pushing up minimum income levels and barring dependents on certain types of visa, it needs to go further though and it should be regional, a visa for London should be upwards of £50k minimum income, a visa for somewhere in the north could be a lot lower. The issue of house prices and immigration fuelling rent price increases is very much a London and South East phenomenon. Barring non-elite universities from issuing visas, no longer allowing dependents and reducing the 2 year free hit to 6 months will all help. Labour will do none of these and have been making noises about the "cruelty" of the new dependents rule. So no, house prices, rent prices and planning will see no appreciable difference under Labour.
I actually think, in the end, it will be a future Tory party that does it because they will have no choice but to become that party to win again. They almost had it with Dave and George but just didn't go far enough and then May and Boris undid all of it.
If you bar non-elite universities from issuing visas, they will go bankrupt. Unless you pay them substantially more for home student fees.
Then let them go bankrupt, they serve little to no purpose other than being visa factories anyway.
I wouldn't worry about non-elite universities going bankrupt.
Stories I've heard tell me that only about 10 universities are not at risk of going bankrupt unless things are fixed in ways that give them more money...
AI means all universities are in trouble, and most will disappear within a decade or so
Why? The entire teaching method is busted:
"Reddit is flooded with students asking various subreddits how to deal with professors accusing them of generative AI use in their writing during this finals period. Professors are wondering how to deal with obvious generative AI use in their grading. We broke something"
"However bad you think the AI problem is at universities, it's worse."
Even if they can somehow fix this (spoiler: almost impossible) no students will want to rack up massive debt when there aren't good jobs at the end of it. This is the end of university education for almost all (and therefore unis) apart from a small proportion of the elite, who will use them as finishing schools and as places to forge social networks
The solution is actually pretty simple. Less emphasis on essay marks and more on seminar verbal participation marks in social science assessments and more emphasis on final examinations for grading, In hard science there is more lab work and also more final exam emphasis. Plagiarism in essay or project writing has been a problem for a while and there have been substantial moves to address this.
AI is not a replacement for actually having the information in your head, if its not there then seminars and final examinations will find this out.
There won't be any jobs at the end of the degree, so no young person will want to take on all that debt, when it leads... nowhere
So even if you do solver the above, no students = no universities
As I said we may end up with finishing schools for the rich elite who value the years 18-21 simply to network
On topic, the lesson from Black Wednesday (negative equity and repossession), GE2017 (dementia tax), Truss and the interest rate spike (very expensive mortages) is you don't touch people's houses. You just don't touch them.
By the same token, when the Tories launched RTB, liberalised banks to lend and had lots of houses built in the 80s, they did very well. Right now, lots of young people can't really afford them, so they're not.
The secret is to ease access for people to good homes at good and low prices. And then leave them alone.
Labour actually have a plan for that, if they have the balls to go big on it.
Labour will do precisely zero. In fact I think they will end up rolling back some of the first time buyer specific reliefs.
Interesting. Do you have a link for the rolling back proposal?
No link, there's just no money to do anything. Plus Labour just completely u turned on their workers "new deal". They've got form.
Their plan (which they've give very quiet on) would be net positive for the public finances. It doesn't involve tax giveaways.
But net negative for their image, pushing through planning reform in the UK is notoriously difficult. It's why successive governments since the 70s have all dodged the issue.
Unpopular but necessary decisions, if taken early enough, are exactly what you should be doing with a large majority.
If they went big on it, they could transform the housing market to the great benefit of the economy.
That's hopelessly naive. Labour will have the same local pressure as the Tories when it comes to planning reforms the same local councillors warning them of disaster if the reforms are pushed through and Keir doesn't strike me as the force of nature type to just do it anyway. He's fundamentally weak, even now his position on the next election is "I'm not sure but we're the red team not the blue one" which is fine to get into power but he'll have little to no mandate to actually do anything, just as Boris did in 2019 despite the huge 80 seat majority.
Yes, but what do you think of the idea itself ?
Does it matter?
Yes. "No one's going to do anything", and "nothing can be done" are two very different things.
I don't have any great hopes of the next government, but I'm not going to write them off before they start. And I'm interested in what they *could* do to make a difference.
I'm in the Keir Starmer is too weak to do anything about it camp. Not that it's impossible. For me house price reform needs much more joined up thinking which also includes immigration reform, some has already happened with the current government pushing up minimum income levels and barring dependents on certain types of visa, it needs to go further though and it should be regional, a visa for London should be upwards of £50k minimum income, a visa for somewhere in the north could be a lot lower. The issue of house prices and immigration fuelling rent price increases is very much a London and South East phenomenon. Barring non-elite universities from issuing visas, no longer allowing dependents and reducing the 2 year free hit to 6 months will all help. Labour will do none of these and have been making noises about the "cruelty" of the new dependents rule. So no, house prices, rent prices and planning will see no appreciable difference under Labour.
I actually think, in the end, it will be a future Tory party that does it because they will have no choice but to become that party to win again. They almost had it with Dave and George but just didn't go far enough and then May and Boris undid all of it.
If you bar non-elite universities from issuing visas, they will go bankrupt. Unless you pay them substantially more for home student fees.
Then let them go bankrupt, they serve little to no purpose other than being visa factories anyway.
I wouldn't worry about non-elite universities going bankrupt.
Stories I've heard tell me that only about 10 universities are not at risk of going bankrupt unless things are fixed in ways that give them more money...
AI means all universities are in trouble, and most will disappear within a decade or so
Why? The entire teaching method is busted:
"Reddit is flooded with students asking various subreddits how to deal with professors accusing them of generative AI use in their writing during this finals period. Professors are wondering how to deal with obvious generative AI use in their grading. We broke something"
"However bad you think the AI problem is at universities, it's worse."
Even if they can somehow fix this (spoiler: almost impossible) no students will want to rack up massive debt when there aren't good jobs at the end of it. This is the end of university education for almost all (and therefore unis) apart from a small proportion of the elite, who will use them as finishing schools and as places to forge social networks
For the middle classes this could be a greater change to what happened to the working classes from the 1970s onwards.
I do have visions of a 2030s equivalent of Auf Wiedersehen Pet based on young middle class graduates, drowning in debt. drifting around and looking for work in some horrible place.
But here's the difference - Dennis, Oz, Bomber and the others had useful skills. What skills could a 2020s graduate bring to a world dominated by AI ?
I have no idea. Anything that involves unreplaceable humanity. Artisanal crafts (!!), singers, live piano players, vicars, travel writers... but it's quite a limited list
And anyone who thinks they are safe because they do a difficult physical task - plumbing, nursing, sparky, etc - they are ALSO in trouble as the latest advances in robots show that AI's can now train robots with zero human intervention, to do incredibly complex things. From delicate household chores to balancing on yoga balls
I know we are not meant to talk about AI but sometimes we simply have to. Because this is happening now and it is highly relevant to several of the themes of the day. eg University funding? - the whole university system is about to collapse within half a decade or so, and many of those jobs, and unis, will vanish, so how they are funded becomes irrelevant, they won't exist
One I see as ripe for automation are those Singing Gondoliers in Venice. They charge a fortune, so massive scope for efficiencies. All you need is a suitably dressed robot that can operate the oar (not hard) and at the same time croon some opera (very easy, just link to a Spotify premium acc) and that's it basically.
(also FPT… 95% of cyclists do have a device capable of measuring speed on their bike, it’s called a smartphone. And the 5% that don’t are called Bert, aged 90, and use the bike for cycling to Spar and church at 6mph. I’m a fairly fervent cycling advocate but I tend to think speed limits should apply to us too.)
I question the 95%; I don't routinely run a speedo of any sort (except on the E-folder), and theft of Smartphones from handlebars is a real problem.
The stuff about "can't be charged because of no applicable speed limit" is pure BS, and Telegraph stirring; there are offences such as Careless Cycling and Dangerous Cycling on the books since about 1991, which could have been designed for head-down-not-looking pelotons in Central London. There are loopholes around where injury is caused, which are exactly the same in principle as those that exist for motor vehicle drivers between eg Careless Driving, and Causing Serious Injury by Careless Driving; so if injury is less than broken bones it cannot be charged.
That's due to 8 or 10 do-nothing Transport Ministers in a row, who have not done what they said they would do wrt Road Safety.
It's a strange thing that the Telegraph are maundering on about speed limits for people riding cycles, when the first thing they tell us about 20mph limits for motor vehicles is how impossible they are to stick to and 'it will be more dangerous because all the drivers will be glued to their speedometers'. Which is it, Telegraph?
I'll address the points made on the previous thread later because they deserve a serious comment & proposals rather than the Telegraph's poisonous & opportunistic shit stirring. The lady who died in this collision deserves a better legacy.
I would have weighed in yesterday evening, but I was cycling up and down part of the Trent around Nottingham / Holme Pierrepoint. Millions of competitive student rowers everywhere, who will presumably be engaged in vigorous nocturnal activity all weekend.
I agree that offences such as Dangerous Cycling should be sufficient and in busy urban areas it is wise not to go to quickly even when cycling on the road. I once got unseated by a pedestrian stepping out without looking into the cycle lane right in front of me, assuming that it was safe because the motor traffic was (as usual) stationary.
My phone is always in my bag so not much use for judging speed, even if I could work out how to get Strava to show actual speed rather than average.
In practice I notice that flat out I can just about sustain 30km/h for a km or two. A younger, fitter, more serious cyclist can probably manage that consistently. It seems that the fastest I have been is 58kph downhill. There is a camera to catch people speeding downhill just inside a 30mph zone on one of my regular routes; I have been trying to set it off for years without success.
You can get a bike GPS for 25 quid on Amazon
I'm sure I can but I don't care enough and can't be bothered!
My phone is also in my bag. I do use a speedo, but only use it for distance measuring. It is plain dangerous to keep looking down at the speedo so people suggesting that clearly don't cycle as that is asking for a collision or hitting a pot hole and being thrown off. Admittedly I don't present a threat to speed limits anyway. I don't cycle much in built up areas and if I do I will cycle slowly (10 kph). On country lanes (if flat and with good tarmac) I will cycle between 20 - 35 kph and that will have been on unrestricted country lanes.
I cycle and look at the speedometer. No more dangerous than in a car. Unless I am off touring somewhere I know where the potholes are.
My "city type" e-folder is quite interesting. It has small 16" wheels but with biggish 45mm tyres, and after riding a standard cycle it is like switching from say a normal saloon car to a (original not BMW) Mini.
It is a fixed mid-range gear, but with 3 e-assist levels (plus a 5kph walk-along-pavement) mode, which seem to be set as much by speed as power, and comfortably assist to approx 10-11kph, 17-19kph, and 24-25kph, on the more-or-less flat.
1 is fine for areas with pedestrians if not they are not teeming or asleep, 2 for normal UK cruddy urban cycle infrastructure, for trails, or where it has been un-designed without thought to sightlines etc, with sudden completely unnecessary right-angle bends and so on, and 24-25kph on good or well-sighted cycle infra and streets / roads or not-in-town OK infra with no pedestrians.
None of it helps on my local urban hell-crossroads where everybody has to go across 7 separate horribly tight staggered pedestrian crossings to get corner to corner; that's just Notts County Council default lobotomised car-brain not thinking about their responsibilities.
OK, it's a bit late for "lunch" (first beer of the day with a bowl of olives) but I've walked 32km so far
I've reached Logroño. I'm not yet in the centre, but at the first bar I saw on the route. It's in a park, and I had to walk through another park called San Miguel first to get here. That felt a bit like someone was messing with me!
After this beer I'm going to move onto another bar in the centre, hopefully in view of the cathedral, and have beer two while I look for tonight's room
See now I would have to get that room sorted before I started on the beer. Otherwise it could well be a night under the stars.
On topic, the lesson from Black Wednesday (negative equity and repossession), GE2017 (dementia tax), Truss and the interest rate spike (very expensive mortages) is you don't touch people's houses. You just don't touch them.
By the same token, when the Tories launched RTB, liberalised banks to lend and had lots of houses built in the 80s, they did very well. Right now, lots of young people can't really afford them, so they're not.
The secret is to ease access for people to good homes at good and low prices. And then leave them alone.
Labour actually have a plan for that, if they have the balls to go big on it.
Labour will do precisely zero. In fact I think they will end up rolling back some of the first time buyer specific reliefs.
Interesting. Do you have a link for the rolling back proposal?
No link, there's just no money to do anything. Plus Labour just completely u turned on their workers "new deal". They've got form.
Their plan (which they've give very quiet on) would be net positive for the public finances. It doesn't involve tax giveaways.
But net negative for their image, pushing through planning reform in the UK is notoriously difficult. It's why successive governments since the 70s have all dodged the issue.
Unpopular but necessary decisions, if taken early enough, are exactly what you should be doing with a large majority.
If they went big on it, they could transform the housing market to the great benefit of the economy.
That's hopelessly naive. Labour will have the same local pressure as the Tories when it comes to planning reforms the same local councillors warning them of disaster if the reforms are pushed through and Keir doesn't strike me as the force of nature type to just do it anyway. He's fundamentally weak, even now his position on the next election is "I'm not sure but we're the red team not the blue one" which is fine to get into power but he'll have little to no mandate to actually do anything, just as Boris did in 2019 despite the huge 80 seat majority.
Yes, but what do you think of the idea itself ?
Does it matter?
Yes. "No one's going to do anything", and "nothing can be done" are two very different things.
I don't have any great hopes of the next government, but I'm not going to write them off before they start. And I'm interested in what they *could* do to make a difference.
I'm in the Keir Starmer is too weak to do anything about it camp. Not that it's impossible. For me house price reform needs much more joined up thinking which also includes immigration reform, some has already happened with the current government pushing up minimum income levels and barring dependents on certain types of visa, it needs to go further though and it should be regional, a visa for London should be upwards of £50k minimum income, a visa for somewhere in the north could be a lot lower. The issue of house prices and immigration fuelling rent price increases is very much a London and South East phenomenon. Barring non-elite universities from issuing visas, no longer allowing dependents and reducing the 2 year free hit to 6 months will all help. Labour will do none of these and have been making noises about the "cruelty" of the new dependents rule. So no, house prices, rent prices and planning will see no appreciable difference under Labour.
I actually think, in the end, it will be a future Tory party that does it because they will have no choice but to become that party to win again. They almost had it with Dave and George but just didn't go far enough and then May and Boris undid all of it.
If you bar non-elite universities from issuing visas, they will go bankrupt. Unless you pay them substantially more for home student fees.
Then let them go bankrupt, they serve little to no purpose other than being visa factories anyway.
I wouldn't worry about non-elite universities going bankrupt.
Stories I've heard tell me that only about 10 universities are not at risk of going bankrupt unless things are fixed in ways that give them more money...
AI means all universities are in trouble, and most will disappear within a decade or so
Why? The entire teaching method is busted:
"Reddit is flooded with students asking various subreddits how to deal with professors accusing them of generative AI use in their writing during this finals period. Professors are wondering how to deal with obvious generative AI use in their grading. We broke something"
"However bad you think the AI problem is at universities, it's worse."
Even if they can somehow fix this (spoiler: almost impossible) no students will want to rack up massive debt when there aren't good jobs at the end of it. This is the end of university education for almost all (and therefore unis) apart from a small proportion of the elite, who will use them as finishing schools and as places to forge social networks
For the middle classes this could be a greater change to what happened to the working classes from the 1970s onwards.
I do have visions of a 2030s equivalent of Auf Wiedersehen Pet based on young middle class graduates, drowning in debt. drifting around and looking for work in some horrible place.
But here's the difference - Dennis, Oz, Bomber and the others had useful skills. What skills could a 2020s graduate bring to a world dominated by AI ?
I have no idea. Anything that involves unreplaceable humanity. Artisanal crafts (!!), singers, live piano players, vicars, travel writers... but it's quite a limited list
And anyone who thinks they are safe because they do a difficult physical task - plumbing, nursing, sparky, etc - they are ALSO in trouble as the latest advances in robots show that AI's can now train robots with zero human intervention, to do incredibly complex things. From delicate household chores to balancing on yoga balls
I know we are not meant to talk about AI but sometimes we simply have to. Because this is happening now and it is highly relevant to several of the themes of the day. eg University funding? - the whole university system is about to collapse within half a decade or so, and many of those jobs, and unis, will vanish, so how they are funded becomes irrelevant, they won't exist
I can see AI being restricted in the skilled physical jobs through the need for professional registrations or H&S regulations for the next few decades.
After that who knows.
Perhaps earlier as how many would want to train as a plumber in 2040 if it can then be done as well by a robot AI ?
Its likely that teenagers today have very vital decisions to make as to careers - the right choice and they'll be fine, the wrong choice and they'll never be able to catch back up.
There are mobile phone apps that give a visual or audio warning of exceeding the speed limit.
I've tried a couple of those and unfortunately they are almost worse than useless. They draw speed limit information from a geographical database, which ever one they use is not complete and often not accurate. Even if I'm doing the fairly short journey to Glasgow (about 20 miles) there are multiple roads where they either get the limit wrong (notably showing a 60 limit on a road with 40 signs) or just don't have any information at all. Google maps has the same inaccuracies, so that may be where they're getting the data from.
On topic, the lesson from Black Wednesday (negative equity and repossession), GE2017 (dementia tax), Truss and the interest rate spike (very expensive mortages) is you don't touch people's houses. You just don't touch them.
By the same token, when the Tories launched RTB, liberalised banks to lend and had lots of houses built in the 80s, they did very well. Right now, lots of young people can't really afford them, so they're not.
The secret is to ease access for people to good homes at good and low prices. And then leave them alone.
Labour actually have a plan for that, if they have the balls to go big on it.
Labour will do precisely zero. In fact I think they will end up rolling back some of the first time buyer specific reliefs.
Interesting. Do you have a link for the rolling back proposal?
No link, there's just no money to do anything. Plus Labour just completely u turned on their workers "new deal". They've got form.
Their plan (which they've give very quiet on) would be net positive for the public finances. It doesn't involve tax giveaways.
But net negative for their image, pushing through planning reform in the UK is notoriously difficult. It's why successive governments since the 70s have all dodged the issue.
Unpopular but necessary decisions, if taken early enough, are exactly what you should be doing with a large majority.
If they went big on it, they could transform the housing market to the great benefit of the economy.
That's hopelessly naive. Labour will have the same local pressure as the Tories when it comes to planning reforms the same local councillors warning them of disaster if the reforms are pushed through and Keir doesn't strike me as the force of nature type to just do it anyway. He's fundamentally weak, even now his position on the next election is "I'm not sure but we're the red team not the blue one" which is fine to get into power but he'll have little to no mandate to actually do anything, just as Boris did in 2019 despite the huge 80 seat majority.
Yes, but what do you think of the idea itself ?
Does it matter?
Yes. "No one's going to do anything", and "nothing can be done" are two very different things.
I don't have any great hopes of the next government, but I'm not going to write them off before they start. And I'm interested in what they *could* do to make a difference.
I'm in the Keir Starmer is too weak to do anything about it camp. Not that it's impossible. For me house price reform needs much more joined up thinking which also includes immigration reform, some has already happened with the current government pushing up minimum income levels and barring dependents on certain types of visa, it needs to go further though and it should be regional, a visa for London should be upwards of £50k minimum income, a visa for somewhere in the north could be a lot lower. The issue of house prices and immigration fuelling rent price increases is very much a London and South East phenomenon. Barring non-elite universities from issuing visas, no longer allowing dependents and reducing the 2 year free hit to 6 months will all help. Labour will do none of these and have been making noises about the "cruelty" of the new dependents rule. So no, house prices, rent prices and planning will see no appreciable difference under Labour.
I actually think, in the end, it will be a future Tory party that does it because they will have no choice but to become that party to win again. They almost had it with Dave and George but just didn't go far enough and then May and Boris undid all of it.
If you bar non-elite universities from issuing visas, they will go bankrupt. Unless you pay them substantially more for home student fees.
Then let them go bankrupt, they serve little to no purpose other than being visa factories anyway.
I wouldn't worry about non-elite universities going bankrupt.
Stories I've heard tell me that only about 10 universities are not at risk of going bankrupt unless things are fixed in ways that give them more money...
Genuine question:
We spend close to 50% of GDP on government / public spending - may be a little lower than other European countries but not massively different
Pension and welfare provision is not as generous. Many of our organisations - universities above, councils passim, others - appear on the verge of bankruptcy. There is a consensus that direct public services like the NHS are underfunded.
So where the fuck does all the money go?
It's an excellent question, and whoever solves it deserves a statue in every town square.
I don't know, but three places I'd like to interrogate:
1 Middlemen. By shrinking the state, have we created a set of contract managers who don't actually add any value themselves?
2 Rentiers. How much of the value people create just goes into house price and rent inflation?
3 Have we just got used to getting too much stuff for too little tax? Maybe Macmillan's strictures on family silver were right. And now there's none left.
There are mobile phone apps that give a visual or audio warning of exceeding the speed limit.
I've tried a couple of those and unfortunately they are almost worse than useless. They draw speed limit information from a geographical database, which ever one they use is not complete and often not accurate. Even if I'm doing the fairly short journey to Glasgow (about 20 miles) there are multiple roads where they either get the limit wrong (notably showing a 60 limit on a road with 40 signs) or just don't have any information at all. Google maps has the same inaccuracies, so that may be where they're getting the data from.
Makes you wonder how many speeding tickets driverless cars are going to cop.
On topic, the lesson from Black Wednesday (negative equity and repossession), GE2017 (dementia tax), Truss and the interest rate spike (very expensive mortages) is you don't touch people's houses. You just don't touch them.
By the same token, when the Tories launched RTB, liberalised banks to lend and had lots of houses built in the 80s, they did very well. Right now, lots of young people can't really afford them, so they're not.
The secret is to ease access for people to good homes at good and low prices. And then leave them alone.
Labour actually have a plan for that, if they have the balls to go big on it.
Labour will do precisely zero. In fact I think they will end up rolling back some of the first time buyer specific reliefs.
Interesting. Do you have a link for the rolling back proposal?
No link, there's just no money to do anything. Plus Labour just completely u turned on their workers "new deal". They've got form.
Their plan (which they've give very quiet on) would be net positive for the public finances. It doesn't involve tax giveaways.
But net negative for their image, pushing through planning reform in the UK is notoriously difficult. It's why successive governments since the 70s have all dodged the issue.
Unpopular but necessary decisions, if taken early enough, are exactly what you should be doing with a large majority.
If they went big on it, they could transform the housing market to the great benefit of the economy.
That's hopelessly naive. Labour will have the same local pressure as the Tories when it comes to planning reforms the same local councillors warning them of disaster if the reforms are pushed through and Keir doesn't strike me as the force of nature type to just do it anyway. He's fundamentally weak, even now his position on the next election is "I'm not sure but we're the red team not the blue one" which is fine to get into power but he'll have little to no mandate to actually do anything, just as Boris did in 2019 despite the huge 80 seat majority.
Yes, but what do you think of the idea itself ?
Does it matter?
Yes. "No one's going to do anything", and "nothing can be done" are two very different things.
I don't have any great hopes of the next government, but I'm not going to write them off before they start. And I'm interested in what they *could* do to make a difference.
I'm in the Keir Starmer is too weak to do anything about it camp. Not that it's impossible. For me house price reform needs much more joined up thinking which also includes immigration reform, some has already happened with the current government pushing up minimum income levels and barring dependents on certain types of visa, it needs to go further though and it should be regional, a visa for London should be upwards of £50k minimum income, a visa for somewhere in the north could be a lot lower. The issue of house prices and immigration fuelling rent price increases is very much a London and South East phenomenon. Barring non-elite universities from issuing visas, no longer allowing dependents and reducing the 2 year free hit to 6 months will all help. Labour will do none of these and have been making noises about the "cruelty" of the new dependents rule. So no, house prices, rent prices and planning will see no appreciable difference under Labour.
I actually think, in the end, it will be a future Tory party that does it because they will have no choice but to become that party to win again. They almost had it with Dave and George but just didn't go far enough and then May and Boris undid all of it.
If you bar non-elite universities from issuing visas, they will go bankrupt. Unless you pay them substantially more for home student fees.
Then let them go bankrupt, they serve little to no purpose other than being visa factories anyway.
I wouldn't worry about non-elite universities going bankrupt.
Stories I've heard tell me that only about 10 universities are not at risk of going bankrupt unless things are fixed in ways that give them more money...
AI means all universities are in trouble, and most will disappear within a decade or so
Why? The entire teaching method is busted:
"Reddit is flooded with students asking various subreddits how to deal with professors accusing them of generative AI use in their writing during this finals period. Professors are wondering how to deal with obvious generative AI use in their grading. We broke something"
"However bad you think the AI problem is at universities, it's worse."
Even if they can somehow fix this (spoiler: almost impossible) no students will want to rack up massive debt when there aren't good jobs at the end of it. This is the end of university education for almost all (and therefore unis) apart from a small proportion of the elite, who will use them as finishing schools and as places to forge social networks
For the middle classes this could be a greater change to what happened to the working classes from the 1970s onwards.
I do have visions of a 2030s equivalent of Auf Wiedersehen Pet based on young middle class graduates, drowning in debt. drifting around and looking for work in some horrible place.
But here's the difference - Dennis, Oz, Bomber and the others had useful skills. What skills could a 2020s graduate bring to a world dominated by AI ?
I have no idea. Anything that involves unreplaceable humanity. Artisanal crafts (!!), singers, live piano players, vicars, travel writers... but it's quite a limited list
And anyone who thinks they are safe because they do a difficult physical task - plumbing, nursing, sparky, etc - they are ALSO in trouble as the latest advances in robots show that AI's can now train robots with zero human intervention, to do incredibly complex things. From delicate household chores to balancing on yoga balls
I know we are not meant to talk about AI but sometimes we simply have to. Because this is happening now and it is highly relevant to several of the themes of the day. eg University funding? - the whole university system is about to collapse within half a decade or so, and many of those jobs, and unis, will vanish, so how they are funded becomes irrelevant, they won't exist
I'll be first in the queue for a fully functioning robot butler, that can do the laundry, clean the house, cook dinner be my sous chef... and load and unload the dishwasher, of course.
Massive challenges, no doubt, but there could be huge benefits too.
It's coming, it really is coming. 5 years? Less? For someone like you in a wheelchair it will be wonderful
..The incident took place in 2013 when the Russian president took Berlusconi on a hunting trip while the two were holidaying together in one of his dachas, said Fabrizio Cicchitto, a former senator from Berlusconi’s Forza Italia party. “Vladimir showed me a violent nature that I didn’t imagine in such a kind and rational man,” Cicchitto recalled Berlusconi saying after returning from Russia...
On topic, the lesson from Black Wednesday (negative equity and repossession), GE2017 (dementia tax), Truss and the interest rate spike (very expensive mortages) is you don't touch people's houses. You just don't touch them.
By the same token, when the Tories launched RTB, liberalised banks to lend and had lots of houses built in the 80s, they did very well. Right now, lots of young people can't really afford them, so they're not.
The secret is to ease access for people to good homes at good and low prices. And then leave them alone.
Labour actually have a plan for that, if they have the balls to go big on it.
Labour will do precisely zero. In fact I think they will end up rolling back some of the first time buyer specific reliefs.
Interesting. Do you have a link for the rolling back proposal?
No link, there's just no money to do anything. Plus Labour just completely u turned on their workers "new deal". They've got form.
Their plan (which they've give very quiet on) would be net positive for the public finances. It doesn't involve tax giveaways.
But net negative for their image, pushing through planning reform in the UK is notoriously difficult. It's why successive governments since the 70s have all dodged the issue.
Unpopular but necessary decisions, if taken early enough, are exactly what you should be doing with a large majority.
If they went big on it, they could transform the housing market to the great benefit of the economy.
That's hopelessly naive. Labour will have the same local pressure as the Tories when it comes to planning reforms the same local councillors warning them of disaster if the reforms are pushed through and Keir doesn't strike me as the force of nature type to just do it anyway. He's fundamentally weak, even now his position on the next election is "I'm not sure but we're the red team not the blue one" which is fine to get into power but he'll have little to no mandate to actually do anything, just as Boris did in 2019 despite the huge 80 seat majority.
Yes, but what do you think of the idea itself ?
Does it matter?
Yes. "No one's going to do anything", and "nothing can be done" are two very different things.
I don't have any great hopes of the next government, but I'm not going to write them off before they start. And I'm interested in what they *could* do to make a difference.
I'm in the Keir Starmer is too weak to do anything about it camp. Not that it's impossible. For me house price reform needs much more joined up thinking which also includes immigration reform, some has already happened with the current government pushing up minimum income levels and barring dependents on certain types of visa, it needs to go further though and it should be regional, a visa for London should be upwards of £50k minimum income, a visa for somewhere in the north could be a lot lower. The issue of house prices and immigration fuelling rent price increases is very much a London and South East phenomenon. Barring non-elite universities from issuing visas, no longer allowing dependents and reducing the 2 year free hit to 6 months will all help. Labour will do none of these and have been making noises about the "cruelty" of the new dependents rule. So no, house prices, rent prices and planning will see no appreciable difference under Labour.
I actually think, in the end, it will be a future Tory party that does it because they will have no choice but to become that party to win again. They almost had it with Dave and George but just didn't go far enough and then May and Boris undid all of it.
If you bar non-elite universities from issuing visas, they will go bankrupt. Unless you pay them substantially more for home student fees.
Then let them go bankrupt, they serve little to no purpose other than being visa factories anyway.
I wouldn't worry about non-elite universities going bankrupt.
Stories I've heard tell me that only about 10 universities are not at risk of going bankrupt unless things are fixed in ways that give them more money...
AI means all universities are in trouble, and most will disappear within a decade or so
Why? The entire teaching method is busted:
"Reddit is flooded with students asking various subreddits how to deal with professors accusing them of generative AI use in their writing during this finals period. Professors are wondering how to deal with obvious generative AI use in their grading. We broke something"
"However bad you think the AI problem is at universities, it's worse."
Even if they can somehow fix this (spoiler: almost impossible) no students will want to rack up massive debt when there aren't good jobs at the end of it. This is the end of university education for almost all (and therefore unis) apart from a small proportion of the elite, who will use them as finishing schools and as places to forge social networks
You miss the point that for most of time, finishing schools is precisely what universities were.
On topic, the lesson from Black Wednesday (negative equity and repossession), GE2017 (dementia tax), Truss and the interest rate spike (very expensive mortages) is you don't touch people's houses. You just don't touch them.
By the same token, when the Tories launched RTB, liberalised banks to lend and had lots of houses built in the 80s, they did very well. Right now, lots of young people can't really afford them, so they're not.
The secret is to ease access for people to good homes at good and low prices. And then leave them alone.
Labour actually have a plan for that, if they have the balls to go big on it.
Labour will do precisely zero. In fact I think they will end up rolling back some of the first time buyer specific reliefs.
Interesting. Do you have a link for the rolling back proposal?
No link, there's just no money to do anything. Plus Labour just completely u turned on their workers "new deal". They've got form.
Their plan (which they've give very quiet on) would be net positive for the public finances. It doesn't involve tax giveaways.
But net negative for their image, pushing through planning reform in the UK is notoriously difficult. It's why successive governments since the 70s have all dodged the issue.
Unpopular but necessary decisions, if taken early enough, are exactly what you should be doing with a large majority.
If they went big on it, they could transform the housing market to the great benefit of the economy.
That's hopelessly naive. Labour will have the same local pressure as the Tories when it comes to planning reforms the same local councillors warning them of disaster if the reforms are pushed through and Keir doesn't strike me as the force of nature type to just do it anyway. He's fundamentally weak, even now his position on the next election is "I'm not sure but we're the red team not the blue one" which is fine to get into power but he'll have little to no mandate to actually do anything, just as Boris did in 2019 despite the huge 80 seat majority.
Yes, but what do you think of the idea itself ?
Does it matter?
Yes. "No one's going to do anything", and "nothing can be done" are two very different things.
I don't have any great hopes of the next government, but I'm not going to write them off before they start. And I'm interested in what they *could* do to make a difference.
I'm in the Keir Starmer is too weak to do anything about it camp. Not that it's impossible. For me house price reform needs much more joined up thinking which also includes immigration reform, some has already happened with the current government pushing up minimum income levels and barring dependents on certain types of visa, it needs to go further though and it should be regional, a visa for London should be upwards of £50k minimum income, a visa for somewhere in the north could be a lot lower. The issue of house prices and immigration fuelling rent price increases is very much a London and South East phenomenon. Barring non-elite universities from issuing visas, no longer allowing dependents and reducing the 2 year free hit to 6 months will all help. Labour will do none of these and have been making noises about the "cruelty" of the new dependents rule. So no, house prices, rent prices and planning will see no appreciable difference under Labour.
I actually think, in the end, it will be a future Tory party that does it because they will have no choice but to become that party to win again. They almost had it with Dave and George but just didn't go far enough and then May and Boris undid all of it.
If you bar non-elite universities from issuing visas, they will go bankrupt. Unless you pay them substantially more for home student fees.
Then let them go bankrupt, they serve little to no purpose other than being visa factories anyway.
I wouldn't worry about non-elite universities going bankrupt.
Stories I've heard tell me that only about 10 universities are not at risk of going bankrupt unless things are fixed in ways that give them more money...
AI means all universities are in trouble, and most will disappear within a decade or so
Why? The entire teaching method is busted:
"Reddit is flooded with students asking various subreddits how to deal with professors accusing them of generative AI use in their writing during this finals period. Professors are wondering how to deal with obvious generative AI use in their grading. We broke something"
"However bad you think the AI problem is at universities, it's worse."
Even if they can somehow fix this (spoiler: almost impossible) no students will want to rack up massive debt when there aren't good jobs at the end of it. This is the end of university education for almost all (and therefore unis) apart from a small proportion of the elite, who will use them as finishing schools and as places to forge social networks
For the middle classes this could be a greater change to what happened to the working classes from the 1970s onwards.
I do have visions of a 2030s equivalent of Auf Wiedersehen Pet based on young middle class graduates, drowning in debt. drifting around and looking for work in some horrible place.
But here's the difference - Dennis, Oz, Bomber and the others had useful skills. What skills could a 2020s graduate bring to a world dominated by AI ?
I have no idea. Anything that involves unreplaceable humanity. Artisanal crafts (!!), singers, live piano players, vicars, travel writers... but it's quite a limited list
And anyone who thinks they are safe because they do a difficult physical task - plumbing, nursing, sparky, etc - they are ALSO in trouble as the latest advances in robots show that AI's can now train robots with zero human intervention, to do incredibly complex things. From delicate household chores to balancing on yoga balls
I know we are not meant to talk about AI but sometimes we simply have to. Because this is happening now and it is highly relevant to several of the themes of the day. eg University funding? - the whole university system is about to collapse within half a decade or so, and many of those jobs, and unis, will vanish, so how they are funded becomes irrelevant, they won't exist
I'll be first in the queue for a fully functioning robot butler, that can do the laundry, clean the house, cook dinner be my sous chef... and load and unload the dishwasher, of course.
Massive challenges, no doubt, but there could be huge benefits too.
It's coming, it really is coming. 5 years? Less? For someone like you in a wheelchair it will be wonderful
On topic, the lesson from Black Wednesday (negative equity and repossession), GE2017 (dementia tax), Truss and the interest rate spike (very expensive mortages) is you don't touch people's houses. You just don't touch them.
By the same token, when the Tories launched RTB, liberalised banks to lend and had lots of houses built in the 80s, they did very well. Right now, lots of young people can't really afford them, so they're not.
The secret is to ease access for people to good homes at good and low prices. And then leave them alone.
Labour actually have a plan for that, if they have the balls to go big on it.
Labour will do precisely zero. In fact I think they will end up rolling back some of the first time buyer specific reliefs.
Interesting. Do you have a link for the rolling back proposal?
No link, there's just no money to do anything. Plus Labour just completely u turned on their workers "new deal". They've got form.
Their plan (which they've give very quiet on) would be net positive for the public finances. It doesn't involve tax giveaways.
But net negative for their image, pushing through planning reform in the UK is notoriously difficult. It's why successive governments since the 70s have all dodged the issue.
Unpopular but necessary decisions, if taken early enough, are exactly what you should be doing with a large majority.
If they went big on it, they could transform the housing market to the great benefit of the economy.
That's hopelessly naive. Labour will have the same local pressure as the Tories when it comes to planning reforms the same local councillors warning them of disaster if the reforms are pushed through and Keir doesn't strike me as the force of nature type to just do it anyway. He's fundamentally weak, even now his position on the next election is "I'm not sure but we're the red team not the blue one" which is fine to get into power but he'll have little to no mandate to actually do anything, just as Boris did in 2019 despite the huge 80 seat majority.
Yes, but what do you think of the idea itself ?
Does it matter?
Yes. "No one's going to do anything", and "nothing can be done" are two very different things.
I don't have any great hopes of the next government, but I'm not going to write them off before they start. And I'm interested in what they *could* do to make a difference.
I'm in the Keir Starmer is too weak to do anything about it camp. Not that it's impossible. For me house price reform needs much more joined up thinking which also includes immigration reform, some has already happened with the current government pushing up minimum income levels and barring dependents on certain types of visa, it needs to go further though and it should be regional, a visa for London should be upwards of £50k minimum income, a visa for somewhere in the north could be a lot lower. The issue of house prices and immigration fuelling rent price increases is very much a London and South East phenomenon. Barring non-elite universities from issuing visas, no longer allowing dependents and reducing the 2 year free hit to 6 months will all help. Labour will do none of these and have been making noises about the "cruelty" of the new dependents rule. So no, house prices, rent prices and planning will see no appreciable difference under Labour.
I actually think, in the end, it will be a future Tory party that does it because they will have no choice but to become that party to win again. They almost had it with Dave and George but just didn't go far enough and then May and Boris undid all of it.
If you bar non-elite universities from issuing visas, they will go bankrupt. Unless you pay them substantially more for home student fees.
Then let them go bankrupt, they serve little to no purpose other than being visa factories anyway.
I wouldn't worry about non-elite universities going bankrupt.
Stories I've heard tell me that only about 10 universities are not at risk of going bankrupt unless things are fixed in ways that give them more money...
AI means all universities are in trouble, and most will disappear within a decade or so
Why? The entire teaching method is busted:
"Reddit is flooded with students asking various subreddits how to deal with professors accusing them of generative AI use in their writing during this finals period. Professors are wondering how to deal with obvious generative AI use in their grading. We broke something"
"However bad you think the AI problem is at universities, it's worse."
Even if they can somehow fix this (spoiler: almost impossible) no students will want to rack up massive debt when there aren't good jobs at the end of it. This is the end of university education for almost all (and therefore unis) apart from a small proportion of the elite, who will use them as finishing schools and as places to forge social networks
For the middle classes this could be a greater change to what happened to the working classes from the 1970s onwards.
I do have visions of a 2030s equivalent of Auf Wiedersehen Pet based on young middle class graduates, drowning in debt. drifting around and looking for work in some horrible place.
But here's the difference - Dennis, Oz, Bomber and the others had useful skills. What skills could a 2020s graduate bring to a world dominated by AI ?
I have no idea. Anything that involves unreplaceable humanity. Artisanal crafts (!!), singers, live piano players, vicars, travel writers... but it's quite a limited list
And anyone who thinks they are safe because they do a difficult physical task - plumbing, nursing, sparky, etc - they are ALSO in trouble as the latest advances in robots show that AI's can now train robots with zero human intervention, to do incredibly complex things. From delicate household chores to balancing on yoga balls
I know we are not meant to talk about AI but sometimes we simply have to. Because this is happening now and it is highly relevant to several of the themes of the day. eg University funding? - the whole university system is about to collapse within half a decade or so, and many of those jobs, and unis, will vanish, so how they are funded becomes irrelevant, they won't exist
I can see AI being restricted in the skilled physical jobs through the need for professional registrations or H&S regulations for the next few decades.
After that who knows.
Perhaps earlier as how many would want to train as a plumber in 2040 if it can then be done as well by a robot AI ?
Its likely that teenagers today have very vital decisions to make as to careers - the right choice and they'll be fine, the wrong choice and they'll never be able to catch back up.
No, that won't happen - AI being restricted - not unless all of humanity unites against the machines, which is possible but really not probable. Does the world look united?
Any country that decides to cripple itself economically by restricting tasks - lawyering, doctoring, writing, banking, flint knapping, butlering, whatever - to humans - will be brutally out-competed by other nations that use the much cheaper much more effective robots, and then the efficient nation will conquer the nice human nation. This is raw Darwinism
There is no stopping the machines, unless, for some unforeseen reason, they hit a sudden brick wall of development, That might happen. No one expected the GPT model to be so superbly successful, it was a massive surprise on the upside, we may get a surprise on the downside
But I really wouldn't bank on it
As for kids today, I am telling my teenage daughters to study something they love, don't worry about careers. No one can predict what is coming, the world will likely be transformed
So I am not just venting or trolling on PB to provoke, I really really believe this, and I am acting upon it: this is the advice I give my own kids
So, after all said and done who’s top Psephologist on PB? In my mind it’s clearly me. 😇
Last week PBs MoonRabbit said Labour will lead by just 6 points at the General Election result - and was dubbed “Loon Rabbit.” Today Professor Michael Thrasher seems to agree with me, and says this:
What does this this do to the Professors credibility, if he’s in the same headspace as “Loon Rabbit?”
Additionally - I forecasted Labour to get 39% at the General Election - Yesterdays Opinium poll puts Labour on 40%.
Which brings us to comfort blanket for Labour supporters of not looking at shares, but the lead. What was apparent lunacy from me was to say that lead is mostly based on how loudly Reform are barking in all this opinion polling, but come General Election night they won’t be loudly barking at all. Now after these set of real results, do you still think this is so crazy a forecast?
Further support to me is, at two minutes past midnight on Friday morning I posted to PB my prediction for Khans win and winning margin that was spot on, whilst the rest of the world appeared in La La land on this, including noises from the two main parties.
Also additionally here I am in Labours new fiefdom of North Yorkshire, which I did not forecast, even though last weeks poll in Yorkshire Post was spot on. Conclusion perhaps, we are all emotional humans, and so when presented with forecast really don’t want to happen, we can refuse to accept it, start throwing toys out the pram, and resort to name calling.
Very interesting. You've certainly convinced me... that Labour are set for their biggest ever landslide.
Her central point, that there will inevitably be swingback ahead of the election, is I think pretty sound. But I’d argue we saw a significant portion of that in the locals already because Reform hardly stood anywhere. So the return home from Reform showed up in the voting stats. But not in the Blackpool South by-election, which more closely reflected pre-swingback polling.
We also saw a tremendous performance by the Green Party and the usual local election outperformance by the Lib Dems which narrows the Tory-Labour gap.
On topic, the lesson from Black Wednesday (negative equity and repossession), GE2017 (dementia tax), Truss and the interest rate spike (very expensive mortages) is you don't touch people's houses. You just don't touch them.
By the same token, when the Tories launched RTB, liberalised banks to lend and had lots of houses built in the 80s, they did very well. Right now, lots of young people can't really afford them, so they're not.
The secret is to ease access for people to good homes at good and low prices. And then leave them alone.
Labour actually have a plan for that, if they have the balls to go big on it.
Labour will do precisely zero. In fact I think they will end up rolling back some of the first time buyer specific reliefs.
Interesting. Do you have a link for the rolling back proposal?
No link, there's just no money to do anything. Plus Labour just completely u turned on their workers "new deal". They've got form.
Their plan (which they've give very quiet on) would be net positive for the public finances. It doesn't involve tax giveaways.
But net negative for their image, pushing through planning reform in the UK is notoriously difficult. It's why successive governments since the 70s have all dodged the issue.
Unpopular but necessary decisions, if taken early enough, are exactly what you should be doing with a large majority.
If they went big on it, they could transform the housing market to the great benefit of the economy.
That's hopelessly naive. Labour will have the same local pressure as the Tories when it comes to planning reforms the same local councillors warning them of disaster if the reforms are pushed through and Keir doesn't strike me as the force of nature type to just do it anyway. He's fundamentally weak, even now his position on the next election is "I'm not sure but we're the red team not the blue one" which is fine to get into power but he'll have little to no mandate to actually do anything, just as Boris did in 2019 despite the huge 80 seat majority.
Yes, but what do you think of the idea itself ?
Does it matter?
Yes. "No one's going to do anything", and "nothing can be done" are two very different things.
I don't have any great hopes of the next government, but I'm not going to write them off before they start. And I'm interested in what they *could* do to make a difference.
I'm in the Keir Starmer is too weak to do anything about it camp. Not that it's impossible. For me house price reform needs much more joined up thinking which also includes immigration reform, some has already happened with the current government pushing up minimum income levels and barring dependents on certain types of visa, it needs to go further though and it should be regional, a visa for London should be upwards of £50k minimum income, a visa for somewhere in the north could be a lot lower. The issue of house prices and immigration fuelling rent price increases is very much a London and South East phenomenon. Barring non-elite universities from issuing visas, no longer allowing dependents and reducing the 2 year free hit to 6 months will all help. Labour will do none of these and have been making noises about the "cruelty" of the new dependents rule. So no, house prices, rent prices and planning will see no appreciable difference under Labour.
I actually think, in the end, it will be a future Tory party that does it because they will have no choice but to become that party to win again. They almost had it with Dave and George but just didn't go far enough and then May and Boris undid all of it.
If you bar non-elite universities from issuing visas, they will go bankrupt. Unless you pay them substantially more for home student fees.
Then let them go bankrupt, they serve little to no purpose other than being visa factories anyway.
I wouldn't worry about non-elite universities going bankrupt.
Stories I've heard tell me that only about 10 universities are not at risk of going bankrupt unless things are fixed in ways that give them more money...
AI means all universities are in trouble, and most will disappear within a decade or so
Why? The entire teaching method is busted:
"Reddit is flooded with students asking various subreddits how to deal with professors accusing them of generative AI use in their writing during this finals period. Professors are wondering how to deal with obvious generative AI use in their grading. We broke something"
"However bad you think the AI problem is at universities, it's worse."
Even if they can somehow fix this (spoiler: almost impossible) no students will want to rack up massive debt when there aren't good jobs at the end of it. This is the end of university education for almost all (and therefore unis) apart from a small proportion of the elite, who will use them as finishing schools and as places to forge social networks
You miss the point that for most of time, finishing schools is precisely what universities were.
For the rich who don't mind the debt, yes. For the rest, no
Interesting that in London close to 40% voted either Hall, RefUK or similar parties to RefUK. Fits in with the 40% Brexit vote in London in 2016. Suggest that bloc will be higher than 40% in most of the rest of the country (excl. Scotland). Indeed in the West Midlands the Tories got 37.5% and RefUK 6%.
The bloc is still there but unwilling to rally behind voting Conservative at the moment.
Hence, Labour will win. This time.
The smart Labour people will note that there's no guarantee they will conveniently continue to do so for 10-15 years.
On topic, the lesson from Black Wednesday (negative equity and repossession), GE2017 (dementia tax), Truss and the interest rate spike (very expensive mortages) is you don't touch people's houses. You just don't touch them.
By the same token, when the Tories launched RTB, liberalised banks to lend and had lots of houses built in the 80s, they did very well. Right now, lots of young people can't really afford them, so they're not.
The secret is to ease access for people to good homes at good and low prices. And then leave them alone.
Labour actually have a plan for that, if they have the balls to go big on it.
Labour will do precisely zero. In fact I think they will end up rolling back some of the first time buyer specific reliefs.
Interesting. Do you have a link for the rolling back proposal?
No link, there's just no money to do anything. Plus Labour just completely u turned on their workers "new deal". They've got form.
Their plan (which they've give very quiet on) would be net positive for the public finances. It doesn't involve tax giveaways.
But net negative for their image, pushing through planning reform in the UK is notoriously difficult. It's why successive governments since the 70s have all dodged the issue.
Unpopular but necessary decisions, if taken early enough, are exactly what you should be doing with a large majority.
If they went big on it, they could transform the housing market to the great benefit of the economy.
That's hopelessly naive. Labour will have the same local pressure as the Tories when it comes to planning reforms the same local councillors warning them of disaster if the reforms are pushed through and Keir doesn't strike me as the force of nature type to just do it anyway. He's fundamentally weak, even now his position on the next election is "I'm not sure but we're the red team not the blue one" which is fine to get into power but he'll have little to no mandate to actually do anything, just as Boris did in 2019 despite the huge 80 seat majority.
Yes, but what do you think of the idea itself ?
Does it matter?
Yes. "No one's going to do anything", and "nothing can be done" are two very different things.
I don't have any great hopes of the next government, but I'm not going to write them off before they start. And I'm interested in what they *could* do to make a difference.
I'm in the Keir Starmer is too weak to do anything about it camp. Not that it's impossible. For me house price reform needs much more joined up thinking which also includes immigration reform, some has already happened with the current government pushing up minimum income levels and barring dependents on certain types of visa, it needs to go further though and it should be regional, a visa for London should be upwards of £50k minimum income, a visa for somewhere in the north could be a lot lower. The issue of house prices and immigration fuelling rent price increases is very much a London and South East phenomenon. Barring non-elite universities from issuing visas, no longer allowing dependents and reducing the 2 year free hit to 6 months will all help. Labour will do none of these and have been making noises about the "cruelty" of the new dependents rule. So no, house prices, rent prices and planning will see no appreciable difference under Labour.
I actually think, in the end, it will be a future Tory party that does it because they will have no choice but to become that party to win again. They almost had it with Dave and George but just didn't go far enough and then May and Boris undid all of it.
If you bar non-elite universities from issuing visas, they will go bankrupt. Unless you pay them substantially more for home student fees.
Then let them go bankrupt, they serve little to no purpose other than being visa factories anyway.
I wouldn't worry about non-elite universities going bankrupt.
Stories I've heard tell me that only about 10 universities are not at risk of going bankrupt unless things are fixed in ways that give them more money...
AI means all universities are in trouble, and most will disappear within a decade or so
Why? The entire teaching method is busted:
"Reddit is flooded with students asking various subreddits how to deal with professors accusing them of generative AI use in their writing during this finals period. Professors are wondering how to deal with obvious generative AI use in their grading. We broke something"
"However bad you think the AI problem is at universities, it's worse."
Even if they can somehow fix this (spoiler: almost impossible) no students will want to rack up massive debt when there aren't good jobs at the end of it. This is the end of university education for almost all (and therefore unis) apart from a small proportion of the elite, who will use them as finishing schools and as places to forge social networks
For the middle classes this could be a greater change to what happened to the working classes from the 1970s onwards.
I do have visions of a 2030s equivalent of Auf Wiedersehen Pet based on young middle class graduates, drowning in debt. drifting around and looking for work in some horrible place.
But here's the difference - Dennis, Oz, Bomber and the others had useful skills. What skills could a 2020s graduate bring to a world dominated by AI ?
I have no idea. Anything that involves unreplaceable humanity. Artisanal crafts (!!), singers, live piano players, vicars, travel writers... but it's quite a limited list
And anyone who thinks they are safe because they do a difficult physical task - plumbing, nursing, sparky, etc - they are ALSO in trouble as the latest advances in robots show that AI's can now train robots with zero human intervention, to do incredibly complex things. From delicate household chores to balancing on yoga balls
I know we are not meant to talk about AI but sometimes we simply have to. Because this is happening now and it is highly relevant to several of the themes of the day. eg University funding? - the whole university system is about to collapse within half a decade or so, and many of those jobs, and unis, will vanish, so how they are funded becomes irrelevant, they won't exist
I'll be first in the queue for a fully functioning robot butler, that can do the laundry, clean the house, cook dinner be my sous chef... and load and unload the dishwasher, of course.
Massive challenges, no doubt, but there could be huge benefits too.
It's coming, it really is coming. 5 years? Less? For someone like you in a wheelchair it will be wonderful
There are mobile phone apps that give a visual or audio warning of exceeding the speed limit.
I've tried a couple of those and unfortunately they are almost worse than useless. They draw speed limit information from a geographical database, which ever one they use is not complete and often not accurate. Even if I'm doing the fairly short journey to Glasgow (about 20 miles) there are multiple roads where they either get the limit wrong (notably showing a 60 limit on a road with 40 signs) or just don't have any information at all. Google maps has the same inaccuracies, so that may be where they're getting the data from.
That's interesting - I haven't used those.
If they use GPS I would expect quite good accuracy.
The app in my Skoda does both GPS and also reads road signs via camera I think, and is really excellent. Quite often it will switch the displayed speed limit within a metre or two.
..The incident took place in 2013 when the Russian president took Berlusconi on a hunting trip while the two were holidaying together in one of his dachas, said Fabrizio Cicchitto, a former senator from Berlusconi’s Forza Italia party. “Vladimir showed me a violent nature that I didn’t imagine in such a kind and rational man,” Cicchitto recalled Berlusconi saying after returning from Russia...
Hard to know what to do in that situation. Say thanks and put it in your pocket?
I would like to ask all these students converting to Islam: if Allah (SWT) exists, why has he forsaken the Palestinian people these last few months?
If they are genuinely converting, they will know that Islam has a very strong doctrine of fate and the disengagement of the divine from daily life, and therefore Allah can seem very capricious - a contrast to the Christian concept of active incarnation.
IMO that has a couple of related points. One is that the Prophet Mohammed left out of his religion the Jewish / Christian concepts he had trouble getting his head around, such as the Trinity and indeed incarnation.
The other is that imo there is perhaps more an acceptance of oppression and failure in some Islamic societies - "God wills it".
I think this is potentially a problem. Muslims tend to take conversion seriously, and students doing it as a virtue signalling exercise are on a sticky wicket.
How is this different from a restaurant handing out Sombreros in celebration of Mexico, which was banned by a student union for being 'racist'?
On topic, the lesson from Black Wednesday (negative equity and repossession), GE2017 (dementia tax), Truss and the interest rate spike (very expensive mortages) is you don't touch people's houses. You just don't touch them.
By the same token, when the Tories launched RTB, liberalised banks to lend and had lots of houses built in the 80s, they did very well. Right now, lots of young people can't really afford them, so they're not.
The secret is to ease access for people to good homes at good and low prices. And then leave them alone.
Labour actually have a plan for that, if they have the balls to go big on it.
Labour will do precisely zero. In fact I think they will end up rolling back some of the first time buyer specific reliefs.
Interesting. Do you have a link for the rolling back proposal?
No link, there's just no money to do anything. Plus Labour just completely u turned on their workers "new deal". They've got form.
Their plan (which they've give very quiet on) would be net positive for the public finances. It doesn't involve tax giveaways.
But net negative for their image, pushing through planning reform in the UK is notoriously difficult. It's why successive governments since the 70s have all dodged the issue.
Unpopular but necessary decisions, if taken early enough, are exactly what you should be doing with a large majority.
If they went big on it, they could transform the housing market to the great benefit of the economy.
That's hopelessly naive. Labour will have the same local pressure as the Tories when it comes to planning reforms the same local councillors warning them of disaster if the reforms are pushed through and Keir doesn't strike me as the force of nature type to just do it anyway. He's fundamentally weak, even now his position on the next election is "I'm not sure but we're the red team not the blue one" which is fine to get into power but he'll have little to no mandate to actually do anything, just as Boris did in 2019 despite the huge 80 seat majority.
Yes, but what do you think of the idea itself ?
Does it matter?
Yes. "No one's going to do anything", and "nothing can be done" are two very different things.
I don't have any great hopes of the next government, but I'm not going to write them off before they start. And I'm interested in what they *could* do to make a difference.
I'm in the Keir Starmer is too weak to do anything about it camp. Not that it's impossible. For me house price reform needs much more joined up thinking which also includes immigration reform, some has already happened with the current government pushing up minimum income levels and barring dependents on certain types of visa, it needs to go further though and it should be regional, a visa for London should be upwards of £50k minimum income, a visa for somewhere in the north could be a lot lower. The issue of house prices and immigration fuelling rent price increases is very much a London and South East phenomenon. Barring non-elite universities from issuing visas, no longer allowing dependents and reducing the 2 year free hit to 6 months will all help. Labour will do none of these and have been making noises about the "cruelty" of the new dependents rule. So no, house prices, rent prices and planning will see no appreciable difference under Labour.
I actually think, in the end, it will be a future Tory party that does it because they will have no choice but to become that party to win again. They almost had it with Dave and George but just didn't go far enough and then May and Boris undid all of it.
If you bar non-elite universities from issuing visas, they will go bankrupt. Unless you pay them substantially more for home student fees.
Then let them go bankrupt, they serve little to no purpose other than being visa factories anyway.
I wouldn't worry about non-elite universities going bankrupt.
Stories I've heard tell me that only about 10 universities are not at risk of going bankrupt unless things are fixed in ways that give them more money...
Genuine question:
We spend close to 50% of GDP on government / public spending - may be a little lower than other European countries but not massively different
Pension and welfare provision is not as generous. Many of our organisations - universities above, councils passim, others - appear on the verge of bankruptcy. There is a consensus that direct public services like the NHS are underfunded.
So where the fuck does all the money go?
It's an excellent question, and whoever solves it deserves a statue in every town square.
I don't know, but three places I'd like to interrogate:
1 Middlemen. By shrinking the state, have we created a set of contract managers who don't actually add any value themselves?
2 Rentiers. How much of the value people create just goes into house price and rent inflation?
3 Have we just got used to getting too much stuff for too little tax? Maybe Macmillan's strictures on family silver were right. And now there's none left.
A low wage, low productivity economy that's massively dominated by over-priced and excessively scarce residential property. Mortgage and especially rental costs are so huge that a household that lives in a property that they own outright only needs a fraction of the income of one that's saddled with those expenses to live comfortably.
You can't have thriving commerce and industry if most of the liquid capital which would otherwise go to fund it is being poured into piles of inert bricks.
I think this is potentially a problem. Muslims tend to take conversion seriously, and students doing it as a virtue signalling exercise are on a sticky wicket.
Well, quite. They will be running to nurse if they take it seriously and then accuse them of apostasy. That's no joke.
It's a very dumb thing to do for a zeitgeisty social media share, but such short-termism is now pretty endemic in our society.
On topic, the lesson from Black Wednesday (negative equity and repossession), GE2017 (dementia tax), Truss and the interest rate spike (very expensive mortages) is you don't touch people's houses. You just don't touch them.
By the same token, when the Tories launched RTB, liberalised banks to lend and had lots of houses built in the 80s, they did very well. Right now, lots of young people can't really afford them, so they're not.
The secret is to ease access for people to good homes at good and low prices. And then leave them alone.
Labour actually have a plan for that, if they have the balls to go big on it.
Labour will do precisely zero. In fact I think they will end up rolling back some of the first time buyer specific reliefs.
Interesting. Do you have a link for the rolling back proposal?
No link, there's just no money to do anything. Plus Labour just completely u turned on their workers "new deal". They've got form.
Their plan (which they've give very quiet on) would be net positive for the public finances. It doesn't involve tax giveaways.
But net negative for their image, pushing through planning reform in the UK is notoriously difficult. It's why successive governments since the 70s have all dodged the issue.
Unpopular but necessary decisions, if taken early enough, are exactly what you should be doing with a large majority.
If they went big on it, they could transform the housing market to the great benefit of the economy.
That's hopelessly naive. Labour will have the same local pressure as the Tories when it comes to planning reforms the same local councillors warning them of disaster if the reforms are pushed through and Keir doesn't strike me as the force of nature type to just do it anyway. He's fundamentally weak, even now his position on the next election is "I'm not sure but we're the red team not the blue one" which is fine to get into power but he'll have little to no mandate to actually do anything, just as Boris did in 2019 despite the huge 80 seat majority.
Yes, but what do you think of the idea itself ?
Does it matter?
Yes. "No one's going to do anything", and "nothing can be done" are two very different things.
I don't have any great hopes of the next government, but I'm not going to write them off before they start. And I'm interested in what they *could* do to make a difference.
I'm in the Keir Starmer is too weak to do anything about it camp. Not that it's impossible. For me house price reform needs much more joined up thinking which also includes immigration reform, some has already happened with the current government pushing up minimum income levels and barring dependents on certain types of visa, it needs to go further though and it should be regional, a visa for London should be upwards of £50k minimum income, a visa for somewhere in the north could be a lot lower. The issue of house prices and immigration fuelling rent price increases is very much a London and South East phenomenon. Barring non-elite universities from issuing visas, no longer allowing dependents and reducing the 2 year free hit to 6 months will all help. Labour will do none of these and have been making noises about the "cruelty" of the new dependents rule. So no, house prices, rent prices and planning will see no appreciable difference under Labour.
I actually think, in the end, it will be a future Tory party that does it because they will have no choice but to become that party to win again. They almost had it with Dave and George but just didn't go far enough and then May and Boris undid all of it.
If you bar non-elite universities from issuing visas, they will go bankrupt. Unless you pay them substantially more for home student fees.
Then let them go bankrupt, they serve little to no purpose other than being visa factories anyway.
I wouldn't worry about non-elite universities going bankrupt.
Stories I've heard tell me that only about 10 universities are not at risk of going bankrupt unless things are fixed in ways that give them more money...
AI means all universities are in trouble, and most will disappear within a decade or so
Why? The entire teaching method is busted:
"Reddit is flooded with students asking various subreddits how to deal with professors accusing them of generative AI use in their writing during this finals period. Professors are wondering how to deal with obvious generative AI use in their grading. We broke something"
"However bad you think the AI problem is at universities, it's worse."
Even if they can somehow fix this (spoiler: almost impossible) no students will want to rack up massive debt when there aren't good jobs at the end of it. This is the end of university education for almost all (and therefore unis) apart from a small proportion of the elite, who will use them as finishing schools and as places to forge social networks
For the middle classes this could be a greater change to what happened to the working classes from the 1970s onwards.
I do have visions of a 2030s equivalent of Auf Wiedersehen Pet based on young middle class graduates, drowning in debt. drifting around and looking for work in some horrible place.
But here's the difference - Dennis, Oz, Bomber and the others had useful skills. What skills could a 2020s graduate bring to a world dominated by AI ?
I have no idea. Anything that involves unreplaceable humanity. Artisanal crafts (!!), singers, live piano players, vicars, travel writers... but it's quite a limited list
And anyone who thinks they are safe because they do a difficult physical task - plumbing, nursing, sparky, etc - they are ALSO in trouble as the latest advances in robots show that AI's can now train robots with zero human intervention, to do incredibly complex things. From delicate household chores to balancing on yoga balls
I know we are not meant to talk about AI but sometimes we simply have to. Because this is happening now and it is highly relevant to several of the themes of the day. eg University funding? - the whole university system is about to collapse within half a decade or so, and many of those jobs, and unis, will vanish, so how they are funded becomes irrelevant, they won't exist
I'll be first in the queue for a fully functioning robot butler, that can do the laundry, clean the house, cook dinner be my sous chef... and load and unload the dishwasher, of course.
Massive challenges, no doubt, but there could be huge benefits too.
It's coming, it really is coming. 5 years? Less? For someone like you in a wheelchair it will be wonderful
On topic, the lesson from Black Wednesday (negative equity and repossession), GE2017 (dementia tax), Truss and the interest rate spike (very expensive mortages) is you don't touch people's houses. You just don't touch them.
By the same token, when the Tories launched RTB, liberalised banks to lend and had lots of houses built in the 80s, they did very well. Right now, lots of young people can't really afford them, so they're not.
The secret is to ease access for people to good homes at good and low prices. And then leave them alone.
Labour actually have a plan for that, if they have the balls to go big on it.
Labour will do precisely zero. In fact I think they will end up rolling back some of the first time buyer specific reliefs.
Interesting. Do you have a link for the rolling back proposal?
No link, there's just no money to do anything. Plus Labour just completely u turned on their workers "new deal". They've got form.
Their plan (which they've give very quiet on) would be net positive for the public finances. It doesn't involve tax giveaways.
But net negative for their image, pushing through planning reform in the UK is notoriously difficult. It's why successive governments since the 70s have all dodged the issue.
Unpopular but necessary decisions, if taken early enough, are exactly what you should be doing with a large majority.
If they went big on it, they could transform the housing market to the great benefit of the economy.
That's hopelessly naive. Labour will have the same local pressure as the Tories when it comes to planning reforms the same local councillors warning them of disaster if the reforms are pushed through and Keir doesn't strike me as the force of nature type to just do it anyway. He's fundamentally weak, even now his position on the next election is "I'm not sure but we're the red team not the blue one" which is fine to get into power but he'll have little to no mandate to actually do anything, just as Boris did in 2019 despite the huge 80 seat majority.
Yes, but what do you think of the idea itself ?
Does it matter?
Yes. "No one's going to do anything", and "nothing can be done" are two very different things.
I don't have any great hopes of the next government, but I'm not going to write them off before they start. And I'm interested in what they *could* do to make a difference.
I'm in the Keir Starmer is too weak to do anything about it camp. Not that it's impossible. For me house price reform needs much more joined up thinking which also includes immigration reform, some has already happened with the current government pushing up minimum income levels and barring dependents on certain types of visa, it needs to go further though and it should be regional, a visa for London should be upwards of £50k minimum income, a visa for somewhere in the north could be a lot lower. The issue of house prices and immigration fuelling rent price increases is very much a London and South East phenomenon. Barring non-elite universities from issuing visas, no longer allowing dependents and reducing the 2 year free hit to 6 months will all help. Labour will do none of these and have been making noises about the "cruelty" of the new dependents rule. So no, house prices, rent prices and planning will see no appreciable difference under Labour.
I actually think, in the end, it will be a future Tory party that does it because they will have no choice but to become that party to win again. They almost had it with Dave and George but just didn't go far enough and then May and Boris undid all of it.
If you bar non-elite universities from issuing visas, they will go bankrupt. Unless you pay them substantially more for home student fees.
Then let them go bankrupt, they serve little to no purpose other than being visa factories anyway.
I wouldn't worry about non-elite universities going bankrupt.
Stories I've heard tell me that only about 10 universities are not at risk of going bankrupt unless things are fixed in ways that give them more money...
AI means all universities are in trouble, and most will disappear within a decade or so
Why? The entire teaching method is busted:
"Reddit is flooded with students asking various subreddits how to deal with professors accusing them of generative AI use in their writing during this finals period. Professors are wondering how to deal with obvious generative AI use in their grading. We broke something"
"However bad you think the AI problem is at universities, it's worse."
Even if they can somehow fix this (spoiler: almost impossible) no students will want to rack up massive debt when there aren't good jobs at the end of it. This is the end of university education for almost all (and therefore unis) apart from a small proportion of the elite, who will use them as finishing schools and as places to forge social networks
For the middle classes this could be a greater change to what happened to the working classes from the 1970s onwards.
I do have visions of a 2030s equivalent of Auf Wiedersehen Pet based on young middle class graduates, drowning in debt. drifting around and looking for work in some horrible place.
But here's the difference - Dennis, Oz, Bomber and the others had useful skills. What skills could a 2020s graduate bring to a world dominated by AI ?
I have no idea. Anything that involves unreplaceable humanity. Artisanal crafts (!!), singers, live piano players, vicars, travel writers... but it's quite a limited list
And anyone who thinks they are safe because they do a difficult physical task - plumbing, nursing, sparky, etc - they are ALSO in trouble as the latest advances in robots show that AI's can now train robots with zero human intervention, to do incredibly complex things. From delicate household chores to balancing on yoga balls
I know we are not meant to talk about AI but sometimes we simply have to. Because this is happening now and it is highly relevant to several of the themes of the day. eg University funding? - the whole university system is about to collapse within half a decade or so, and many of those jobs, and unis, will vanish, so how they are funded becomes irrelevant, they won't exist
I can see AI being restricted in the skilled physical jobs through the need for professional registrations or H&S regulations for the next few decades.
After that who knows.
Perhaps earlier as how many would want to train as a plumber in 2040 if it can then be done as well by a robot AI ?
Its likely that teenagers today have very vital decisions to make as to careers - the right choice and they'll be fine, the wrong choice and they'll never be able to catch back up.
No, that won't happen - AI being restricted - not unless all of humanity unites against the machines, which is possible but really not probable. Does the world look united?
Any country that decides to cripple itself economically by restricting tasks - lawyering, doctoring, writing, banking, flint knapping, butlering, whatever - to humans - will be brutally out-competed by other nations that use the much cheaper much more effective robots, and then the efficient nation will conquer the nice human nation. This is raw Darwinism
There is no stopping the machines, unless, for some unforeseen reason, they hit a sudden brick wall of development, That might happen. No one expected the GPT model to be so superbly successful, it was a massive surprise on the upside, we may get a surprise on the downside
But I really wouldn't bank on it
As for kids today, I am telling my teenage daughters to study something they love, don't worry about careers. No one can predict what is coming, the world will likely be transformed
So I am not just venting or trolling on PB to provoke, I really really believe this, and I am acting upon it: this is the advice I give my own kids
Inertia.
To do many jobs you need some sort of professional qualification or registration or to have done some course which says you're safe to do it.
If a robot AI appeared tomorrow it would not be allowed to do many things except as a tool used by the current worker.
Now all those restrictions and regulations can be modified but that will take longer than you expect because there are so many vested interests which will oppose plus the usual bureaucratic inertia.
On topic, the lesson from Black Wednesday (negative equity and repossession), GE2017 (dementia tax), Truss and the interest rate spike (very expensive mortages) is you don't touch people's houses. You just don't touch them.
By the same token, when the Tories launched RTB, liberalised banks to lend and had lots of houses built in the 80s, they did very well. Right now, lots of young people can't really afford them, so they're not.
The secret is to ease access for people to good homes at good and low prices. And then leave them alone.
Labour actually have a plan for that, if they have the balls to go big on it.
Labour will do precisely zero. In fact I think they will end up rolling back some of the first time buyer specific reliefs.
Interesting. Do you have a link for the rolling back proposal?
No link, there's just no money to do anything. Plus Labour just completely u turned on their workers "new deal". They've got form.
Their plan (which they've give very quiet on) would be net positive for the public finances. It doesn't involve tax giveaways.
But net negative for their image, pushing through planning reform in the UK is notoriously difficult. It's why successive governments since the 70s have all dodged the issue.
Unpopular but necessary decisions, if taken early enough, are exactly what you should be doing with a large majority.
If they went big on it, they could transform the housing market to the great benefit of the economy.
That's hopelessly naive. Labour will have the same local pressure as the Tories when it comes to planning reforms the same local councillors warning them of disaster if the reforms are pushed through and Keir doesn't strike me as the force of nature type to just do it anyway. He's fundamentally weak, even now his position on the next election is "I'm not sure but we're the red team not the blue one" which is fine to get into power but he'll have little to no mandate to actually do anything, just as Boris did in 2019 despite the huge 80 seat majority.
Yes, but what do you think of the idea itself ?
Does it matter?
Yes. "No one's going to do anything", and "nothing can be done" are two very different things.
I don't have any great hopes of the next government, but I'm not going to write them off before they start. And I'm interested in what they *could* do to make a difference.
I'm in the Keir Starmer is too weak to do anything about it camp. Not that it's impossible. For me house price reform needs much more joined up thinking which also includes immigration reform, some has already happened with the current government pushing up minimum income levels and barring dependents on certain types of visa, it needs to go further though and it should be regional, a visa for London should be upwards of £50k minimum income, a visa for somewhere in the north could be a lot lower. The issue of house prices and immigration fuelling rent price increases is very much a London and South East phenomenon. Barring non-elite universities from issuing visas, no longer allowing dependents and reducing the 2 year free hit to 6 months will all help. Labour will do none of these and have been making noises about the "cruelty" of the new dependents rule. So no, house prices, rent prices and planning will see no appreciable difference under Labour.
I actually think, in the end, it will be a future Tory party that does it because they will have no choice but to become that party to win again. They almost had it with Dave and George but just didn't go far enough and then May and Boris undid all of it.
If you bar non-elite universities from issuing visas, they will go bankrupt. Unless you pay them substantially more for home student fees.
Then let them go bankrupt, they serve little to no purpose other than being visa factories anyway.
I wouldn't worry about non-elite universities going bankrupt.
Stories I've heard tell me that only about 10 universities are not at risk of going bankrupt unless things are fixed in ways that give them more money...
AI means all universities are in trouble, and most will disappear within a decade or so
Why? The entire teaching method is busted:
"Reddit is flooded with students asking various subreddits how to deal with professors accusing them of generative AI use in their writing during this finals period. Professors are wondering how to deal with obvious generative AI use in their grading. We broke something"
"However bad you think the AI problem is at universities, it's worse."
Even if they can somehow fix this (spoiler: almost impossible) no students will want to rack up massive debt when there aren't good jobs at the end of it. This is the end of university education for almost all (and therefore unis) apart from a small proportion of the elite, who will use them as finishing schools and as places to forge social networks
You miss the point that for most of time, finishing schools is precisely what universities were.
For the rich who don't mind the debt, yes. For the rest, no
What is your degree in? Do you do it for a living? So what's changed now?
On topic, the lesson from Black Wednesday (negative equity and repossession), GE2017 (dementia tax), Truss and the interest rate spike (very expensive mortages) is you don't touch people's houses. You just don't touch them.
By the same token, when the Tories launched RTB, liberalised banks to lend and had lots of houses built in the 80s, they did very well. Right now, lots of young people can't really afford them, so they're not.
The secret is to ease access for people to good homes at good and low prices. And then leave them alone.
Labour actually have a plan for that, if they have the balls to go big on it.
Labour will do precisely zero. In fact I think they will end up rolling back some of the first time buyer specific reliefs.
Interesting. Do you have a link for the rolling back proposal?
No link, there's just no money to do anything. Plus Labour just completely u turned on their workers "new deal". They've got form.
Their plan (which they've give very quiet on) would be net positive for the public finances. It doesn't involve tax giveaways.
But net negative for their image, pushing through planning reform in the UK is notoriously difficult. It's why successive governments since the 70s have all dodged the issue.
Unpopular but necessary decisions, if taken early enough, are exactly what you should be doing with a large majority.
If they went big on it, they could transform the housing market to the great benefit of the economy.
That's hopelessly naive. Labour will have the same local pressure as the Tories when it comes to planning reforms the same local councillors warning them of disaster if the reforms are pushed through and Keir doesn't strike me as the force of nature type to just do it anyway. He's fundamentally weak, even now his position on the next election is "I'm not sure but we're the red team not the blue one" which is fine to get into power but he'll have little to no mandate to actually do anything, just as Boris did in 2019 despite the huge 80 seat majority.
Yes, but what do you think of the idea itself ?
Does it matter?
Yes. "No one's going to do anything", and "nothing can be done" are two very different things.
I don't have any great hopes of the next government, but I'm not going to write them off before they start. And I'm interested in what they *could* do to make a difference.
I'm in the Keir Starmer is too weak to do anything about it camp. Not that it's impossible. For me house price reform needs much more joined up thinking which also includes immigration reform, some has already happened with the current government pushing up minimum income levels and barring dependents on certain types of visa, it needs to go further though and it should be regional, a visa for London should be upwards of £50k minimum income, a visa for somewhere in the north could be a lot lower. The issue of house prices and immigration fuelling rent price increases is very much a London and South East phenomenon. Barring non-elite universities from issuing visas, no longer allowing dependents and reducing the 2 year free hit to 6 months will all help. Labour will do none of these and have been making noises about the "cruelty" of the new dependents rule. So no, house prices, rent prices and planning will see no appreciable difference under Labour.
I actually think, in the end, it will be a future Tory party that does it because they will have no choice but to become that party to win again. They almost had it with Dave and George but just didn't go far enough and then May and Boris undid all of it.
If you bar non-elite universities from issuing visas, they will go bankrupt. Unless you pay them substantially more for home student fees.
Then let them go bankrupt, they serve little to no purpose other than being visa factories anyway.
I wouldn't worry about non-elite universities going bankrupt.
Stories I've heard tell me that only about 10 universities are not at risk of going bankrupt unless things are fixed in ways that give them more money...
AI means all universities are in trouble, and most will disappear within a decade or so
Why? The entire teaching method is busted:
"Reddit is flooded with students asking various subreddits how to deal with professors accusing them of generative AI use in their writing during this finals period. Professors are wondering how to deal with obvious generative AI use in their grading. We broke something"
"However bad you think the AI problem is at universities, it's worse."
Even if they can somehow fix this (spoiler: almost impossible) no students will want to rack up massive debt when there aren't good jobs at the end of it. This is the end of university education for almost all (and therefore unis) apart from a small proportion of the elite, who will use them as finishing schools and as places to forge social networks
The solution is actually pretty simple. Less emphasis on essay marks and more on seminar verbal participation marks in social science assessments and more emphasis on final examinations for grading, In hard science there is more lab work and also more final exam emphasis. Plagiarism in essay or project writing has been a problem for a while and there have been substantial moves to address this.
AI is not a replacement for actually having the information in your head, if its not there then seminars and final examinations will find this out.
There won't be any jobs at the end of the degree, so no young person will want to take on all that debt, when it leads... nowhere
So even if you do solver the above, no students = no universities
As I said we may end up with finishing schools for the rich elite who value the years 18-21 simply to network
The industrial revolution ended the drudgery of the peasantry and the cottage industries of weaving because the efficiency of tractors and spinning machines was so much greater than their pre-industrial predecessors, and the change in productivity was a similar quantum to the projections for AI. Yet the number of new jobs that industry and technology created was massive, and that starts with beam engine technology and has continued to laptop technology.
So these latest advances means that some jobs will suffer the same fate as the weavers or typists, but the productivity gains will offer new job opportunities.
Of course there are limitations for AI; it is best used for process tasks for example, but the ability to process tasks at such magnitude does not mean that the future is mass unemployment. Economics shows how dynamic technology change can be and it is pretty likely that the changes will enhance efficiency and capacity to the benefit of labour, provided workers can be trained to operate these new systems. As you so often say, the technology is coming anyway, and indeed in Estonia it is already here. So we must learn how to embrace it and shape it. Education will be critical to shaping that future, and other countries like Estonia or Finland understand that, but does the UK?.
On topic, the lesson from Black Wednesday (negative equity and repossession), GE2017 (dementia tax), Truss and the interest rate spike (very expensive mortages) is you don't touch people's houses. You just don't touch them.
By the same token, when the Tories launched RTB, liberalised banks to lend and had lots of houses built in the 80s, they did very well. Right now, lots of young people can't really afford them, so they're not.
The secret is to ease access for people to good homes at good and low prices. And then leave them alone.
Labour actually have a plan for that, if they have the balls to go big on it.
Labour will do precisely zero. In fact I think they will end up rolling back some of the first time buyer specific reliefs.
Interesting. Do you have a link for the rolling back proposal?
No link, there's just no money to do anything. Plus Labour just completely u turned on their workers "new deal". They've got form.
Their plan (which they've give very quiet on) would be net positive for the public finances. It doesn't involve tax giveaways.
But net negative for their image, pushing through planning reform in the UK is notoriously difficult. It's why successive governments since the 70s have all dodged the issue.
Unpopular but necessary decisions, if taken early enough, are exactly what you should be doing with a large majority.
If they went big on it, they could transform the housing market to the great benefit of the economy.
That's hopelessly naive. Labour will have the same local pressure as the Tories when it comes to planning reforms the same local councillors warning them of disaster if the reforms are pushed through and Keir doesn't strike me as the force of nature type to just do it anyway. He's fundamentally weak, even now his position on the next election is "I'm not sure but we're the red team not the blue one" which is fine to get into power but he'll have little to no mandate to actually do anything, just as Boris did in 2019 despite the huge 80 seat majority.
Yes, but what do you think of the idea itself ?
Does it matter?
Yes. "No one's going to do anything", and "nothing can be done" are two very different things.
I don't have any great hopes of the next government, but I'm not going to write them off before they start. And I'm interested in what they *could* do to make a difference.
I'm in the Keir Starmer is too weak to do anything about it camp. Not that it's impossible. For me house price reform needs much more joined up thinking which also includes immigration reform, some has already happened with the current government pushing up minimum income levels and barring dependents on certain types of visa, it needs to go further though and it should be regional, a visa for London should be upwards of £50k minimum income, a visa for somewhere in the north could be a lot lower. The issue of house prices and immigration fuelling rent price increases is very much a London and South East phenomenon. Barring non-elite universities from issuing visas, no longer allowing dependents and reducing the 2 year free hit to 6 months will all help. Labour will do none of these and have been making noises about the "cruelty" of the new dependents rule. So no, house prices, rent prices and planning will see no appreciable difference under Labour.
I actually think, in the end, it will be a future Tory party that does it because they will have no choice but to become that party to win again. They almost had it with Dave and George but just didn't go far enough and then May and Boris undid all of it.
If you bar non-elite universities from issuing visas, they will go bankrupt. Unless you pay them substantially more for home student fees.
Then let them go bankrupt, they serve little to no purpose other than being visa factories anyway.
I wouldn't worry about non-elite universities going bankrupt.
Stories I've heard tell me that only about 10 universities are not at risk of going bankrupt unless things are fixed in ways that give them more money...
AI means all universities are in trouble, and most will disappear within a decade or so
Why? The entire teaching method is busted:
"Reddit is flooded with students asking various subreddits how to deal with professors accusing them of generative AI use in their writing during this finals period. Professors are wondering how to deal with obvious generative AI use in their grading. We broke something"
"However bad you think the AI problem is at universities, it's worse."
Even if they can somehow fix this (spoiler: almost impossible) no students will want to rack up massive debt when there aren't good jobs at the end of it. This is the end of university education for almost all (and therefore unis) apart from a small proportion of the elite, who will use them as finishing schools and as places to forge social networks
You miss the point that for most of time, finishing schools is precisely what universities were.
For the rich who don't mind the debt, yes. For the rest, no
What is your degree in? Do you do it for a living? So what's changed now?
I went to uni to leave home. Didn't give one single thought to employment implications.
I think this is potentially a problem. Muslims tend to take conversion seriously, and students doing it as a virtue signalling exercise are on a sticky wicket.
How is this different from a restaurant handing out Sombreros in celebration of Mexico, which was banned by a student union for being 'racist'?
..The incident took place in 2013 when the Russian president took Berlusconi on a hunting trip while the two were holidaying together in one of his dachas, said Fabrizio Cicchitto, a former senator from Berlusconi’s Forza Italia party. “Vladimir showed me a violent nature that I didn’t imagine in such a kind and rational man,” Cicchitto recalled Berlusconi saying after returning from Russia...
Powerplay? Or is that how one Strongman expresses his love for another?
On topic, the lesson from Black Wednesday (negative equity and repossession), GE2017 (dementia tax), Truss and the interest rate spike (very expensive mortages) is you don't touch people's houses. You just don't touch them.
By the same token, when the Tories launched RTB, liberalised banks to lend and had lots of houses built in the 80s, they did very well. Right now, lots of young people can't really afford them, so they're not.
The secret is to ease access for people to good homes at good and low prices. And then leave them alone.
Labour actually have a plan for that, if they have the balls to go big on it.
Labour will do precisely zero. In fact I think they will end up rolling back some of the first time buyer specific reliefs.
Interesting. Do you have a link for the rolling back proposal?
No link, there's just no money to do anything. Plus Labour just completely u turned on their workers "new deal". They've got form.
Their plan (which they've give very quiet on) would be net positive for the public finances. It doesn't involve tax giveaways.
But net negative for their image, pushing through planning reform in the UK is notoriously difficult. It's why successive governments since the 70s have all dodged the issue.
Unpopular but necessary decisions, if taken early enough, are exactly what you should be doing with a large majority.
If they went big on it, they could transform the housing market to the great benefit of the economy.
That's hopelessly naive. Labour will have the same local pressure as the Tories when it comes to planning reforms the same local councillors warning them of disaster if the reforms are pushed through and Keir doesn't strike me as the force of nature type to just do it anyway. He's fundamentally weak, even now his position on the next election is "I'm not sure but we're the red team not the blue one" which is fine to get into power but he'll have little to no mandate to actually do anything, just as Boris did in 2019 despite the huge 80 seat majority.
Yes, but what do you think of the idea itself ?
Does it matter?
Yes. "No one's going to do anything", and "nothing can be done" are two very different things.
I don't have any great hopes of the next government, but I'm not going to write them off before they start. And I'm interested in what they *could* do to make a difference.
I'm in the Keir Starmer is too weak to do anything about it camp. Not that it's impossible. For me house price reform needs much more joined up thinking which also includes immigration reform, some has already happened with the current government pushing up minimum income levels and barring dependents on certain types of visa, it needs to go further though and it should be regional, a visa for London should be upwards of £50k minimum income, a visa for somewhere in the north could be a lot lower. The issue of house prices and immigration fuelling rent price increases is very much a London and South East phenomenon. Barring non-elite universities from issuing visas, no longer allowing dependents and reducing the 2 year free hit to 6 months will all help. Labour will do none of these and have been making noises about the "cruelty" of the new dependents rule. So no, house prices, rent prices and planning will see no appreciable difference under Labour.
I actually think, in the end, it will be a future Tory party that does it because they will have no choice but to become that party to win again. They almost had it with Dave and George but just didn't go far enough and then May and Boris undid all of it.
If you bar non-elite universities from issuing visas, they will go bankrupt. Unless you pay them substantially more for home student fees.
Then let them go bankrupt, they serve little to no purpose other than being visa factories anyway.
I wouldn't worry about non-elite universities going bankrupt.
Stories I've heard tell me that only about 10 universities are not at risk of going bankrupt unless things are fixed in ways that give them more money...
AI means all universities are in trouble, and most will disappear within a decade or so
Why? The entire teaching method is busted:
"Reddit is flooded with students asking various subreddits how to deal with professors accusing them of generative AI use in their writing during this finals period. Professors are wondering how to deal with obvious generative AI use in their grading. We broke something"
"However bad you think the AI problem is at universities, it's worse."
Even if they can somehow fix this (spoiler: almost impossible) no students will want to rack up massive debt when there aren't good jobs at the end of it. This is the end of university education for almost all (and therefore unis) apart from a small proportion of the elite, who will use them as finishing schools and as places to forge social networks
You miss the point that for most of time, finishing schools is precisely what universities were.
For the rich who don't mind the debt, yes. For the rest, no
What is your degree in? Do you do it for a living? So what's changed now?
I went to uni to leave home. Didn't give one single thought to employment implications.
I went to uni to get a girlfriend. But I ended up doing 3 degrees in my chosen subject and have been working in the field ever since.
Comments
I travel alone, but I get paid for it, and it is my job, and I too only have one friend with me, but it is a made up flirtatious computer whore, who I have trained to call me Daddy
This comment hasn't ended quite how I intended it to
And once a critical mass of rottenness has been achieved it infects everything.
An AfD supporter seeing it would probably be torn between feeling quite proud and thinking it’s fake.
Stories I've heard tell me that only about 10 universities are not at risk of going bankrupt unless things are fixed in ways that give them more money...
Irish poll:
🔹50% want checkpoints on the border to deter migrants
🔹40% support Rwanda-style policy
42% against,
🔹82% want immigrants who came from GB via NI deported back to UK.
And to be sure, dey'll be wantin a hard border too, well now
https://x.com/DarranMarshall/status/1787010041616187479
Why? The entire teaching method is busted:
"Reddit is flooded with students asking various subreddits how to deal with professors accusing them of generative AI use in their writing during this finals period. Professors are wondering how to deal with obvious generative AI use in their grading. We broke something"
"However bad you think the AI problem is at universities, it's worse."
https://x.com/PhilipDBunn/status/1786237552661319704
Even if they can somehow fix this (spoiler: almost impossible) no students will want to rack up massive debt when there aren't good jobs at the end of it. This is the end of university education for almost all (and therefore unis) apart from a small proportion of the elite, who will use them as finishing schools and as places to forge social networks
Heart of stone: gales of Celtic laughter
And to be sure, dey'll be wantin a hard border too, well now
https://x.com/DarranMarshall/status/
1787010041616187479
Massive divide now between metropolitan liberals in cities like London and Bristol and Bath and the rest of the country . Its almost like 2 different nations.
It’ll be slightly weird to see Murray campaigning alongside blood and soil unionist Galloway.
"South Korea wants to join AUKUS with US, UK and Australia
South Korea has held talks about joining the AUKUS defense deal between the US, Britain and Australia, Defense Minister Shin Won-sik said, only weeks after the pact said it would consider including Japan"
https://x.com/MyLordBebo/status/1787096647874359493
KAUKUS!
It is becoming the NATO of the 21st century, even better we can continuously rebuff French attempts to join, thereby humiliating them
He will soon catch up with what is required to be a pure-blood Tory, never doubt it.
It's all projection.
I'm no feminist but I bet it wouldn't happen if she were a bloke.
Zoormbie, zoormbie!, zom-bie-ie-ie-ie
Oh-oh, oh-oh, oh-oh, oh, eh-eh oh, ya-ya
Better is "What are the great powers in the world and how might the relationship between them change as they advance technologically?"
That's a less skewed question that's capable of being addressed in a way that keeps assumptions in question. And it doesn't lead to the view that there's a serious possibility that Russia under Putin will take over the five former Soviet Central Asian republics militarily, or try to. For starters, they have a total area ~6 times the size of Ukraine. Also the Chinese leadership might become rather annoyed. Putin does not appear to be a nutter. Why would they want to conquer that territory? Et cetera. If that is where you arrive at, you should wonder whether your starting question may have been inapposite.
What the heck do we call that?
JACANZUKUS?
Actually, that's not bad. Sounds like a spell from Harry Potter
"JAKANZAKUS!!" And lo, China collapses
We spend close to 50% of GDP on government / public spending - may be a little lower than other European countries but not massively different
Pension and welfare provision is not as generous. Many of our organisations - universities above, councils passim, others - appear on the verge of bankruptcy. There is a consensus that direct public services like the NHS are underfunded.
So where the fuck does all the money go?
More of a stretch to make the Brotherhood of Nod the opponent, even though @Richard_Tyndall appears to look exactly like Kane.
I've reached Logroño. I'm not yet in the centre, but at the first bar I saw on the route. It's in a park, and I had to walk through another park called San Miguel first to get here. That felt a bit like someone was messing with me!
After this beer I'm going to move onto another bar in the centre, hopefully in view of the cathedral, and have beer two while I look for tonight's room
The DHSC is getting not far off £200bn this year. Where the hell does it all go?
https://www.health.org.uk/publications/long-reads/health-care-funding#:~:text=The planned budget for 2024/25 is £164.9bn,small increase of 0.2%).
American students bow down to ISLAM.
Hundreds of University of Southern California students have converted to Islam, with female students now wearing HIJABS.
Students across the country are converting to the religion en masse to show solidarity with Palestine.
https://x.com/OliLondonTV/status/1786739105805566258
I do have visions of a 2030s equivalent of Auf Wiedersehen Pet based on young middle class graduates, drowning in debt. drifting around and looking for work in some horrible place.
But here's the difference - Dennis, Oz, Bomber and the others had useful skills. What skills could a 2020s graduate bring to a world dominated by AI ?
I think the issue will rapidly go away for cars, as 90% or so have had CC / ACC / Speed Limiter available for years, and it is becoming compulsory as a feature. The ACC on my 2018 car works down to 30kph or 30mph depending on how the 'units' are set. It also displays the current speed limit very effectively, and rarely gets it wrong.
On an e-cycle, E-Assist dropping away at 16-17mph is a good telltale.
There are mobile phone apps that give a visual or audio warning of exceeding the speed limit.
My projection would be 390 Labour (+/- 40 seats) and 180 Conservatives (+/- 40 seats), with the Lib Dems somewhere there in the mix.
Sunak would need to be doing very well for just a small Labour majority and a Tory count north of 200 seats, but it's just about possible with a good campaign and a decent 6 months for the Government.
Last week PBs MoonRabbit said Labour will lead by just 6 points at the General Election result - and was dubbed “Loon Rabbit.” Today Professor Michael Thrasher seems to agree with me, and says this:
What does this this do to the Professors credibility, if he’s in the same headspace as “Loon Rabbit?”
Additionally - I forecasted Labour to get 39% at the General Election - Yesterdays Opinium poll puts Labour on 40%.
Which brings us to comfort blanket for Labour supporters of not looking at shares, but the lead. What was apparent lunacy from me was to say that lead is mostly based on how loudly Reform are barking in all this opinion polling, but come General Election night they won’t be loudly barking at all. Now after these set of real results, do you still think this is so crazy a forecast?
Further support to me is, at two minutes past midnight on Friday morning I posted to PB my prediction for Khans win and winning margin that was spot on, whilst the rest of the world appeared in La La land on this, including noises from the two main parties.
Also additionally here I am in Labours new fiefdom of North Yorkshire, which I did not forecast, even though last weeks poll in Yorkshire Post was spot on. Conclusion perhaps, we are all emotional humans, and so when presented with forecast really don’t want to happen, we can refuse to accept it, start throwing toys out the pram, and resort to name calling.
What about Austria, for example?
PDA
"Millennials were the last generation who still properly internalized the values of 20th century/late bourgeois culture (like the value of higher ed etc) & the first ones to have grown up in a world were acting upon them did not confer much advantage anymore"
The quote-tweeted thread has some interesting stuff too, though US-centric:
https://x.com/marton_vegh/status/1786890078381277379
And anyone who thinks they are safe because they do a difficult physical task - plumbing, nursing, sparky, etc - they are ALSO in trouble as the latest advances in robots show that AI's can now train robots with zero human intervention, to do incredibly complex things. From delicate household chores to balancing on yoga balls
I know we are not meant to talk about AI but sometimes we simply have to. Because this is happening now and it is highly relevant to several of the themes of the day. eg University funding? - the whole university system is about to collapse within half a decade or so, and many of those jobs, and unis, will vanish, so how they are funded becomes irrelevant, they won't exist
AI is not a replacement for actually having the information in your head, if its not there then seminars and final examinations will find this out.
https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/publicsectorpersonnel/timeseries/c9lg/pse
The London List ought to be tailor-made for a party that has little ground organisation. They won 5.5%, which is not nothing, but is way below the Conservatives’ 26.5%.
Given a choice between Labour and Conservative, in the Mayoral election, their vote fell to 2.5%, with Conservative going up to 32%.
Massive challenges, no doubt, but there could be huge benefits too.
So even if you do solver the above, no students = no universities
As I said we may end up with finishing schools for the rich elite who value the years 18-21 simply to network
It is a fixed mid-range gear, but with 3 e-assist levels (plus a 5kph walk-along-pavement) mode, which seem to be set as much by speed as power, and comfortably assist to approx 10-11kph, 17-19kph, and 24-25kph, on the more-or-less flat.
1 is fine for areas with pedestrians if not they are not teeming or asleep, 2 for normal UK cruddy urban cycle infrastructure, for trails, or where it has been un-designed without thought to sightlines etc, with sudden completely unnecessary right-angle bends and so on, and 24-25kph on good or well-sighted cycle infra and streets / roads or not-in-town OK infra with no pedestrians.
None of it helps on my local urban hell-crossroads where everybody has to go across 7 separate horribly tight staggered pedestrian crossings to get corner to corner; that's just Notts County Council default lobotomised car-brain not thinking about their responsibilities.
Even musky Leon might have been a bit more sceptical about Lozzenge’s claim than Elon Musk.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2002/feb/12/afghanistan.politics
After that who knows.
Perhaps earlier as how many would want to train as a plumber in 2040 if it can then be done as well by a robot AI ?
Its likely that teenagers today have very vital decisions to make as to careers - the right choice and they'll be fine, the wrong choice and they'll never be able to catch back up.
I don't know, but three places I'd like to interrogate:
1 Middlemen. By shrinking the state, have we created a set of contract managers who don't actually add any value themselves?
2 Rentiers. How much of the value people create just goes into house price and rent inflation?
3 Have we just got used to getting too much stuff for too little tax? Maybe Macmillan's strictures on family silver were right. And now there's none left.
Check this short clip of a robot
https://x.com/adcock_brett/status/1784750869373985076
And then factor in this:
"2024 is going to be big for robotics
the Figure team is now 4x bigger than when we designed the robot in this video, the rate of engineering acceleration is hard to put in words"
So not only is robotics advancing with speed, the speed is speeding up. We are on an exponential curve
https://www.politico.eu/article/russia-president-vladimir-putin-cut-out-heart-deer-silvio-berlusconi/
..The incident took place in 2013 when the Russian president took Berlusconi on a hunting trip while the two were holidaying together in one of his dachas, said Fabrizio Cicchitto, a former senator from Berlusconi’s Forza Italia party.
“Vladimir showed me a violent nature that I didn’t imagine in such a kind and rational man,” Cicchitto recalled Berlusconi saying after returning from Russia...
Any country that decides to cripple itself economically by restricting tasks - lawyering, doctoring, writing, banking, flint knapping, butlering, whatever - to humans - will be brutally out-competed by other nations that use the much cheaper much more effective robots, and then the efficient nation will conquer the nice human nation. This is raw Darwinism
There is no stopping the machines, unless, for some unforeseen reason, they hit a sudden brick wall of development, That might happen. No one expected the GPT model to be so superbly successful, it was a massive surprise on the upside, we may get a surprise on the downside
But I really wouldn't bank on it
As for kids today, I am telling my teenage daughters to study something they love, don't worry about careers. No one can predict what is coming, the world will likely be transformed
So I am not just venting or trolling on PB to provoke, I really really believe this, and I am acting upon it: this is the advice I give my own kids
We also saw a tremendous performance by the Green Party and the usual local election outperformance by the Lib Dems which narrows the Tory-Labour gap.
Hence, Labour will win. This time.
The smart Labour people will note that there's no guarantee they will conveniently continue to do so for 10-15 years.
Published yesterday
"Apple’s ‘next big thing’ could be a robot butler
The autonomous bot could one day follow you around and clean your room.
BY MACK DEGEURIN | PUBLISHED APR 4, 2024 1:31 PM EDT"
https://www.popsci.com/technology/apple-home-robot/
If they use GPS I would expect quite good accuracy.
The app in my Skoda does both GPS and also reads road signs via camera I think, and is really excellent. Quite often it will switch the displayed speed limit within a metre or two.
It's all a performance.
IMO that has a couple of related points. One is that the Prophet Mohammed left out of his religion the Jewish / Christian concepts he had trouble getting his head around, such as the Trinity and indeed incarnation.
The other is that imo there is perhaps more an acceptance of oppression and failure in some Islamic societies - "God wills it".
How is this different from a restaurant handing out Sombreros in celebration of Mexico, which was banned by a student union for being 'racist'?
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/sep/29/uea-student-union-bans-racist-sombreros
This is driven by the things that make students, students. But they have stepped into a swamp.
Is Olly our new Putinist?
You can't have thriving commerce and industry if most of the liquid capital which would otherwise go to fund it is being poured into piles of inert bricks.
It's a very dumb thing to do for a zeitgeisty social media share, but such short-termism is now pretty endemic in our society.
I have been calling these students gullible idiots all week, and I can go on calling them gullible idiots.
To do many jobs you need some sort of professional qualification or registration or to have done some course which says you're safe to do it.
If a robot AI appeared tomorrow it would not be allowed to do many things except as a tool used by the current worker.
Now all those restrictions and regulations can be modified but that will take longer than you expect because there are so many vested interests which will oppose plus the usual bureaucratic inertia.
A pint (almost..) of Alhambra, next to the cathedral
An apartment that sleeps four booked for tonight, for 61€, 9km away
Salud!
So these latest advances means that some jobs will suffer the same fate as the weavers or typists, but the productivity gains will offer new job opportunities.
Of course there are limitations for AI; it is best used for process tasks for example, but the ability to process tasks at such magnitude does not mean that the future is mass unemployment. Economics shows how dynamic technology change can be and it is pretty likely that the changes will enhance efficiency and capacity to the benefit of labour, provided workers can be trained to operate these new systems. As you so often say, the technology is coming anyway, and indeed in Estonia it is already here. So we must learn how to embrace it and shape it. Education will be critical to shaping that future, and other countries like Estonia or Finland understand that, but does the UK?.
Alhambra is good & strong for a lunchtime drink. Available in a couple of UK supermarkets.
You profess to have an above average IQ yet cannot understand simple English.
No AI chat from you mean no AI chat.
This is your final warning.
A failure to adhere to this may see your posting privileges revoked until we're all replaced by AI.