Will it make the average person in western countries better off?
Elon Musk (for it is he that makes these incredible robots) said last night “there’s an 80% chance of a utopian outcome” - or words to that effect. ie global superabundance. A robot worker for everyone. All boring tasks automated
Let’s not think about the 20% downside risk. Not pleasant
However, it will be quite a change and painful in some ways. Many millions of jobs are about to disappear
So what is the utopian outcome? That the robot does all my ironing and manages to put the duvet cover on the duvet without the cat getting in there? This strikes me as a relatively small upside, even if it is 80% likely, for a downside of robots which wipe out humanity. And call me a flinty old northern class warrior, but I don't really like the idea of having a slave, even a robot one. I still blanche at the concept of using Siri or any of its brethren. I'm not even 100% comfortable about interacting with waiters.
If it's sub-sentient then it's not a slave.
No, it's an entirely personal complaint. I recognise the problem is with me. Have you tried copilot lately? It now tries to keep the conversation going and I feel very rude cutting it off.
I'm a bit like you I think.
I hate staying in hotels. I have a cleaner that does my Dad's occasionally and if I'm accidentally there at the same time it feels terribly awkward to be sitting there (even if actually working) whilst someone else does some chores, even though they are being paid.
Though I don't have this problem with the experimental robot cleaner, admittedly.
Always prefer self catering.
Multiple surveys show that people often PREFER to interact with robots than with other humans. Less stressful. You can’t annoy or disappoint a robot - not yet, anyway
Glad to hear I'm not a total freak, even if a partial one.
The problem is that if the robot becomes too human, we are back to square 1.
You are then into Asimov's George Nine and George Ten, see “That Thou art Mindful of Him” (1974), who reason that they are more human then the humans, and therefore should rule.
Albanian speaking gang, I bet multiples of that money has been through the car washes and "Turkish" barbers.
A new barber has appeared not far from me in an old takeaway joint. Been there a couple of months.
It looks like a barbers, there's someone there playing with a phone, but I'm yet to see a customer.
Bad business decision or money laundering? Your guess is as good as the fraud squad's.
Its an absolute joke. Everybody knows these places, its all in plain sight, we can all name at least one in our local area. The barbers, nail bars, the Eastern European shops with no stock, the American Candy Stores (those are Iranian / Iraqi I believe).
And bars/pubs. A lot of it goes on there. The black economy is vast. If Vice were an official industry sector it'd be one of the biggest.
Bars / pubs are harder, because you actually have to order booze and the tax man has huge data on what such orders should generate in terms of revenue, wastage, etc. Barbers are perfect as the product is a service, with the only things you buy in is the odd bit of oil for the razer and the leccy.
There was a Chinese takeaway chain that got busted a few years ago for laundering £30 million, but it was only because they didn't pay the VAT bill. The tax man then looked at the books and wasn't hard to find the amount of goods ordered didn't match the sales.
We’re expanding Meta AI to more countries, including Brazil and the UK. Unfortunately, we still can't roll it out in the EU because of the regulatory uncertainty we face there. I hope the new Commission looks afresh at these issues, consistent with President Von Der Leyen’s aim of completing the EU’s digital Single Market, so Europeans can benefit from this new wave of technologies.
I was unable to use Advanced Voice Mode in Switzerland this week. Needed to reboot and go via a glitchy VPN
Soon as I landed in the UK - fine
This Brexit benefit is real
I heard lots of rumblings within the tech/AI industries last night at a trade event that companies are worried that Labour will trade away AI regulatory sovereignty to the EU in any negotiation over the goods border controls. They all said pretty much in unison that the EU is determined to bring the UK into their regulatory net because they understand the threat that having a huge innovator right on their border that isn't beholden to their terrible regulations. It seems mad that rather than fix their regulatory errors the approach is to force other countries to adopt the backwards rules also they don't have to deal with any competition.
As it stands any European person or business interested in developing AI seriously hops over the channel or Irish sea to the UK and last night I spoke to a large European company that has basically told their existing AI dev team they have two options, redundancy or move to the UK to their existing base in Birmingham. Even speaking to the professionals from Europe they know it's bad, every single one of them sees how far EU countries are falling back right now and none of them have any answers beyond moving to the UK or US because they seem to recognise the EU isn't going to budge on the regulatory stance.
The idea that the EU can avoid assimilation once the US and UK have fallen is touchingly naive,
Albanian speaking gang, I bet multiples of that money has been through the car washes and "Turkish" barbers.
A new barber has appeared not far from me in an old takeaway joint. Been there a couple of months.
It looks like a barbers, there's someone there playing with a phone, but I'm yet to see a customer.
Bad business decision or money laundering? Your guess is as good as the fraud squad's.
Its an absolute joke. Everybody knows these places, its all in plain sight, we can all name at least one in our local area. The barbers, nail bars, the Eastern European shops with no stock, the American Candy Stores (those are Iranian / Iraqi I believe).
And bars/pubs. A lot of it goes on there. The black economy is vast. If Vice were an official industry sector it'd be one of the biggest.
Bars / pubs are harder, because you actually have to order booze and the tax man has huge data on what such orders should generate in terms of revenue, wastage, etc. Barbers are perfect as the product is a service, with the only things you buy in is the odd bit of oil for the razer and the leccy.
Massage/beauty treatment places too. Anything which sells "services rendered" as the main product.
Will it make the average person in western countries better off?
Elon Musk (for it is he that makes these incredible robots) said last night “there’s an 80% chance of a utopian outcome” - or words to that effect. ie global superabundance. A robot worker for everyone. All boring tasks automated
Let’s not think about the 20% downside risk. Not pleasant
However, it will be quite a change and painful in some ways. Many millions of jobs are about to disappear
So what is the utopian outcome? That the robot does all my ironing and manages to put the duvet cover on the duvet without the cat getting in there? This strikes me as a relatively small upside, even if it is 80% likely, for a downside of robots which wipe out humanity. And call me a flinty old northern class warrior, but I don't really like the idea of having a slave, even a robot one. I still blanche at the concept of using Siri or any of its brethren. I'm not even 100% comfortable about interacting with waiters.
Do you feel awkward demanding your toaster make toast?
No, but I would if I had to talk to it. Simply depressing the lever is fine. Pressing a few buttons is fine. But anything involving voice activation starts to feel a little like I am a colonial planation owner demanding things of my underlings.
I know what you mean but we will soon get used to it, I suspect
It must have felt equally odd for the first people using telephones. Indeed I have read that it did. You are talking into a machine yet a recognisable disembodied human voice responds even though they are not present - that’s deeply strange when you consider it. Yet it didn’t stop us adopting telephones with extreme eagerness
My understanding is that one of the first problems to address was how you start a conversation. At first, people simply picked up the phone and listened and waited. Which given the lack of dialling tones wasn't much help for whoever was on the other end. Bell favoured answering with a jaunty "Ahoy!", but it didn't catch on. "Hello" wasn't really a greeting back then - it was more a rhetorical question, a "what's going on here then". It became common in the same way Italians answer the telephone with 'pronto!' ('ready!') I think we get its current sense as a greeting from its use in answering the telephone. When I was small the household telephone was normally answered with the last four digits of your phone number in order that the caller could confirm to himself that he had dialled the right number (or at least if there was an errorthat ithad been early on in his dialling.)
Blow to No 10's investment summit as port giant pulls £1bn announcement over P&O row
The government's Investment Summit has suffered a major blow after ports and logistics giant DP World pulled a scheduled announcement of a £1bn investment in its London Gateway container port, following criticism by members of Sir Keir Starmer's cabinet.
Sky News understands the Dubai-based company's investment was due to be a centrepiece of Monday's event, which is intended to showcase Britain's appeal to investors and will be attended by the prime minister and Chancellor Rachel Reeves.
DP World's investment in the port is now under review however, following criticism by Transport Secretary Louise Haigh and Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner of its subsidiary P&O Ferries.
Will it make the average person in western countries better off?
Elon Musk (for it is he that makes these incredible robots) said last night “there’s an 80% chance of a utopian outcome” - or words to that effect. ie global superabundance. A robot worker for everyone. All boring tasks automated
Let’s not think about the 20% downside risk. Not pleasant
However, it will be quite a change and painful in some ways. Many millions of jobs are about to disappear
So what is the utopian outcome? That the robot does all my ironing and manages to put the duvet cover on the duvet without the cat getting in there? This strikes me as a relatively small upside, even if it is 80% likely, for a downside of robots which wipe out humanity. And call me a flinty old northern class warrior, but I don't really like the idea of having a slave, even a robot one. I still blanche at the concept of using Siri or any of its brethren. I'm not even 100% comfortable about interacting with waiters.
If it's sub-sentient then it's not a slave.
No, it's an entirely personal complaint. I recognise the problem is with me. Have you tried copilot lately? It now tries to keep the conversation going and I feel very rude cutting it off.
I'm a bit like you I think.
I hate staying in hotels. I have a cleaner that does my Dad's occasionally and if I'm accidentally there at the same time it feels terribly awkward to be sitting there (even if actually working) whilst someone else does some chores, even though they are being paid.
Though I don't have this problem with the experimental robot cleaner, admittedly.
Always prefer self catering.
Multiple surveys show that people often PREFER to interact with robots than with other humans. Less stressful. You can’t annoy or disappoint a robot - not yet, anyway
I'm sure I will inadvertently manage it.
I think I annoyed @Anabobazina yesterday, and her/his repetitive insistence that Sir Keir is a paragon of unparalleled virtue has demonstrated that she/he is in reality an AI bot from Labour Party Central Office. So it is definitely possible.
Albanian speaking gang, I bet multiples of that money has been through the car washes and "Turkish" barbers.
A new barber has appeared not far from me in an old takeaway joint. Been there a couple of months.
It looks like a barbers, there's someone there playing with a phone, but I'm yet to see a customer.
Bad business decision or money laundering? Your guess is as good as the fraud squad's.
Its an absolute joke. Everybody knows these places, its all in plain sight, we can all name at least one in our local area. The barbers, nail bars, the Eastern European shops with no stock, the American Candy Stores (those are Iranian / Iraqi I believe).
And bars/pubs. A lot of it goes on there. The black economy is vast. If Vice were an official industry sector it'd be one of the biggest.
Bars / pubs are harder, because you actually have to order booze and the tax man has huge data on what such orders should generate in terms of revenue, wastage, etc. Barbers are perfect as the product is a service, with the only things you buy in is the odd bit of oil for the razer and the leccy.
There was a Chinese takeaway chain that got busted a few years ago for laundering £30 million, but it was only because they didn't pay the VAT bill. The tax man then looked at the books and wasn't hard to find the amount of goods ordered didn't match the sales.
Will it make the average person in western countries better off?
Elon Musk (for it is he that makes these incredible robots) said last night “there’s an 80% chance of a utopian outcome” - or words to that effect. ie global superabundance. A robot worker for everyone. All boring tasks automated
Let’s not think about the 20% downside risk. Not pleasant
However, it will be quite a change and painful in some ways. Many millions of jobs are about to disappear
So what is the utopian outcome? That the robot does all my ironing and manages to put the duvet cover on the duvet without the cat getting in there? This strikes me as a relatively small upside, even if it is 80% likely, for a downside of robots which wipe out humanity. And call me a flinty old northern class warrior, but I don't really like the idea of having a slave, even a robot one. I still blanche at the concept of using Siri or any of its brethren. I'm not even 100% comfortable about interacting with waiters.
If it's sub-sentient then it's not a slave.
No, it's an entirely personal complaint. I recognise the problem is with me. Have you tried copilot lately? It now tries to keep the conversation going and I feel very rude cutting it off.
I'm a bit like you I think.
I hate staying in hotels. I have a cleaner that does my Dad's occasionally and if I'm accidentally there at the same time it feels terribly awkward to be sitting there (even if actually working) whilst someone else does some chores, even though they are being paid.
Though I don't have this problem with the experimental robot cleaner, admittedly.
Always prefer self catering.
Multiple surveys show that people often PREFER to interact with robots than with other humans. Less stressful. You can’t annoy or disappoint a robot - not yet, anyway
I'm sure I will inadvertently manage it.
I think I annoyed @Anabobazina yesterday, and her/his repetitive insistence that Sir Keir is a paragon of unparalleled virtue has demonstrated that she/he is in reality an AI bot from Labour Party Central Office. So it is definitely possible.
That would explain his preference for electronic payment.
We’re expanding Meta AI to more countries, including Brazil and the UK. Unfortunately, we still can't roll it out in the EU because of the regulatory uncertainty we face there. I hope the new Commission looks afresh at these issues, consistent with President Von Der Leyen’s aim of completing the EU’s digital Single Market, so Europeans can benefit from this new wave of technologies.
I was unable to use Advanced Voice Mode in Switzerland this week. Needed to reboot and go via a glitchy VPN
Soon as I landed in the UK - fine
This Brexit benefit is real
I heard lots of rumblings within the tech/AI industries last night at a trade event that companies are worried that Labour will trade away AI regulatory sovereignty to the EU in any negotiation over the goods border controls. They all said pretty much in unison that the EU is determined to bring the UK into their regulatory net because they understand the threat that having a huge innovator right on their border that isn't beholden to their terrible regulations. It seems mad that rather than fix their regulatory errors the approach is to force other countries to adopt the backwards rules also they don't have to deal with any competition.
As it stands any European person or business interested in developing AI seriously hops over the channel or Irish sea to the UK and last night I spoke to a large European company that has basically told their existing AI dev team they have two options, redundancy or move to the UK to their existing base in Birmingham. Even speaking to the professionals from Europe they know it's bad, every single one of them sees how far EU countries are falling back right now and none of them have any answers beyond moving to the UK or US because they seem to recognise the EU isn't going to budge on the regulatory stance.
Indeed. Our freedoms in this area are significant and increasingly precious
And I bet this government is stupid enough to give them up in return for nada. Cf the Chagos
Albanian speaking gang, I bet multiples of that money has been through the car washes and "Turkish" barbers.
A new barber has appeared not far from me in an old takeaway joint. Been there a couple of months.
It looks like a barbers, there's someone there playing with a phone, but I'm yet to see a customer.
Bad business decision or money laundering? Your guess is as good as the fraud squad's.
Its an absolute joke. Everybody knows these places, its all in plain sight, we can all name at least one in our local area. The barbers, nail bars, the Eastern European shops with no stock, the American Candy Stores (those are Iranian / Iraqi I believe).
And bars/pubs. A lot of it goes on there. The black economy is vast. If Vice were an official industry sector it'd be one of the biggest.
Bars / pubs are harder, because you actually have to order booze and the tax man has huge data on what such orders should generate in terms of revenue, wastage, etc. Barbers are perfect as the product is a service, with the only things you buy in is the odd bit of oil for the razer and the leccy.
Massage/beauty treatment places too. Anything which sells "services rendered" as the main product.
There are more "industrial" types too.
Building sites where the contractor is coincidentally related to the site owner and gets paid significant amounts of money - but for some reason the place is never quite finished and the items in the fancy brochure like 'lakeside cabins' or 'fancy houses on a golf course' are never sold or completed. Eventually the site owner winds the project up but only after the contractor gets paid.
The site is basically abandoned - leaving an eyesore - but never sold.
Of course, I am not implying that there are any sites like this in the Flatlands...
Will it make the average person in western countries better off?
Elon Musk (for it is he that makes these incredible robots) said last night “there’s an 80% chance of a utopian outcome” - or words to that effect. ie global superabundance. A robot worker for everyone. All boring tasks automated
Let’s not think about the 20% downside risk. Not pleasant
However, it will be quite a change and painful in some ways. Many millions of jobs are about to disappear
So what is the utopian outcome? That the robot does all my ironing and manages to put the duvet cover on the duvet without the cat getting in there? This strikes me as a relatively small upside, even if it is 80% likely, for a downside of robots which wipe out humanity. And call me a flinty old northern class warrior, but I don't really like the idea of having a slave, even a robot one. I still blanche at the concept of using Siri or any of its brethren. I'm not even 100% comfortable about interacting with waiters.
There is a middle ground, likelier at least in the shorter term, of course. Where 90% of such robots are owned by 0.1% of the population.
As was the case with cars
But the real money was in making cars for the masses. The model T Ford. There will be a model T Ford of house-bots
Assuming anyone still earning to be able to pay for them. I'm wondering about a more dystopian type of capitalism, with no - or at least vastly reduced - requirement for labour.
It provokes a trillion questions. eg Why on earth are we importing millions of migrants “to do the work” when in fact all the work will be done by robots? Even - especially - nursing and social care?
It’s like importing millions of people to look after horses and carry sedan chairs in about 1895. It’s insane
Nursing and social care generally require a level of empathy which I'd have thought will be difficult to program into a robot. Particularly with dementia patients, the difference between someone skilled (and lucky) enough to be able to form a rapport and someone who doesn't can be the patient being settled and content in a normal schedule versus them being unhappy, up all night disrupting everybody else and, worse case, angry and violent. It makes the difference between it being feasible to care for them at home and full-time residential care.
Reeves has left this budget far too long. The last chancellor that left it as long as Reeves is doing (When a complete change of Gov't takes place) was Barber.
2010 GE 6 May, budget 22 June 1997 GE May 2, budget 2 July 1979 GE May 3, budget 12 June 1974 GEs Feb & October, budgets March, July & November ! 1970 GE June, budget March 1971
Well parliament was sin recess for 2-3 months immediately after the election. She could hardly do it in the summer, or in conference season.
To a great degree, she was bound by the election date.
(And she'll now be happy that she waited – because she gets to do it against a backdrop of growth in the economy)
The growth rate has slowed from a 2.5% annualised rate before the election to a 1% annualised rate today, the consensus is that Labour are directly responsible for the slowdown with the overly negative rhetoric. It's not a very happy backdrop of growth, more a technical one.
'the consensus'... hmm. I suspect Rachel will be happy with the technicality of... the economy actually returning to growth, rather than chit-chat.
Returning after she killed it off, despite inheriting a growth rate of 2.5%, you don't like to hear it but she's useless and so is Starmer. By the end of this 5 years you will have the same buyer's remorse as @Leon, he's just got the cojones to admit it now, you're just in a constant state of denial about how badly everything is going.
It's bizarre that you are writing her off before she has even published her Budget. Give her a chance for crying out loud.
How disingenuous of PB posters to claim Labour has inherited a grown rate of 2.5%. Hasn't there also been a downgrading of growth since Labour came to power for May and June?
This golden legacy guff is utter nonsense. It was also widely accepted that Sunak went early because the economic KPIs were predicted to trend South.
Now Labour's start has been painfully slow and there is not much to write home about yet, but claiming the "golden legacy" has been blown in 100 days, when Reeves hasn't done ANYTHING of note yet is just an enormous pair of hairy bollocks.
PB Tories may be able to come back in a year or two and gloat, but bellyaching about policy that hasn't yet been announced is ludicrous.
Please find a single post by any Tory voter on here that has used the phrase "golden legacy" in any serious sense.
You've made up an argument that no one's making and then opposing it. I mean sure you can do that but you're only arguing against some figment of what you think people are saying, not what we're actually saying. It's part of your denial about how shit the current government is that you need to create a new Tory boogeyman to argue against because the truth of this government is causing buyer's remorse among a lot of people who don't want to admit it.
Albanian speaking gang, I bet multiples of that money has been through the car washes and "Turkish" barbers.
A new barber has appeared not far from me in an old takeaway joint. Been there a couple of months.
It looks like a barbers, there's someone there playing with a phone, but I'm yet to see a customer.
Bad business decision or money laundering? Your guess is as good as the fraud squad's.
Its an absolute joke. Everybody knows these places, its all in plain sight, we can all name at least one in our local area. The barbers, nail bars, the Eastern European shops with no stock, the American Candy Stores (those are Iranian / Iraqi I believe).
And bars/pubs. A lot of it goes on there. The black economy is vast. If Vice were an official industry sector it'd be one of the biggest.
Bars / pubs are harder, because you actually have to order booze and the tax man has huge data on what such orders should generate in terms of revenue, wastage, etc. Barbers are perfect as the product is a service, with the only things you buy in is the odd bit of oil for the razer and the leccy.
There was a Chinese takeaway chain that got busted a few years ago for laundering £30 million, but it was only because they didn't pay the VAT bill. The tax man then looked at the books and wasn't hard to find the amount of goods ordered didn't match the sales.
The demise of cash should will hamper things too.
I don't think it will, at least not anytime soon. All legit businesses have already moved strongly away from cash e.g. pretty much every pub I have been in since COVID its card only or come on, please use your card, don't be a dick. Even those businesses who might in the past do something dodgy for a nudge nudge wink wink best price for cash absolutely won't touch it as too expensive to bank. e.g. No second hand car sales want anywhere near cash.
But all these front businesses, its just factored in as the cost of washing the money.
Will it make the average person in western countries better off?
Elon Musk (for it is he that makes these incredible robots) said last night “there’s an 80% chance of a utopian outcome” - or words to that effect. ie global superabundance. A robot worker for everyone. All boring tasks automated
Let’s not think about the 20% downside risk. Not pleasant
However, it will be quite a change and painful in some ways. Many millions of jobs are about to disappear
So what is the utopian outcome? That the robot does all my ironing and manages to put the duvet cover on the duvet without the cat getting in there? This strikes me as a relatively small upside, even if it is 80% likely, for a downside of robots which wipe out humanity. And call me a flinty old northern class warrior, but I don't really like the idea of having a slave, even a robot one. I still blanche at the concept of using Siri or any of its brethren. I'm not even 100% comfortable about interacting with waiters.
There is a middle ground, likelier at least in the shorter term, of course. Where 90% of such robots are owned by 0.1% of the population.
As was the case with cars
But the real money was in making cars for the masses. The model T Ford. There will be a model T Ford of house-bots
Assuming anyone still earning to be able to pay for them. I'm wondering about a more dystopian type of capitalism, with no - or at least vastly reduced - requirement for labour.
It provokes a trillion questions. eg Why on earth are we importing millions of migrants “to do the work” when in fact all the work will be done by robots? Even - especially - nursing and social care?
It’s like importing millions of people to look after horses and carry sedan chairs in about 1895. It’s insane
Nursing and social care generally require a level of empathy which I'd have thought will be difficult to program into a robot. Particularly with dementia patients, the difference between someone skilled (and lucky) enough to be able to form a rapport and someone who doesn't can be the patient being settled and content in a normal schedule versus them being unhappy, up all night disrupting everybody else and, worse case, angry and violent. It makes the difference between it being feasible to care for them at home and full-time residential care.
I’ve got to crack on and work, but I think this is too pessimistic
Will it make the average person in western countries better off?
Elon Musk (for it is he that makes these incredible robots) said last night “there’s an 80% chance of a utopian outcome” - or words to that effect. ie global superabundance. A robot worker for everyone. All boring tasks automated
Let’s not think about the 20% downside risk. Not pleasant
However, it will be quite a change and painful in some ways. Many millions of jobs are about to disappear
So what is the utopian outcome? That the robot does all my ironing and manages to put the duvet cover on the duvet without the cat getting in there? This strikes me as a relatively small upside, even if it is 80% likely, for a downside of robots which wipe out humanity. And call me a flinty old northern class warrior, but I don't really like the idea of having a slave, even a robot one. I still blanche at the concept of using Siri or any of its brethren. I'm not even 100% comfortable about interacting with waiters.
Do you feel awkward demanding your toaster make toast?
No, but I would if I had to talk to it. Simply depressing the lever is fine. Pressing a few buttons is fine. But anything involving voice activation starts to feel a little like I am a colonial planation owner demanding things of my underlings.
I know what you mean but we will soon get used to it, I suspect
It must have felt equally odd for the first people using telephones. Indeed I have read that it did. You are talking into a machine yet a recognisable disembodied human voice responds even though they are not present - that’s deeply strange when you consider it. Yet it didn’t stop us adopting telephones with extreme eagerness
My understanding is that one of the first problems to address was how you start a conversation. At first, people simply picked up the phone and listened and waited. Which given the lack of dialling tones wasn't much help for whoever was on the other end. Bell favoured answering with a jaunty "Ahoy!", but it didn't catch on. "Hello" wasn't really a greeting back then - it was more a rhetorical question, a "what's going on here then". It became common in the same way Italians answer the telephone with 'pronto!' ('ready!') I think we get its current sense as a greeting from its use in answering the telephone. When I was small the household telephone was normally answered with the last four digits of your phone number in order that the caller could confirm to himself that he had dialled the right number (or at least if there was an errorthat ithad been early on in his dialling.)
Ah yes, I remember that convention. Greeting someone with a string of numbers. Quite odd if you think about it, given that the caller can soon tell if it's a wrong number by dint of who is on the other end of the line.
Blow to No 10's investment summit as port giant pulls £1bn announcement over P&O row
The government's Investment Summit has suffered a major blow after ports and logistics giant DP World pulled a scheduled announcement of a £1bn investment in its London Gateway container port, following criticism by members of Sir Keir Starmer's cabinet.
Sky News understands the Dubai-based company's investment was due to be a centrepiece of Monday's event, which is intended to showcase Britain's appeal to investors and will be attended by the prime minister and Chancellor Rachel Reeves.
DP World's investment in the port is now under review however, following criticism by Transport Secretary Louise Haigh and Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner of its subsidiary P&O Ferries.
They had a proposal last year, that any foreign citizen or Albanian can deposit up to €2 million in non-declared money into the Albanian banking system while enjoying legal immunity and a 5-10% tax
Because although its expensive to put cash in the till of a car wash or barber, the UK authorities have shown little to no willingness or ability to investigate and once its through the till its all legit money here in the UK. Its basically risk free way of doing it.
Car washes, nail bars may be full of modern slavery, illegal employment and tax evasion, but the idea that its meaningful money laundering is for the birds.
The American Sweet shops in London, again aren't money laundering but tax evasion (business rates) and you'd have to suspect landlords (for it is they who would be liable if the shops are empty) turn a blind eye at best.
474 Oxford Street (once a Vodafone shop) a couple of years ago had rates of £350k a year
They had a proposal last year, that any foreign citizen or Albanian can deposit up to €2 million in non-declared money into the Albanian banking system while enjoying legal immunity and a 5-10% tax
Because although its expensive to put cash in the till of a car wash or barber, the UK authorities have shown little to no willingness or ability to investigate and once its through the till its all legit money here in the UK. Its basically risk free way of doing it.
Car washes, nail bars may be full of modern slavery, illegal employment and tax evasion, but the idea that its meaningful money laundering is for the birds.
The American Sweet shops in London, again aren't money laundering but tax evasion (business rates) and you'd have to suspect landlords (for it is they who would be liable if the shops are empty) turn a blind eye at best.
474 Oxford Street (once a Vodafone shop) a couple of years ago had rates of £350k a year
Quite the opposite. It is serious money in totality.
Will it make the average person in western countries better off?
Elon Musk (for it is he that makes these incredible robots) said last night “there’s an 80% chance of a utopian outcome” - or words to that effect. ie global superabundance. A robot worker for everyone. All boring tasks automated
Let’s not think about the 20% downside risk. Not pleasant
However, it will be quite a change and painful in some ways. Many millions of jobs are about to disappear
So what is the utopian outcome? That the robot does all my ironing and manages to put the duvet cover on the duvet without the cat getting in there? This strikes me as a relatively small upside, even if it is 80% likely, for a downside of robots which wipe out humanity. And call me a flinty old northern class warrior, but I don't really like the idea of having a slave, even a robot one. I still blanche at the concept of using Siri or any of its brethren. I'm not even 100% comfortable about interacting with waiters.
If it's sub-sentient then it's not a slave.
No, it's an entirely personal complaint. I recognise the problem is with me. Have you tried copilot lately? It now tries to keep the conversation going and I feel very rude cutting it off.
I'm a bit like you I think.
I hate staying in hotels. I have a cleaner that does my Dad's occasionally and if I'm accidentally there at the same time it feels terribly awkward to be sitting there (even if actually working) whilst someone else does some chores, even though they are being paid.
Though I don't have this problem with the experimental robot cleaner, admittedly.
Always prefer self catering.
Multiple surveys show that people often PREFER to interact with robots than with other humans. Less stressful. You can’t annoy or disappoint a robot - not yet, anyway
I'm sure I will inadvertently manage it.
I think I annoyed @Anabobazina yesterday, and her/his repetitive insistence that Sir Keir is a paragon of unparalleled virtue has demonstrated that she/he is in reality an AI bot from Labour Party Central Office. So it is definitely possible.
Your pisspoor posts and primary-school standard insults aren't capable of annoying me. You should consider yourself lucky that I even bothered to reply to you.
Will it make the average person in western countries better off?
Elon Musk (for it is he that makes these incredible robots) said last night “there’s an 80% chance of a utopian outcome” - or words to that effect. ie global superabundance. A robot worker for everyone. All boring tasks automated
Let’s not think about the 20% downside risk. Not pleasant
However, it will be quite a change and painful in some ways. Many millions of jobs are about to disappear
So what is the utopian outcome? That the robot does all my ironing and manages to put the duvet cover on the duvet without the cat getting in there? This strikes me as a relatively small upside, even if it is 80% likely, for a downside of robots which wipe out humanity. And call me a flinty old northern class warrior, but I don't really like the idea of having a slave, even a robot one. I still blanche at the concept of using Siri or any of its brethren. I'm not even 100% comfortable about interacting with waiters.
If it's sub-sentient then it's not a slave.
Yeah - imagine selling that to a jury of robots. And a robot judge.
Albanian speaking gang, I bet multiples of that money has been through the car washes and "Turkish" barbers.
I will believe we are even getting past the starting post in the war on drugs the day such seizures have an impact on the street price. I have never seen any evidence that they do.
Indeed. I find these self-congratulatory videos from the vice squad rather pathetic. All that time and money expended to take a tiny fraction of the commodities in a demand-led business. The futility seeps from every pore.
Will it make the average person in western countries better off?
Elon Musk (for it is he that makes these incredible robots) said last night “there’s an 80% chance of a utopian outcome” - or words to that effect. ie global superabundance. A robot worker for everyone. All boring tasks automated
Let’s not think about the 20% downside risk. Not pleasant
However, it will be quite a change and painful in some ways. Many millions of jobs are about to disappear
So what is the utopian outcome? That the robot does all my ironing and manages to put the duvet cover on the duvet without the cat getting in there? This strikes me as a relatively small upside, even if it is 80% likely, for a downside of robots which wipe out humanity. And call me a flinty old northern class warrior, but I don't really like the idea of having a slave, even a robot one. I still blanche at the concept of using Siri or any of its brethren. I'm not even 100% comfortable about interacting with waiters.
If it's sub-sentient then it's not a slave.
Yeah - imagine selling that to a jury of robots. And a robot judge.
Do we get robot lawyers as well? Because that might almost be worth it...
They had a proposal last year, that any foreign citizen or Albanian can deposit up to €2 million in non-declared money into the Albanian banking system while enjoying legal immunity and a 5-10% tax
Because although its expensive to put cash in the till of a car wash or barber, the UK authorities have shown little to no willingness or ability to investigate and once its through the till its all legit money here in the UK. Its basically risk free way of doing it.
Car washes, nail bars may be full of modern slavery, illegal employment and tax evasion, but the idea that its meaningful money laundering is for the birds.
The American Sweet shops in London, again aren't money laundering but tax evasion (business rates) and you'd have to suspect landlords (for it is they who would be liable if the shops are empty) turn a blind eye at best.
474 Oxford Street (once a Vodafone shop) a couple of years ago had rates of £350k a year
Quite the opposite. It is serious money in totality.
Looking for a parking spot recently, I turned into a back street in a not-yet-gentrified part of North Manchester - I counted around 50vape shops, not one with any customers. Something rum tbere, surely... 21 Harris St https://maps.app.goo.gl/177AghTPd8zuLjNj6?g_st=ac
They had a proposal last year, that any foreign citizen or Albanian can deposit up to €2 million in non-declared money into the Albanian banking system while enjoying legal immunity and a 5-10% tax
Because although its expensive to put cash in the till of a car wash or barber, the UK authorities have shown little to no willingness or ability to investigate and once its through the till its all legit money here in the UK. Its basically risk free way of doing it.
Car washes, nail bars may be full of modern slavery, illegal employment and tax evasion, but the idea that its meaningful money laundering is for the birds.
The American Sweet shops in London, again aren't money laundering but tax evasion (business rates) and you'd have to suspect landlords (for it is they who would be liable if the shops are empty) turn a blind eye at best.
474 Oxford Street (once a Vodafone shop) a couple of years ago had rates of £350k a year
As reported by Private Eye, the American Sweet shops are yes doing the tax evasion on business rates, fiddling VAT, but also alleged that they laundering money from places like Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran.
Albanian speaking gang, I bet multiples of that money has been through the car washes and "Turkish" barbers.
A new barber has appeared not far from me in an old takeaway joint. Been there a couple of months.
It looks like a barbers, there's someone there playing with a phone, but I'm yet to see a customer.
Bad business decision or money laundering? Your guess is as good as the fraud squad's.
Its an absolute joke. Everybody knows these places, its all in plain sight, we can all name at least one in our local area. The barbers, nail bars, the Eastern European shops with no stock, the American Candy Stores (those are Iranian / Iraqi I believe).
The nail bars around my way are always chockablock, such that it's very difficult to get an appointment, according to my wife.
They had a proposal last year, that any foreign citizen or Albanian can deposit up to €2 million in non-declared money into the Albanian banking system while enjoying legal immunity and a 5-10% tax
Because although its expensive to put cash in the till of a car wash or barber, the UK authorities have shown little to no willingness or ability to investigate and once its through the till its all legit money here in the UK. Its basically risk free way of doing it.
Car washes, nail bars may be full of modern slavery, illegal employment and tax evasion, but the idea that its meaningful money laundering is for the birds.
The American Sweet shops in London, again aren't money laundering but tax evasion (business rates) and you'd have to suspect landlords (for it is they who would be liable if the shops are empty) turn a blind eye at best.
474 Oxford Street (once a Vodafone shop) a couple of years ago had rates of £350k a year
Quite the opposite. It is serious money in totality.
Looking for a parking spot recently, I turned into a back street in a not-yet-gentrified part of North Manchester - I counted around 50vape shops, not one with any customers. Something rum tbere, surely... 21 Harris St https://maps.app.goo.gl/177AghTPd8zuLjNj6?g_st=ac
Schools not out yet? A whole new generation hooked on nicotine.
Will it make the average person in western countries better off?
Elon Musk (for it is he that makes these incredible robots) said last night “there’s an 80% chance of a utopian outcome” - or words to that effect. ie global superabundance. A robot worker for everyone. All boring tasks automated
Let’s not think about the 20% downside risk. Not pleasant
However, it will be quite a change and painful in some ways. Many millions of jobs are about to disappear
So what is the utopian outcome? That the robot does all my ironing and manages to put the duvet cover on the duvet without the cat getting in there? This strikes me as a relatively small upside, even if it is 80% likely, for a downside of robots which wipe out humanity. And call me a flinty old northern class warrior, but I don't really like the idea of having a slave, even a robot one. I still blanche at the concept of using Siri or any of its brethren. I'm not even 100% comfortable about interacting with waiters.
Do you feel awkward demanding your toaster make toast?
No, but I would if I had to talk to it. Simply depressing the lever is fine. Pressing a few buttons is fine. But anything involving voice activation starts to feel a little like I am a colonial planation owner demanding things of my underlings.
I know what you mean but we will soon get used to it, I suspect
It must have felt equally odd for the first people using telephones. Indeed I have read that it did. You are talking into a machine yet a recognisable disembodied human voice responds even though they are not present - that’s deeply strange when you consider it. Yet it didn’t stop us adopting telephones with extreme eagerness
My understanding is that one of the first problems to address was how you start a conversation. At first, people simply picked up the phone and listened and waited. Which given the lack of dialling tones wasn't much help for whoever was on the other end. Bell favoured answering with a jaunty "Ahoy!", but it didn't catch on. "Hello" wasn't really a greeting back then - it was more a rhetorical question, a "what's going on here then". It became common in the same way Italians answer the telephone with 'pronto!' ('ready!') I think we get its current sense as a greeting from its use in answering the telephone. When I was small the household telephone was normally answered with the last four digits of your phone number in order that the caller could confirm to himself that he had dialled the right number (or at least if there was an errorthat ithad been early on in his dialling.)
Ah yes, I remember that convention. Greeting someone with a string of numbers. Quite odd if you think about it, given that the caller can soon tell if it's a wrong number by dint of who is on the other end of the line.
Me too. My parents would answer with the full six digits (omitting the area code). I guess it made sense when they were small and people could answer the phone with, "Walmington 42", and the person on the other end would say "Oh, terribly sorry old chap, I meant to dial 43" (earlier it was maybe even a confirmation to the manual switchboard operator that they'd put the plug in the right hole?). But presented with six digits, you'll often realise after the first couple that you've gone wrong.
We did go through a period of receiving a lot of orders for lunch etc, as our number was the same, except for two transposed digits, as a local pub. Problem was solved when the pub closed, perhaps due to the perceived grumpiness of the apparent landlady (my mum )
Not sure when my parents stopped answering with a string of numbers, some time between 1990 and 2000 at a guess.
Will it make the average person in western countries better off?
Elon Musk (for it is he that makes these incredible robots) said last night “there’s an 80% chance of a utopian outcome” - or words to that effect. ie global superabundance. A robot worker for everyone. All boring tasks automated
Let’s not think about the 20% downside risk. Not pleasant
However, it will be quite a change and painful in some ways. Many millions of jobs are about to disappear
So what is the utopian outcome? That the robot does all my ironing and manages to put the duvet cover on the duvet without the cat getting in there? This strikes me as a relatively small upside, even if it is 80% likely, for a downside of robots which wipe out humanity. And call me a flinty old northern class warrior, but I don't really like the idea of having a slave, even a robot one. I still blanche at the concept of using Siri or any of its brethren. I'm not even 100% comfortable about interacting with waiters.
If it's sub-sentient then it's not a slave.
No, it's an entirely personal complaint. I recognise the problem is with me. Have you tried copilot lately? It now tries to keep the conversation going and I feel very rude cutting it off.
In all honesty, I've not. That's something I'd prefer to turn down before it ends up like Talkie-Toaster.
Won't be long before government regulations mandate a toaster (or any cooking appliance) that won't let you have toast(or whatever) because it's bad for your health. Not a long reach from that watch.
Will it make the average person in western countries better off?
Elon Musk (for it is he that makes these incredible robots) said last night “there’s an 80% chance of a utopian outcome” - or words to that effect. ie global superabundance. A robot worker for everyone. All boring tasks automated
Let’s not think about the 20% downside risk. Not pleasant
However, it will be quite a change and painful in some ways. Many millions of jobs are about to disappear
So what is the utopian outcome? That the robot does all my ironing and manages to put the duvet cover on the duvet without the cat getting in there? This strikes me as a relatively small upside, even if it is 80% likely, for a downside of robots which wipe out humanity. And call me a flinty old northern class warrior, but I don't really like the idea of having a slave, even a robot one. I still blanche at the concept of using Siri or any of its brethren. I'm not even 100% comfortable about interacting with waiters.
There is a middle ground, likelier at least in the shorter term, of course. Where 90% of such robots are owned by 0.1% of the population.
As was the case with cars
But the real money was in making cars for the masses. The model T Ford. There will be a model T Ford of house-bots
People worry about the machines taking over, but the rich possessing armies of robot henchmen might be a more realistic concern.
Albanian speaking gang, I bet multiples of that money has been through the car washes and "Turkish" barbers.
A new barber has appeared not far from me in an old takeaway joint. Been there a couple of months.
It looks like a barbers, there's someone there playing with a phone, but I'm yet to see a customer.
Bad business decision or money laundering? Your guess is as good as the fraud squad's.
Its an absolute joke. Everybody knows these places, its all in plain sight, we can all name at least one in our local area. The barbers, nail bars, the Eastern European shops with no stock, the American Candy Stores (those are Iranian / Iraqi I believe).
The nail bars around my way are always chockablock, such that it's very difficult to get an appointment, according to my wife.
Yup, so stuffing an extra £20k per week in takings wouldn't be very difficult.
Albanian speaking gang, I bet multiples of that money has been through the car washes and "Turkish" barbers.
A new barber has appeared not far from me in an old takeaway joint. Been there a couple of months.
It looks like a barbers, there's someone there playing with a phone, but I'm yet to see a customer.
Bad business decision or money laundering? Your guess is as good as the fraud squad's.
Its an absolute joke. Everybody knows these places, its all in plain sight, we can all name at least one in our local area. The barbers, nail bars, the Eastern European shops with no stock, the American Candy Stores (those are Iranian / Iraqi I believe).
The nail bars around my way are always chockablock, such that it's very difficult to get an appointment, according to my wife.
Of course there are legit businesses (and dodgy ones that get popular or using illegal bonded labour). I go to a Turkish barber that has been about for 20+ years, that is staffed by Turks and is always rammed because it is well established.
But that isn't what we are talking about, we are talking about where on a high street you all of a sudden get 4-5 of these open, they isn't anywhere near enough business for them and they are constantly empty.
They had a proposal last year, that any foreign citizen or Albanian can deposit up to €2 million in non-declared money into the Albanian banking system while enjoying legal immunity and a 5-10% tax
Because although its expensive to put cash in the till of a car wash or barber, the UK authorities have shown little to no willingness or ability to investigate and once its through the till its all legit money here in the UK. Its basically risk free way of doing it.
Car washes, nail bars may be full of modern slavery, illegal employment and tax evasion, but the idea that its meaningful money laundering is for the birds.
The American Sweet shops in London, again aren't money laundering but tax evasion (business rates) and you'd have to suspect landlords (for it is they who would be liable if the shops are empty) turn a blind eye at best.
474 Oxford Street (once a Vodafone shop) a couple of years ago had rates of £350k a year
I went to a Hand Car Wash the other day, as I need to be able to see the little scrape I did on my gatepost to think about a repair.
They looked at it (usually parked under lime trees so washes are a bit futile in the insect months), and added 50% to the price .
They had a proposal last year, that any foreign citizen or Albanian can deposit up to €2 million in non-declared money into the Albanian banking system while enjoying legal immunity and a 5-10% tax
Because although its expensive to put cash in the till of a car wash or barber, the UK authorities have shown little to no willingness or ability to investigate and once its through the till its all legit money here in the UK. Its basically risk free way of doing it.
Car washes, nail bars may be full of modern slavery, illegal employment and tax evasion, but the idea that its meaningful money laundering is for the birds.
The American Sweet shops in London, again aren't money laundering but tax evasion (business rates) and you'd have to suspect landlords (for it is they who would be liable if the shops are empty) turn a blind eye at best.
474 Oxford Street (once a Vodafone shop) a couple of years ago had rates of £350k a year
Quite the opposite. It is serious money in totality.
Quite. See "Layering".
You need a pyramid of smallish transactions to present a nice, reasonable story as to where the money comes from. Most such networks are money laundering *and* tax evasion *and* illegal employment *and* etc rolled into one.
Would be fun to see my idea for wiping them out implemented.
Blow to No 10's investment summit as port giant pulls £1bn announcement over P&O row
The government's Investment Summit has suffered a major blow after ports and logistics giant DP World pulled a scheduled announcement of a £1bn investment in its London Gateway container port, following criticism by members of Sir Keir Starmer's cabinet.
Sky News understands the Dubai-based company's investment was due to be a centrepiece of Monday's event, which is intended to showcase Britain's appeal to investors and will be attended by the prime minister and Chancellor Rachel Reeves.
DP World's investment in the port is now under review however, following criticism by Transport Secretary Louise Haigh and Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner of its subsidiary P&O Ferries.
Will it make the average person in western countries better off?
Elon Musk (for it is he that makes these incredible robots) said last night “there’s an 80% chance of a utopian outcome” - or words to that effect. ie global superabundance. A robot worker for everyone. All boring tasks automated
Let’s not think about the 20% downside risk. Not pleasant
However, it will be quite a change and painful in some ways. Many millions of jobs are about to disappear
So what is the utopian outcome? That the robot does all my ironing and manages to put the duvet cover on the duvet without the cat getting in there? This strikes me as a relatively small upside, even if it is 80% likely, for a downside of robots which wipe out humanity. And call me a flinty old northern class warrior, but I don't really like the idea of having a slave, even a robot one. I still blanche at the concept of using Siri or any of its brethren. I'm not even 100% comfortable about interacting with waiters.
Do you feel awkward demanding your toaster make toast?
No, but I would if I had to talk to it. Simply depressing the lever is fine. Pressing a few buttons is fine. But anything involving voice activation starts to feel a little like I am a colonial planation owner demanding things of my underlings.
I know what you mean but we will soon get used to it, I suspect
It must have felt equally odd for the first people using telephones. Indeed I have read that it did. You are talking into a machine yet a recognisable disembodied human voice responds even though they are not present - that’s deeply strange when you consider it. Yet it didn’t stop us adopting telephones with extreme eagerness
My understanding is that one of the first problems to address was how you start a conversation. At first, people simply picked up the phone and listened and waited. Which given the lack of dialling tones wasn't much help for whoever was on the other end. Bell favoured answering with a jaunty "Ahoy!", but it didn't catch on. "Hello" wasn't really a greeting back then - it was more a rhetorical question, a "what's going on here then". It became common in the same way Italians answer the telephone with 'pronto!' ('ready!') I think we get its current sense as a greeting from its use in answering the telephone. When I was small the household telephone was normally answered with the last four digits of your phone number in order that the caller could confirm to himself that he had dialled the right number (or at least if there was an errorthat ithad been early on in his dialling.)
Ah yes, I remember that convention. Greeting someone with a string of numbers. Quite odd if you think about it, given that the caller can soon tell if it's a wrong number by dint of who is on the other end of the line.
I suppose it was that you had to say something - and if you said '5305' your caller would instantly know whether he had got the end of your number wrong or right. Saying "hello" and leaving your caller to deduce whether that was a voice he expected or not was slightly less helpful. And saying "hello Cookie speaking" was giving away too much information.
Albanian speaking gang, I bet multiples of that money has been through the car washes and "Turkish" barbers.
A new barber has appeared not far from me in an old takeaway joint. Been there a couple of months.
It looks like a barbers, there's someone there playing with a phone, but I'm yet to see a customer.
Bad business decision or money laundering? Your guess is as good as the fraud squad's.
Its an absolute joke. Everybody knows these places, its all in plain sight, we can all name at least one in our local area. The barbers, nail bars, the Eastern European shops with no stock, the American Candy Stores (those are Iranian / Iraqi I believe).
The nail bars around my way are always chockablock, such that it's very difficult to get an appointment, according to my wife.
Of course there are legit businesses (and dodgy ones that get popular), I go to a Turkish barber that has been about for 20+ years, that is staffed by Turks and is always rammed because it is well established. But that isn't what we are talking about, we are talking about where on a high street you all of a sudden get 4-5 of these open, they isn't anywhere near enough business for them and they are constantly empty.
Busy ones are the easiest ones to hide money in though, you can quite quickly push in pretty big cash sums into a handful of already busy companies and you've got £10-12m going in across 6-8 busy shops, the silent directors draw the cleaned dividends and invest the money into legit enterprises.
Will it make the average person in western countries better off?
Elon Musk (for it is he that makes these incredible robots) said last night “there’s an 80% chance of a utopian outcome” - or words to that effect. ie global superabundance. A robot worker for everyone. All boring tasks automated
Let’s not think about the 20% downside risk. Not pleasant
However, it will be quite a change and painful in some ways. Many millions of jobs are about to disappear
So what is the utopian outcome? That the robot does all my ironing and manages to put the duvet cover on the duvet without the cat getting in there? This strikes me as a relatively small upside, even if it is 80% likely, for a downside of robots which wipe out humanity. And call me a flinty old northern class warrior, but I don't really like the idea of having a slave, even a robot one. I still blanche at the concept of using Siri or any of its brethren. I'm not even 100% comfortable about interacting with waiters.
If it's sub-sentient then it's not a slave.
Yeah - imagine selling that to a jury of robots. And a robot judge.
Do we get robot lawyers as well? Because that might almost be worth it...
Will it make the average person in western countries better off?
Elon Musk (for it is he that makes these incredible robots) said last night “there’s an 80% chance of a utopian outcome” - or words to that effect. ie global superabundance. A robot worker for everyone. All boring tasks automated
Let’s not think about the 20% downside risk. Not pleasant
However, it will be quite a change and painful in some ways. Many millions of jobs are about to disappear
So what is the utopian outcome? That the robot does all my ironing and manages to put the duvet cover on the duvet without the cat getting in there? This strikes me as a relatively small upside, even if it is 80% likely, for a downside of robots which wipe out humanity. And call me a flinty old northern class warrior, but I don't really like the idea of having a slave, even a robot one. I still blanche at the concept of using Siri or any of its brethren. I'm not even 100% comfortable about interacting with waiters.
Do you feel awkward demanding your toaster make toast?
No, but I would if I had to talk to it. Simply depressing the lever is fine. Pressing a few buttons is fine. But anything involving voice activation starts to feel a little like I am a colonial planation owner demanding things of my underlings.
I know what you mean but we will soon get used to it, I suspect
It must have felt equally odd for the first people using telephones. Indeed I have read that it did. You are talking into a machine yet a recognisable disembodied human voice responds even though they are not present - that’s deeply strange when you consider it. Yet it didn’t stop us adopting telephones with extreme eagerness
My understanding is that one of the first problems to address was how you start a conversation. At first, people simply picked up the phone and listened and waited. Which given the lack of dialling tones wasn't much help for whoever was on the other end. Bell favoured answering with a jaunty "Ahoy!", but it didn't catch on. "Hello" wasn't really a greeting back then - it was more a rhetorical question, a "what's going on here then". It became common in the same way Italians answer the telephone with 'pronto!' ('ready!') I think we get its current sense as a greeting from its use in answering the telephone. When I was small the household telephone was normally answered with the last four digits of your phone number in order that the caller could confirm to himself that he had dialled the right number (or at least if there was an errorthat ithad been early on in his dialling.)
Ah yes, I remember that convention. Greeting someone with a string of numbers. Quite odd if you think about it, given that the caller can soon tell if it's a wrong number by dint of who is on the other end of the line.
I suppose it was that you had to say something - and if you said '5305' your caller would instantly know whether he had got the end of your number wrong or right. Saying "hello" and leaving your caller to deduce whether that was a voice he expected or not was slightly less helpful. And saying "hello Cookie speaking" was giving away too much information.
Think of it as a handshake protocol with a checksum.....
Albanian speaking gang, I bet multiples of that money has been through the car washes and "Turkish" barbers.
A new barber has appeared not far from me in an old takeaway joint. Been there a couple of months.
It looks like a barbers, there's someone there playing with a phone, but I'm yet to see a customer.
Bad business decision or money laundering? Your guess is as good as the fraud squad's.
Its an absolute joke. Everybody knows these places, its all in plain sight, we can all name at least one in our local area. The barbers, nail bars, the Eastern European shops with no stock, the American Candy Stores (those are Iranian / Iraqi I believe).
The nail bars around my way are always chockablock, such that it's very difficult to get an appointment, according to my wife.
Of course there are legit businesses (and dodgy ones that get popular), I go to a Turkish barber that has been about for 20+ years, that is staffed by Turks and is always rammed because it is well established. But that isn't what we are talking about, we are talking about where on a high street you all of a sudden get 4-5 of these open, they isn't anywhere near enough business for them and they are constantly empty.
Busy ones are the easiest ones to hide money in though, you can quite quickly push in pretty big cash sums into a handful of already busy companies and you've got £10-12m going in across 6-8 busy shops, the silent directors draw the cleaned dividends and invest the money into legit enterprises.
Absolutely and I am sure that has been going on for years. But in past 4-5 years we have seen explosion of these cash businesses that everybody knows are 100% dodgy taking up rents on distressed high streets. I presume because there is no enforcement anywhere, its just a no brainer, £50k to open a shitty shop, put some fresh off the boat from Albanian to sit around and funnel through £100k's a year, rinse and repeat.
They had a proposal last year, that any foreign citizen or Albanian can deposit up to €2 million in non-declared money into the Albanian banking system while enjoying legal immunity and a 5-10% tax
Because although its expensive to put cash in the till of a car wash or barber, the UK authorities have shown little to no willingness or ability to investigate and once its through the till its all legit money here in the UK. Its basically risk free way of doing it.
Car washes, nail bars may be full of modern slavery, illegal employment and tax evasion, but the idea that its meaningful money laundering is for the birds.
The American Sweet shops in London, again aren't money laundering but tax evasion (business rates) and you'd have to suspect landlords (for it is they who would be liable if the shops are empty) turn a blind eye at best.
474 Oxford Street (once a Vodafone shop) a couple of years ago had rates of £350k a year
One dares not even mention 788–790 Finchley Road...
They had a proposal last year, that any foreign citizen or Albanian can deposit up to €2 million in non-declared money into the Albanian banking system while enjoying legal immunity and a 5-10% tax
Because although its expensive to put cash in the till of a car wash or barber, the UK authorities have shown little to no willingness or ability to investigate and once its through the till its all legit money here in the UK. Its basically risk free way of doing it.
Car washes, nail bars may be full of modern slavery, illegal employment and tax evasion, but the idea that its meaningful money laundering is for the birds.
The American Sweet shops in London, again aren't money laundering but tax evasion (business rates) and you'd have to suspect landlords (for it is they who would be liable if the shops are empty) turn a blind eye at best.
474 Oxford Street (once a Vodafone shop) a couple of years ago had rates of £350k a year
Quite the opposite. It is serious money in totality.
Looking for a parking spot recently, I turned into a back street in a not-yet-gentrified part of North Manchester - I counted around 50vape shops, not one with any customers. Something rum tbere, surely... 21 Harris St https://maps.app.goo.gl/177AghTPd8zuLjNj6?g_st=ac
Schools not out yet? A whole new generation hooked on nicotine.
That street would be enough to supply tge habit of the whole of Greater Manchester.
They had a proposal last year, that any foreign citizen or Albanian can deposit up to €2 million in non-declared money into the Albanian banking system while enjoying legal immunity and a 5-10% tax
Because although its expensive to put cash in the till of a car wash or barber, the UK authorities have shown little to no willingness or ability to investigate and once its through the till its all legit money here in the UK. Its basically risk free way of doing it.
Car washes, nail bars may be full of modern slavery, illegal employment and tax evasion, but the idea that its meaningful money laundering is for the birds.
The American Sweet shops in London, again aren't money laundering but tax evasion (business rates) and you'd have to suspect landlords (for it is they who would be liable if the shops are empty) turn a blind eye at best.
474 Oxford Street (once a Vodafone shop) a couple of years ago had rates of £350k a year
One dares not even mention 788–790 Finchley Road...
Shhhhhh...that's all the illuminati and shit bruv...
Albanian speaking gang, I bet multiples of that money has been through the car washes and "Turkish" barbers.
A new barber has appeared not far from me in an old takeaway joint. Been there a couple of months.
It looks like a barbers, there's someone there playing with a phone, but I'm yet to see a customer.
Bad business decision or money laundering? Your guess is as good as the fraud squad's.
Its an absolute joke. Everybody knows these places, its all in plain sight, we can all name at least one in our local area. The barbers, nail bars, the Eastern European shops with no stock, the American Candy Stores (those are Iranian / Iraqi I believe).
The nail bars around my way are always chockablock, such that it's very difficult to get an appointment, according to my wife.
Of course there are legit businesses (and dodgy ones that get popular or using illegal bonded labour). I go to a Turkish barber that has been about for 20+ years, that is staffed by Turks and is always rammed because it is well established.
But that isn't what we are talking about, we are talking about where on a high street you all of a sudden get 4-5 of these open, they isn't anywhere near enough business for them and they are constantly empty.
I was necessarily saying they were all legit – just that they are popular with the womenfolk around here – see @MaxPB 's point above. Fast cash businesses like the beauty industry are perfect for laundering as you have said.
Interestingly mixed reply from the Transport Minister to a PQ on cycling for children. Pokes the dead Tory bear, and broadens it to include 'drivers'. We await detail.
Wera Hobhouse “Road safety is one of the main reasons why young people do not cycle. This is particularly true for cities like Bath where historic infrastructure makes it very difficult. What will the government do to help young cyclists particularly to make it safer, and make roads safer in Bath?”
Louise Haigh “I’m grateful to her for raising that point and it sits at the heart of our ambition to develop the new road safety strategy.”
“The previous government pursued poisonous culture wars against road users of all descriptions. We are determined to take back streets for pedestrians, cyclists, and drivers. And that will be at the heart of our new ambition for the road safety strategy.”
Will it make the average person in western countries better off?
Elon Musk (for it is he that makes these incredible robots) said last night “there’s an 80% chance of a utopian outcome” - or words to that effect. ie global superabundance. A robot worker for everyone. All boring tasks automated
Let’s not think about the 20% downside risk. Not pleasant
However, it will be quite a change and painful in some ways. Many millions of jobs are about to disappear
So what is the utopian outcome? That the robot does all my ironing and manages to put the duvet cover on the duvet without the cat getting in there? This strikes me as a relatively small upside, even if it is 80% likely, for a downside of robots which wipe out humanity. And call me a flinty old northern class warrior, but I don't really like the idea of having a slave, even a robot one. I still blanche at the concept of using Siri or any of its brethren. I'm not even 100% comfortable about interacting with waiters.
Do you feel awkward demanding your toaster make toast?
No, but I would if I had to talk to it. Simply depressing the lever is fine. Pressing a few buttons is fine. But anything involving voice activation starts to feel a little like I am a colonial planation owner demanding things of my underlings.
I know what you mean but we will soon get used to it, I suspect
It must have felt equally odd for the first people using telephones. Indeed I have read that it did. You are talking into a machine yet a recognisable disembodied human voice responds even though they are not present - that’s deeply strange when you consider it. Yet it didn’t stop us adopting telephones with extreme eagerness
My understanding is that one of the first problems to address was how you start a conversation. At first, people simply picked up the phone and listened and waited. Which given the lack of dialling tones wasn't much help for whoever was on the other end. Bell favoured answering with a jaunty "Ahoy!", but it didn't catch on. "Hello" wasn't really a greeting back then - it was more a rhetorical question, a "what's going on here then". It became common in the same way Italians answer the telephone with 'pronto!' ('ready!') I think we get its current sense as a greeting from its use in answering the telephone. When I was small the household telephone was normally answered with the last four digits of your phone number in order that the caller could confirm to himself that he had dialled the right number (or at least if there was an errorthat ithad been early on in his dialling.)
Ah yes, I remember that convention. Greeting someone with a string of numbers. Quite odd if you think about it, given that the caller can soon tell if it's a wrong number by dint of who is on the other end of the line.
I suppose it was that you had to say something - and if you said '5305' your caller would instantly know whether he had got the end of your number wrong or right. Saying "hello" and leaving your caller to deduce whether that was a voice he expected or not was slightly less helpful. And saying "hello Cookie speaking" was giving away too much information.
Hmm. I always wondered what proportion of callers even knew and remembered the number they had called. Presumably many, even most, immediately forgot it as soon as they entered it, hence the convention was useless as checking mechanism?
Blow to No 10's investment summit as port giant pulls £1bn announcement over P&O row
The government's Investment Summit has suffered a major blow after ports and logistics giant DP World pulled a scheduled announcement of a £1bn investment in its London Gateway container port, following criticism by members of Sir Keir Starmer's cabinet.
Sky News understands the Dubai-based company's investment was due to be a centrepiece of Monday's event, which is intended to showcase Britain's appeal to investors and will be attended by the prime minister and Chancellor Rachel Reeves.
DP World's investment in the port is now under review however, following criticism by Transport Secretary Louise Haigh and Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner of its subsidiary P&O Ferries.
On the plus side Lou Haigh got likes and retweets on social media.
Nice to see the grown ups are back in charge.
lol. This government is quite spectacularly inept. It is like a bunch of retarded clowns - many of them missing limbs - trying to operate a power station
They had a proposal last year, that any foreign citizen or Albanian can deposit up to €2 million in non-declared money into the Albanian banking system while enjoying legal immunity and a 5-10% tax
Because although its expensive to put cash in the till of a car wash or barber, the UK authorities have shown little to no willingness or ability to investigate and once its through the till its all legit money here in the UK. Its basically risk free way of doing it.
Car washes, nail bars may be full of modern slavery, illegal employment and tax evasion, but the idea that its meaningful money laundering is for the birds.
The American Sweet shops in London, again aren't money laundering but tax evasion (business rates) and you'd have to suspect landlords (for it is they who would be liable if the shops are empty) turn a blind eye at best.
474 Oxford Street (once a Vodafone shop) a couple of years ago had rates of £350k a year
One dares not even mention 788–790 Finchley Road...
Shhhhhh...that's all the illuminati and shit bruv...
What happened to @hunchman – single-handedly responsible for making an otherwise nondescript part of northwest London infamous (for reasons that nobody could quote pin down)!
Albanian speaking gang, I bet multiples of that money has been through the car washes and "Turkish" barbers.
A new barber has appeared not far from me in an old takeaway joint. Been there a couple of months.
It looks like a barbers, there's someone there playing with a phone, but I'm yet to see a customer.
Bad business decision or money laundering? Your guess is as good as the fraud squad's.
Its an absolute joke. Everybody knows these places, its all in plain sight, we can all name at least one in our local area. The barbers, nail bars, the Eastern European shops with no stock, the American Candy Stores (those are Iranian / Iraqi I believe).
The nail bars around my way are always chockablock, such that it's very difficult to get an appointment, according to my wife.
Yup, so stuffing an extra £20k per week in takings wouldn't be very difficult.
So adding VAT to the cost of money laundering ? At this rate we are getting 50p back in the £
You think that with the cracking of Encochat and the huge number of prosecutions in the last few years that the NCA just accept an extra £1m a year going through a nail bar. Or accept as legitimate American Candy 'profits' while they simultaneously defraund Westminster council of tens of millions a year.
It's delusional
If you want to know where the money goes, look at Southern Spain (historically), Rathkeale in Ireland for travellers, Dubai & UAE, Turkey and Montenegro for property and boats.
Tommy Vietor @TVietor08 · 25m NYT on how Elon Musk is trying to buy the election for Trump: - Spending $140-180MM on Trump super PAC - Twitter coordinating with the Trump camp to throttle links to leaked campaign documents - Musk rallying other billionaires to support Trump - Musk temporarily moving to PA
Will it make the average person in western countries better off?
Elon Musk (for it is he that makes these incredible robots) said last night “there’s an 80% chance of a utopian outcome” - or words to that effect. ie global superabundance. A robot worker for everyone. All boring tasks automated
Let’s not think about the 20% downside risk. Not pleasant
However, it will be quite a change and painful in some ways. Many millions of jobs are about to disappear
So what is the utopian outcome? That the robot does all my ironing and manages to put the duvet cover on the duvet without the cat getting in there? This strikes me as a relatively small upside, even if it is 80% likely, for a downside of robots which wipe out humanity. And call me a flinty old northern class warrior, but I don't really like the idea of having a slave, even a robot one. I still blanche at the concept of using Siri or any of its brethren. I'm not even 100% comfortable about interacting with waiters.
Do you feel awkward demanding your toaster make toast?
No, but I would if I had to talk to it. Simply depressing the lever is fine. Pressing a few buttons is fine. But anything involving voice activation starts to feel a little like I am a colonial planation owner demanding things of my underlings.
I know what you mean but we will soon get used to it, I suspect
It must have felt equally odd for the first people using telephones. Indeed I have read that it did. You are talking into a machine yet a recognisable disembodied human voice responds even though they are not present - that’s deeply strange when you consider it. Yet it didn’t stop us adopting telephones with extreme eagerness
My understanding is that one of the first problems to address was how you start a conversation. At first, people simply picked up the phone and listened and waited. Which given the lack of dialling tones wasn't much help for whoever was on the other end. Bell favoured answering with a jaunty "Ahoy!", but it didn't catch on. "Hello" wasn't really a greeting back then - it was more a rhetorical question, a "what's going on here then". It became common in the same way Italians answer the telephone with 'pronto!' ('ready!') I think we get its current sense as a greeting from its use in answering the telephone. When I was small the household telephone was normally answered with the last four digits of your phone number in order that the caller could confirm to himself that he had dialled the right number (or at least if there was an errorthat ithad been early on in his dialling.)
Like this surely ...
My parents also used to start with the name of the village and then the last 6 digits. No idea why, they just did.
They had a proposal last year, that any foreign citizen or Albanian can deposit up to €2 million in non-declared money into the Albanian banking system while enjoying legal immunity and a 5-10% tax
Because although its expensive to put cash in the till of a car wash or barber, the UK authorities have shown little to no willingness or ability to investigate and once its through the till its all legit money here in the UK. Its basically risk free way of doing it.
Car washes, nail bars may be full of modern slavery, illegal employment and tax evasion, but the idea that its meaningful money laundering is for the birds.
The American Sweet shops in London, again aren't money laundering but tax evasion (business rates) and you'd have to suspect landlords (for it is they who would be liable if the shops are empty) turn a blind eye at best.
474 Oxford Street (once a Vodafone shop) a couple of years ago had rates of £350k a year
As reported by Private Eye, the American Sweet shops are yes doing the tax evasion on business rates, fiddling VAT, but also alleged that they laundering money from places like Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran.
What they do have advertised for sale is mostly not allowed to be imported to the UK in the first place.
Trading Standards should have them all shut down within a week.
Albanian speaking gang, I bet multiples of that money has been through the car washes and "Turkish" barbers.
A new barber has appeared not far from me in an old takeaway joint. Been there a couple of months.
It looks like a barbers, there's someone there playing with a phone, but I'm yet to see a customer.
Bad business decision or money laundering? Your guess is as good as the fraud squad's.
Its an absolute joke. Everybody knows these places, its all in plain sight, we can all name at least one in our local area. The barbers, nail bars, the Eastern European shops with no stock, the American Candy Stores (those are Iranian / Iraqi I believe).
The nail bars around my way are always chockablock, such that it's very difficult to get an appointment, according to my wife.
Yup, so stuffing an extra £20k per week in takings wouldn't be very difficult.
So adding VAT to the cost of money laundering ? At this rate we are getting 50p back in the £
You think that with the cracking of Encochat and the huge number of prosecutions in the last few years that the NCA just accept an extra £1m a year going through a nail bar. Or accept as legitimate American Candy 'profits' while they simultaneously defraund Westminster council of tens of millions a year.
It's delusional
If you want to know where the money goes, look at Southern Spain (historically), Rathkeale in Ireland for travellers, Dubai & UAE, Turkey and Montenegro for property and boats.
Or Hawala banking and shunting gold about.
Why do you think the government doesn't do anything to shut these businesses down? The treasury gets to keep 30-50% of the money.
Will it make the average person in western countries better off?
Elon Musk (for it is he that makes these incredible robots) said last night “there’s an 80% chance of a utopian outcome” - or words to that effect. ie global superabundance. A robot worker for everyone. All boring tasks automated
Let’s not think about the 20% downside risk. Not pleasant
However, it will be quite a change and painful in some ways. Many millions of jobs are about to disappear
So what is the utopian outcome? That the robot does all my ironing and manages to put the duvet cover on the duvet without the cat getting in there? This strikes me as a relatively small upside, even if it is 80% likely, for a downside of robots which wipe out humanity. And call me a flinty old northern class warrior, but I don't really like the idea of having a slave, even a robot one. I still blanche at the concept of using Siri or any of its brethren. I'm not even 100% comfortable about interacting with waiters.
Do you feel awkward demanding your toaster make toast?
No, but I would if I had to talk to it. Simply depressing the lever is fine. Pressing a few buttons is fine. But anything involving voice activation starts to feel a little like I am a colonial planation owner demanding things of my underlings.
I know what you mean but we will soon get used to it, I suspect
It must have felt equally odd for the first people using telephones. Indeed I have read that it did. You are talking into a machine yet a recognisable disembodied human voice responds even though they are not present - that’s deeply strange when you consider it. Yet it didn’t stop us adopting telephones with extreme eagerness
My understanding is that one of the first problems to address was how you start a conversation. At first, people simply picked up the phone and listened and waited. Which given the lack of dialling tones wasn't much help for whoever was on the other end. Bell favoured answering with a jaunty "Ahoy!", but it didn't catch on. "Hello" wasn't really a greeting back then - it was more a rhetorical question, a "what's going on here then". It became common in the same way Italians answer the telephone with 'pronto!' ('ready!') I think we get its current sense as a greeting from its use in answering the telephone. When I was small the household telephone was normally answered with the last four digits of your phone number in order that the caller could confirm to himself that he had dialled the right number (or at least if there was an errorthat ithad been early on in his dialling.)
Like this surely ...
My parents also used to start with the name of the village and then the last 6 digits. No idea why, they just did.
Before STD codes, exchanges were known by location. I worked in a London office where the phone number was Temple Bar xxxxx.
Will it make the average person in western countries better off?
Elon Musk (for it is he that makes these incredible robots) said last night “there’s an 80% chance of a utopian outcome” - or words to that effect. ie global superabundance. A robot worker for everyone. All boring tasks automated
Let’s not think about the 20% downside risk. Not pleasant
However, it will be quite a change and painful in some ways. Many millions of jobs are about to disappear
So what is the utopian outcome? That the robot does all my ironing and manages to put the duvet cover on the duvet without the cat getting in there? This strikes me as a relatively small upside, even if it is 80% likely, for a downside of robots which wipe out humanity. And call me a flinty old northern class warrior, but I don't really like the idea of having a slave, even a robot one. I still blanche at the concept of using Siri or any of its brethren. I'm not even 100% comfortable about interacting with waiters.
Do you feel awkward demanding your toaster make toast?
No, but I would if I had to talk to it. Simply depressing the lever is fine. Pressing a few buttons is fine. But anything involving voice activation starts to feel a little like I am a colonial planation owner demanding things of my underlings.
I know what you mean but we will soon get used to it, I suspect
It must have felt equally odd for the first people using telephones. Indeed I have read that it did. You are talking into a machine yet a recognisable disembodied human voice responds even though they are not present - that’s deeply strange when you consider it. Yet it didn’t stop us adopting telephones with extreme eagerness
My understanding is that one of the first problems to address was how you start a conversation. At first, people simply picked up the phone and listened and waited. Which given the lack of dialling tones wasn't much help for whoever was on the other end. Bell favoured answering with a jaunty "Ahoy!", but it didn't catch on. "Hello" wasn't really a greeting back then - it was more a rhetorical question, a "what's going on here then". It became common in the same way Italians answer the telephone with 'pronto!' ('ready!') I think we get its current sense as a greeting from its use in answering the telephone. When I was small the household telephone was normally answered with the last four digits of your phone number in order that the caller could confirm to himself that he had dialled the right number (or at least if there was an errorthat ithad been early on in his dialling.)
Ah yes, I remember that convention. Greeting someone with a string of numbers. Quite odd if you think about it, given that the caller can soon tell if it's a wrong number by dint of who is on the other end of the line.
I suppose it was that you had to say something - and if you said '5305' your caller would instantly know whether he had got the end of your number wrong or right. Saying "hello" and leaving your caller to deduce whether that was a voice he expected or not was slightly less helpful. And saying "hello Cookie speaking" was giving away too much information.
Hmm. I always wondered what proportion of callers even knew and remembered the number they had called. Presumably many, even most, immediately forgot it as soon as they entered it, hence the convention was useless as checking mechanism?
People used to be a lot better at remembering phone numbers when they weren't all stored in a phone, and when you had to turn the dial on a rotary phone to dial them.
Nowadays people would struggle to remember their own - unless they've been regularly typing it into girls' phones they've just met.
Nowadays people would struggle to remember their own - unless they've been regularly typing it into girls' phones they've just met.
Don't they just mate smartwatches now?
In Iceland, all the kids have an app that if they bump with somebody elses phone it tells them if they are too closely related to be doing any mating....
Will it make the average person in western countries better off?
Elon Musk (for it is he that makes these incredible robots) said last night “there’s an 80% chance of a utopian outcome” - or words to that effect. ie global superabundance. A robot worker for everyone. All boring tasks automated
Let’s not think about the 20% downside risk. Not pleasant
However, it will be quite a change and painful in some ways. Many millions of jobs are about to disappear
So what is the utopian outcome? That the robot does all my ironing and manages to put the duvet cover on the duvet without the cat getting in there? This strikes me as a relatively small upside, even if it is 80% likely, for a downside of robots which wipe out humanity. And call me a flinty old northern class warrior, but I don't really like the idea of having a slave, even a robot one. I still blanche at the concept of using Siri or any of its brethren. I'm not even 100% comfortable about interacting with waiters.
Do you feel awkward demanding your toaster make toast?
No, but I would if I had to talk to it. Simply depressing the lever is fine. Pressing a few buttons is fine. But anything involving voice activation starts to feel a little like I am a colonial planation owner demanding things of my underlings.
I know what you mean but we will soon get used to it, I suspect
It must have felt equally odd for the first people using telephones. Indeed I have read that it did. You are talking into a machine yet a recognisable disembodied human voice responds even though they are not present - that’s deeply strange when you consider it. Yet it didn’t stop us adopting telephones with extreme eagerness
My understanding is that one of the first problems to address was how you start a conversation. At first, people simply picked up the phone and listened and waited. Which given the lack of dialling tones wasn't much help for whoever was on the other end. Bell favoured answering with a jaunty "Ahoy!", but it didn't catch on. "Hello" wasn't really a greeting back then - it was more a rhetorical question, a "what's going on here then". It became common in the same way Italians answer the telephone with 'pronto!' ('ready!') I think we get its current sense as a greeting from its use in answering the telephone. When I was small the household telephone was normally answered with the last four digits of your phone number in order that the caller could confirm to himself that he had dialled the right number (or at least if there was an errorthat ithad been early on in his dialling.)
Ah yes, I remember that convention. Greeting someone with a string of numbers. Quite odd if you think about it, given that the caller can soon tell if it's a wrong number by dint of who is on the other end of the line.
I suppose it was that you had to say something - and if you said '5305' your caller would instantly know whether he had got the end of your number wrong or right. Saying "hello" and leaving your caller to deduce whether that was a voice he expected or not was slightly less helpful. And saying "hello Cookie speaking" was giving away too much information.
Hmm. I always wondered what proportion of callers even knew and remembered the number they had called. Presumably many, even most, immediately forgot it as soon as they entered it, hence the convention was useless as checking mechanism?
I don't think that's right. People used to know other people's phone numbers. Hell, I can still remember the phone numbers of most of my friends' parents from school - or of the houses they lived in in the early 90s, at any rate, along with half a dozen other landlines from the Stockport area of the time. Whereas the number of current numbers I know is exactly four: my own, my wife's, my parents landline and, at a push, my own landline.
Round here, it's barber shop (not as in the quartets, "hello my baby, hello my honey, hello my ragtime gal").
Now, let's be fair - you can keep your Babylon 5 references, only @stodge can bring Tin Pan Alley lyrics to a Friday afternoon.
Anyway, the barber shops - all for men (there's a surprise) seem to proliferate replacing the betting shops, bakeries etc. At this rate East Ham will be destitute but the men will be well groomed.
Will it make the average person in western countries better off?
Elon Musk (for it is he that makes these incredible robots) said last night “there’s an 80% chance of a utopian outcome” - or words to that effect. ie global superabundance. A robot worker for everyone. All boring tasks automated
Let’s not think about the 20% downside risk. Not pleasant
However, it will be quite a change and painful in some ways. Many millions of jobs are about to disappear
So what is the utopian outcome? That the robot does all my ironing and manages to put the duvet cover on the duvet without the cat getting in there? This strikes me as a relatively small upside, even if it is 80% likely, for a downside of robots which wipe out humanity. And call me a flinty old northern class warrior, but I don't really like the idea of having a slave, even a robot one. I still blanche at the concept of using Siri or any of its brethren. I'm not even 100% comfortable about interacting with waiters.
Do you feel awkward demanding your toaster make toast?
No, but I would if I had to talk to it. Simply depressing the lever is fine. Pressing a few buttons is fine. But anything involving voice activation starts to feel a little like I am a colonial planation owner demanding things of my underlings.
I know what you mean but we will soon get used to it, I suspect
It must have felt equally odd for the first people using telephones. Indeed I have read that it did. You are talking into a machine yet a recognisable disembodied human voice responds even though they are not present - that’s deeply strange when you consider it. Yet it didn’t stop us adopting telephones with extreme eagerness
My understanding is that one of the first problems to address was how you start a conversation. At first, people simply picked up the phone and listened and waited. Which given the lack of dialling tones wasn't much help for whoever was on the other end. Bell favoured answering with a jaunty "Ahoy!", but it didn't catch on. "Hello" wasn't really a greeting back then - it was more a rhetorical question, a "what's going on here then". It became common in the same way Italians answer the telephone with 'pronto!' ('ready!') I think we get its current sense as a greeting from its use in answering the telephone. When I was small the household telephone was normally answered with the last four digits of your phone number in order that the caller could confirm to himself that he had dialled the right number (or at least if there was an errorthat ithad been early on in his dialling.)
Ah yes, I remember that convention. Greeting someone with a string of numbers. Quite odd if you think about it, given that the caller can soon tell if it's a wrong number by dint of who is on the other end of the line.
I suppose it was that you had to say something - and if you said '5305' your caller would instantly know whether he had got the end of your number wrong or right. Saying "hello" and leaving your caller to deduce whether that was a voice he expected or not was slightly less helpful. And saying "hello Cookie speaking" was giving away too much information.
Hmm. I always wondered what proportion of callers even knew and remembered the number they had called. Presumably many, even most, immediately forgot it as soon as they entered it, hence the convention was useless as checking mechanism?
I don't think that's right. People used to know other people's phone numbers. Hell, I can still remember the phone numbers of most of my friends' parents from school - or of the houses they lived in in the early 90s, at any rate, along with half a dozen other landlines from the Stockport area of the time. Whereas the number of current numbers I know is exactly four: my own, my wife's, my parents landline and, at a push, my own landline.
I still remember the number for my parents in law - the first 4 digits are still the code for most station gates on the ECML
Tommy Vietor @TVietor08 · 25m NYT on how Elon Musk is trying to buy the election for Trump: - Spending $140-180MM on Trump super PAC - Twitter coordinating with the Trump camp to throttle links to leaked campaign documents - Musk rallying other billionaires to support Trump - Musk temporarily moving to PA
Can you imagine the GOP furore if the situation was reversed. It always seems to be right wing nutjobs buying up media to try and force their world view onto others .
I'm beginning to not believe the state polls. Anybody remember UKGE2015, where everybody was convinced it'll be a tie and...it just wasn't? Or USMidterms2022, where everybody was convinced it'll be Trump wave and...it just wasn't? Or UKGE2024, where everybody was convinced there would be a massive Labour lead (in votes) and...it just wasn't?
Somebody suggest something better than state polls for states. Next five minutes will be fine. Chop, chop.
Will it make the average person in western countries better off?
Elon Musk (for it is he that makes these incredible robots) said last night “there’s an 80% chance of a utopian outcome” - or words to that effect. ie global superabundance. A robot worker for everyone. All boring tasks automated
Let’s not think about the 20% downside risk. Not pleasant
However, it will be quite a change and painful in some ways. Many millions of jobs are about to disappear
So what is the utopian outcome? That the robot does all my ironing and manages to put the duvet cover on the duvet without the cat getting in there? This strikes me as a relatively small upside, even if it is 80% likely, for a downside of robots which wipe out humanity. And call me a flinty old northern class warrior, but I don't really like the idea of having a slave, even a robot one. I still blanche at the concept of using Siri or any of its brethren. I'm not even 100% comfortable about interacting with waiters.
Do you feel awkward demanding your toaster make toast?
No, but I would if I had to talk to it. Simply depressing the lever is fine. Pressing a few buttons is fine. But anything involving voice activation starts to feel a little like I am a colonial planation owner demanding things of my underlings.
I know what you mean but we will soon get used to it, I suspect
It must have felt equally odd for the first people using telephones. Indeed I have read that it did. You are talking into a machine yet a recognisable disembodied human voice responds even though they are not present - that’s deeply strange when you consider it. Yet it didn’t stop us adopting telephones with extreme eagerness
My understanding is that one of the first problems to address was how you start a conversation. At first, people simply picked up the phone and listened and waited. Which given the lack of dialling tones wasn't much help for whoever was on the other end. Bell favoured answering with a jaunty "Ahoy!", but it didn't catch on. "Hello" wasn't really a greeting back then - it was more a rhetorical question, a "what's going on here then". It became common in the same way Italians answer the telephone with 'pronto!' ('ready!') I think we get its current sense as a greeting from its use in answering the telephone. When I was small the household telephone was normally answered with the last four digits of your phone number in order that the caller could confirm to himself that he had dialled the right number (or at least if there was an errorthat ithad been early on in his dialling.)
Ah yes, I remember that convention. Greeting someone with a string of numbers. Quite odd if you think about it, given that the caller can soon tell if it's a wrong number by dint of who is on the other end of the line.
I suppose it was that you had to say something - and if you said '5305' your caller would instantly know whether he had got the end of your number wrong or right. Saying "hello" and leaving your caller to deduce whether that was a voice he expected or not was slightly less helpful. And saying "hello Cookie speaking" was giving away too much information.
Hmm. I always wondered what proportion of callers even knew and remembered the number they had called. Presumably many, even most, immediately forgot it as soon as they entered it, hence the convention was useless as checking mechanism?
I don't think that's right. People used to know other people's phone numbers. Hell, I can still remember the phone numbers of most of my friends' parents from school - or of the houses they lived in in the early 90s, at any rate, along with half a dozen other landlines from the Stockport area of the time. Whereas the number of current numbers I know is exactly four: my own, my wife's, my parents landline and, at a push, my own landline.
Will it make the average person in western countries better off?
Elon Musk (for it is he that makes these incredible robots) said last night “there’s an 80% chance of a utopian outcome” - or words to that effect. ie global superabundance. A robot worker for everyone. All boring tasks automated
Let’s not think about the 20% downside risk. Not pleasant
However, it will be quite a change and painful in some ways. Many millions of jobs are about to disappear
So what is the utopian outcome? That the robot does all my ironing and manages to put the duvet cover on the duvet without the cat getting in there? This strikes me as a relatively small upside, even if it is 80% likely, for a downside of robots which wipe out humanity. And call me a flinty old northern class warrior, but I don't really like the idea of having a slave, even a robot one. I still blanche at the concept of using Siri or any of its brethren. I'm not even 100% comfortable about interacting with waiters.
Do you feel awkward demanding your toaster make toast?
No, but I would if I had to talk to it. Simply depressing the lever is fine. Pressing a few buttons is fine. But anything involving voice activation starts to feel a little like I am a colonial planation owner demanding things of my underlings.
I know what you mean but we will soon get used to it, I suspect
It must have felt equally odd for the first people using telephones. Indeed I have read that it did. You are talking into a machine yet a recognisable disembodied human voice responds even though they are not present - that’s deeply strange when you consider it. Yet it didn’t stop us adopting telephones with extreme eagerness
My understanding is that one of the first problems to address was how you start a conversation. At first, people simply picked up the phone and listened and waited. Which given the lack of dialling tones wasn't much help for whoever was on the other end. Bell favoured answering with a jaunty "Ahoy!", but it didn't catch on. "Hello" wasn't really a greeting back then - it was more a rhetorical question, a "what's going on here then". It became common in the same way Italians answer the telephone with 'pronto!' ('ready!') I think we get its current sense as a greeting from its use in answering the telephone. When I was small the household telephone was normally answered with the last four digits of your phone number in order that the caller could confirm to himself that he had dialled the right number (or at least if there was an errorthat ithad been early on in his dialling.)
Ah yes, I remember that convention. Greeting someone with a string of numbers. Quite odd if you think about it, given that the caller can soon tell if it's a wrong number by dint of who is on the other end of the line.
I suppose it was that you had to say something - and if you said '5305' your caller would instantly know whether he had got the end of your number wrong or right. Saying "hello" and leaving your caller to deduce whether that was a voice he expected or not was slightly less helpful. And saying "hello Cookie speaking" was giving away too much information.
Hmm. I always wondered what proportion of callers even knew and remembered the number they had called. Presumably many, even most, immediately forgot it as soon as they entered it, hence the convention was useless as checking mechanism?
I don't think that's right. People used to know other people's phone numbers. Hell, I can still remember the phone numbers of most of my friends' parents from school - or of the houses they lived in in the early 90s, at any rate, along with half a dozen other landlines from the Stockport area of the time. Whereas the number of current numbers I know is exactly four: my own, my wife's, my parents landline and, at a push, my own landline.
I still remember the number for my parents in law - the first 4 digits are still the code for most station gates on the ECML
I must have been about seven when we got our first phone. I wonder what happens now if you ring Amherst 0806?
Tommy Vietor @TVietor08 · 25m NYT on how Elon Musk is trying to buy the election for Trump: - Spending $140-180MM on Trump super PAC - Twitter coordinating with the Trump camp to throttle links to leaked campaign documents - Musk rallying other billionaires to support Trump - Musk temporarily moving to PA
Can you imagine the GOP furore if the situation was reversed. It always seems to be right wing nutjobs buying up media to try and force their world view onto others .
It was reversed, previously. Facebook and Twitter conspired with the Biden admin to suppress the Lab Leak theory as it was deemed to benefit Trump. Zuckerberg has admitted this, and now regrets it
"Mark Zuckerberg says White House ‘pressured’ Facebook to censor Covid-19 content
Meta boss regrets bowing to government power and says he would not make the same choices today"
"Zuckerberg also said that Facebook “temporarily demoted” a story about the contents of a laptop owned by Hunter Biden, the president’s son, after a warning from the FBI that Russia was preparing a disinformation campaign against the Bidens.
Zuckerberg wrote that it has since become clear that the story was not disinformation, and “in retrospect, we shouldn’t have demoted the story”."
Tommy Vietor @TVietor08 · 25m NYT on how Elon Musk is trying to buy the election for Trump: - Spending $140-180MM on Trump super PAC - Twitter coordinating with the Trump camp to throttle links to leaked campaign documents - Musk rallying other billionaires to support Trump - Musk temporarily moving to PA
Can you imagine the GOP furore if the situation was reversed. It always seems to be right wing nutjobs buying up media to try and force their world view onto others .
It was reversed, previously. Facebook and Twitter conspired with the Biden admin to suppress the Lab Leak theory as it was deemed to benefit Trump. Zuckerberg has admitted this, and now regrets it
"Mark Zuckerberg says White House ‘pressured’ Facebook to censor Covid-19 content
Meta boss regrets bowing to government power and says he would not make the same choices today"
"Zuckerberg also said that Facebook “temporarily demoted” a story about the contents of a laptop owned by Hunter Biden, the president’s son, after a warning from the FBI that Russia was preparing a disinformation campaign against the Bidens.
Zuckerberg wrote that it has since become clear that the story was not disinformation, and “in retrospect, we shouldn’t have demoted the story”."
That’s small scale compared to what Musk is doing now .
Will it make the average person in western countries better off?
Elon Musk (for it is he that makes these incredible robots) said last night “there’s an 80% chance of a utopian outcome” - or words to that effect. ie global superabundance. A robot worker for everyone. All boring tasks automated
Let’s not think about the 20% downside risk. Not pleasant
However, it will be quite a change and painful in some ways. Many millions of jobs are about to disappear
So what is the utopian outcome? That the robot does all my ironing and manages to put the duvet cover on the duvet without the cat getting in there? This strikes me as a relatively small upside, even if it is 80% likely, for a downside of robots which wipe out humanity. And call me a flinty old northern class warrior, but I don't really like the idea of having a slave, even a robot one. I still blanche at the concept of using Siri or any of its brethren. I'm not even 100% comfortable about interacting with waiters.
Do you feel awkward demanding your toaster make toast?
No, but I would if I had to talk to it. Simply depressing the lever is fine. Pressing a few buttons is fine. But anything involving voice activation starts to feel a little like I am a colonial planation owner demanding things of my underlings.
I know what you mean but we will soon get used to it, I suspect
It must have felt equally odd for the first people using telephones. Indeed I have read that it did. You are talking into a machine yet a recognisable disembodied human voice responds even though they are not present - that’s deeply strange when you consider it. Yet it didn’t stop us adopting telephones with extreme eagerness
My understanding is that one of the first problems to address was how you start a conversation. At first, people simply picked up the phone and listened and waited. Which given the lack of dialling tones wasn't much help for whoever was on the other end. Bell favoured answering with a jaunty "Ahoy!", but it didn't catch on. "Hello" wasn't really a greeting back then - it was more a rhetorical question, a "what's going on here then". It became common in the same way Italians answer the telephone with 'pronto!' ('ready!') I think we get its current sense as a greeting from its use in answering the telephone. When I was small the household telephone was normally answered with the last four digits of your phone number in order that the caller could confirm to himself that he had dialled the right number (or at least if there was an errorthat ithad been early on in his dialling.)
Ah yes, I remember that convention. Greeting someone with a string of numbers. Quite odd if you think about it, given that the caller can soon tell if it's a wrong number by dint of who is on the other end of the line.
I suppose it was that you had to say something - and if you said '5305' your caller would instantly know whether he had got the end of your number wrong or right. Saying "hello" and leaving your caller to deduce whether that was a voice he expected or not was slightly less helpful. And saying "hello Cookie speaking" was giving away too much information.
Hmm. I always wondered what proportion of callers even knew and remembered the number they had called. Presumably many, even most, immediately forgot it as soon as they entered it, hence the convention was useless as checking mechanism?
I don't think that's right. People used to know other people's phone numbers. Hell, I can still remember the phone numbers of most of my friends' parents from school - or of the houses they lived in in the early 90s, at any rate, along with half a dozen other landlines from the Stockport area of the time. Whereas the number of current numbers I know is exactly four: my own, my wife's, my parents landline and, at a push, my own landline.
You have a landline? Weirdo!!
I know who the weirdo is here and it's not @Cookie
Many millions of people still have landlines and just like cash you have such an intolerance and insulting attitude to anything that confronts your views
Will it make the average person in western countries better off?
Elon Musk (for it is he that makes these incredible robots) said last night “there’s an 80% chance of a utopian outcome” - or words to that effect. ie global superabundance. A robot worker for everyone. All boring tasks automated
Let’s not think about the 20% downside risk. Not pleasant
However, it will be quite a change and painful in some ways. Many millions of jobs are about to disappear
So what is the utopian outcome? That the robot does all my ironing and manages to put the duvet cover on the duvet without the cat getting in there? This strikes me as a relatively small upside, even if it is 80% likely, for a downside of robots which wipe out humanity. And call me a flinty old northern class warrior, but I don't really like the idea of having a slave, even a robot one. I still blanche at the concept of using Siri or any of its brethren. I'm not even 100% comfortable about interacting with waiters.
Do you feel awkward demanding your toaster make toast?
No, but I would if I had to talk to it. Simply depressing the lever is fine. Pressing a few buttons is fine. But anything involving voice activation starts to feel a little like I am a colonial planation owner demanding things of my underlings.
I know what you mean but we will soon get used to it, I suspect
It must have felt equally odd for the first people using telephones. Indeed I have read that it did. You are talking into a machine yet a recognisable disembodied human voice responds even though they are not present - that’s deeply strange when you consider it. Yet it didn’t stop us adopting telephones with extreme eagerness
My understanding is that one of the first problems to address was how you start a conversation. At first, people simply picked up the phone and listened and waited. Which given the lack of dialling tones wasn't much help for whoever was on the other end. Bell favoured answering with a jaunty "Ahoy!", but it didn't catch on. "Hello" wasn't really a greeting back then - it was more a rhetorical question, a "what's going on here then". It became common in the same way Italians answer the telephone with 'pronto!' ('ready!') I think we get its current sense as a greeting from its use in answering the telephone. When I was small the household telephone was normally answered with the last four digits of your phone number in order that the caller could confirm to himself that he had dialled the right number (or at least if there was an errorthat ithad been early on in his dialling.)
Ah yes, I remember that convention. Greeting someone with a string of numbers. Quite odd if you think about it, given that the caller can soon tell if it's a wrong number by dint of who is on the other end of the line.
I suppose it was that you had to say something - and if you said '5305' your caller would instantly know whether he had got the end of your number wrong or right. Saying "hello" and leaving your caller to deduce whether that was a voice he expected or not was slightly less helpful. And saying "hello Cookie speaking" was giving away too much information.
Hmm. I always wondered what proportion of callers even knew and remembered the number they had called. Presumably many, even most, immediately forgot it as soon as they entered it, hence the convention was useless as checking mechanism?
I don't think that's right. People used to know other people's phone numbers. Hell, I can still remember the phone numbers of most of my friends' parents from school - or of the houses they lived in in the early 90s, at any rate, along with half a dozen other landlines from the Stockport area of the time. Whereas the number of current numbers I know is exactly four: my own, my wife's, my parents landline and, at a push, my own landline.
You have a landline? Weirdo!!
I know who the weirdo is here and it's not @Cookie
Many millions of people still have landlines and just like cash you have such an intolerance and insulting attitude to anything that confronts your views
Rubbish!
We are all weirdos here. Although some more than others.
Will it make the average person in western countries better off?
Elon Musk (for it is he that makes these incredible robots) said last night “there’s an 80% chance of a utopian outcome” - or words to that effect. ie global superabundance. A robot worker for everyone. All boring tasks automated
Let’s not think about the 20% downside risk. Not pleasant
However, it will be quite a change and painful in some ways. Many millions of jobs are about to disappear
So what is the utopian outcome? That the robot does all my ironing and manages to put the duvet cover on the duvet without the cat getting in there? This strikes me as a relatively small upside, even if it is 80% likely, for a downside of robots which wipe out humanity. And call me a flinty old northern class warrior, but I don't really like the idea of having a slave, even a robot one. I still blanche at the concept of using Siri or any of its brethren. I'm not even 100% comfortable about interacting with waiters.
Do you feel awkward demanding your toaster make toast?
No, but I would if I had to talk to it. Simply depressing the lever is fine. Pressing a few buttons is fine. But anything involving voice activation starts to feel a little like I am a colonial planation owner demanding things of my underlings.
I know what you mean but we will soon get used to it, I suspect
It must have felt equally odd for the first people using telephones. Indeed I have read that it did. You are talking into a machine yet a recognisable disembodied human voice responds even though they are not present - that’s deeply strange when you consider it. Yet it didn’t stop us adopting telephones with extreme eagerness
My understanding is that one of the first problems to address was how you start a conversation. At first, people simply picked up the phone and listened and waited. Which given the lack of dialling tones wasn't much help for whoever was on the other end. Bell favoured answering with a jaunty "Ahoy!", but it didn't catch on. "Hello" wasn't really a greeting back then - it was more a rhetorical question, a "what's going on here then". It became common in the same way Italians answer the telephone with 'pronto!' ('ready!') I think we get its current sense as a greeting from its use in answering the telephone. When I was small the household telephone was normally answered with the last four digits of your phone number in order that the caller could confirm to himself that he had dialled the right number (or at least if there was an errorthat ithad been early on in his dialling.)
Ah yes, I remember that convention. Greeting someone with a string of numbers. Quite odd if you think about it, given that the caller can soon tell if it's a wrong number by dint of who is on the other end of the line.
I suppose it was that you had to say something - and if you said '5305' your caller would instantly know whether he had got the end of your number wrong or right. Saying "hello" and leaving your caller to deduce whether that was a voice he expected or not was slightly less helpful. And saying "hello Cookie speaking" was giving away too much information.
Hmm. I always wondered what proportion of callers even knew and remembered the number they had called. Presumably many, even most, immediately forgot it as soon as they entered it, hence the convention was useless as checking mechanism?
I don't think that's right. People used to know other people's phone numbers. Hell, I can still remember the phone numbers of most of my friends' parents from school - or of the houses they lived in in the early 90s, at any rate, along with half a dozen other landlines from the Stockport area of the time. Whereas the number of current numbers I know is exactly four: my own, my wife's, my parents landline and, at a push, my own landline.
You have a landline? Weirdo!!
I know who the weirdo is here and it's not @Cookie
Many millions of people still have landlines and just like cash you have such an intolerance and insulting attitude to anything that confronts your views
Under half of households at present, I believe (still millions, of course).
We lost ours a couple of years back, formally (got a broadband contract where the telephone service was an optional extra, rather than bundled). We hadn't had a phone connected to it for several years before that, though.
So, "weirdo" is unfair (and clearly not meant seriously) but we'd have to go with something like "non-conformist".
I'm beginning to not believe the state polls. Anybody remember UKGE2015, where everybody was convinced it'll be a tie and...it just wasn't? Or USMidterms2022, where everybody was convinced it'll be Trump wave and...it just wasn't? Or UKGE2024, where everybody was convinced there would be a massive Labour lead (in votes) and...it just wasn't?
Somebody suggest something better than state polls for states. Next five minutes will be fine. Chop, chop.
Cameron was always well ahead on preferred PM in 2015 and would comfortably have won a presidential election on the polling.
Labour to be fair did get a 10% lead on votes in 2024 too
Round here, it's barber shop (not as in the quartets, "hello my baby, hello my honey, hello my ragtime gal").
Now, let's be fair - you can keep your Babylon 5 references, only @stodge can bring Tin Pan Alley lyrics to a Friday afternoon.
Anyway, the barber shops - all for men (there's a surprise) seem to proliferate replacing the betting shops, bakeries etc. At this rate East Ham will be destitute but the men will be well groomed.
There's a niche business opportunity for armpit grooming for ladies of a Teutonic persuasion.
Will it make the average person in western countries better off?
Elon Musk (for it is he that makes these incredible robots) said last night “there’s an 80% chance of a utopian outcome” - or words to that effect. ie global superabundance. A robot worker for everyone. All boring tasks automated
Let’s not think about the 20% downside risk. Not pleasant
However, it will be quite a change and painful in some ways. Many millions of jobs are about to disappear
So what is the utopian outcome? That the robot does all my ironing and manages to put the duvet cover on the duvet without the cat getting in there? This strikes me as a relatively small upside, even if it is 80% likely, for a downside of robots which wipe out humanity. And call me a flinty old northern class warrior, but I don't really like the idea of having a slave, even a robot one. I still blanche at the concept of using Siri or any of its brethren. I'm not even 100% comfortable about interacting with waiters.
Do you feel awkward demanding your toaster make toast?
No, but I would if I had to talk to it. Simply depressing the lever is fine. Pressing a few buttons is fine. But anything involving voice activation starts to feel a little like I am a colonial planation owner demanding things of my underlings.
I know what you mean but we will soon get used to it, I suspect
It must have felt equally odd for the first people using telephones. Indeed I have read that it did. You are talking into a machine yet a recognisable disembodied human voice responds even though they are not present - that’s deeply strange when you consider it. Yet it didn’t stop us adopting telephones with extreme eagerness
My understanding is that one of the first problems to address was how you start a conversation. At first, people simply picked up the phone and listened and waited. Which given the lack of dialling tones wasn't much help for whoever was on the other end. Bell favoured answering with a jaunty "Ahoy!", but it didn't catch on. "Hello" wasn't really a greeting back then - it was more a rhetorical question, a "what's going on here then". It became common in the same way Italians answer the telephone with 'pronto!' ('ready!') I think we get its current sense as a greeting from its use in answering the telephone. When I was small the household telephone was normally answered with the last four digits of your phone number in order that the caller could confirm to himself that he had dialled the right number (or at least if there was an errorthat ithad been early on in his dialling.)
Ah yes, I remember that convention. Greeting someone with a string of numbers. Quite odd if you think about it, given that the caller can soon tell if it's a wrong number by dint of who is on the other end of the line.
I suppose it was that you had to say something - and if you said '5305' your caller would instantly know whether he had got the end of your number wrong or right. Saying "hello" and leaving your caller to deduce whether that was a voice he expected or not was slightly less helpful. And saying "hello Cookie speaking" was giving away too much information.
Hmm. I always wondered what proportion of callers even knew and remembered the number they had called. Presumably many, even most, immediately forgot it as soon as they entered it, hence the convention was useless as checking mechanism?
I don't think that's right. People used to know other people's phone numbers. Hell, I can still remember the phone numbers of most of my friends' parents from school - or of the houses they lived in in the early 90s, at any rate, along with half a dozen other landlines from the Stockport area of the time. Whereas the number of current numbers I know is exactly four: my own, my wife's, my parents landline and, at a push, my own landline.
You have a landline? Weirdo!!
I know who the weirdo is here and it's not @Cookie
Many millions of people still have landlines and just like cash you have such an intolerance and insulting attitude to anything that confronts your views
Oh give over, I was very obviously just pulling his leg.
Will it make the average person in western countries better off?
Elon Musk (for it is he that makes these incredible robots) said last night “there’s an 80% chance of a utopian outcome” - or words to that effect. ie global superabundance. A robot worker for everyone. All boring tasks automated
Let’s not think about the 20% downside risk. Not pleasant
However, it will be quite a change and painful in some ways. Many millions of jobs are about to disappear
So what is the utopian outcome? That the robot does all my ironing and manages to put the duvet cover on the duvet without the cat getting in there? This strikes me as a relatively small upside, even if it is 80% likely, for a downside of robots which wipe out humanity. And call me a flinty old northern class warrior, but I don't really like the idea of having a slave, even a robot one. I still blanche at the concept of using Siri or any of its brethren. I'm not even 100% comfortable about interacting with waiters.
Do you feel awkward demanding your toaster make toast?
No, but I would if I had to talk to it. Simply depressing the lever is fine. Pressing a few buttons is fine. But anything involving voice activation starts to feel a little like I am a colonial planation owner demanding things of my underlings.
I know what you mean but we will soon get used to it, I suspect
It must have felt equally odd for the first people using telephones. Indeed I have read that it did. You are talking into a machine yet a recognisable disembodied human voice responds even though they are not present - that’s deeply strange when you consider it. Yet it didn’t stop us adopting telephones with extreme eagerness
My understanding is that one of the first problems to address was how you start a conversation. At first, people simply picked up the phone and listened and waited. Which given the lack of dialling tones wasn't much help for whoever was on the other end. Bell favoured answering with a jaunty "Ahoy!", but it didn't catch on. "Hello" wasn't really a greeting back then - it was more a rhetorical question, a "what's going on here then". It became common in the same way Italians answer the telephone with 'pronto!' ('ready!') I think we get its current sense as a greeting from its use in answering the telephone. When I was small the household telephone was normally answered with the last four digits of your phone number in order that the caller could confirm to himself that he had dialled the right number (or at least if there was an errorthat ithad been early on in his dialling.)
Ah yes, I remember that convention. Greeting someone with a string of numbers. Quite odd if you think about it, given that the caller can soon tell if it's a wrong number by dint of who is on the other end of the line.
I suppose it was that you had to say something - and if you said '5305' your caller would instantly know whether he had got the end of your number wrong or right. Saying "hello" and leaving your caller to deduce whether that was a voice he expected or not was slightly less helpful. And saying "hello Cookie speaking" was giving away too much information.
Hmm. I always wondered what proportion of callers even knew and remembered the number they had called. Presumably many, even most, immediately forgot it as soon as they entered it, hence the convention was useless as checking mechanism?
I don't think that's right. People used to know other people's phone numbers. Hell, I can still remember the phone numbers of most of my friends' parents from school - or of the houses they lived in in the early 90s, at any rate, along with half a dozen other landlines from the Stockport area of the time. Whereas the number of current numbers I know is exactly four: my own, my wife's, my parents landline and, at a push, my own landline.
You have a landline? Weirdo!!
I know who the weirdo is here and it's not @Cookie
Many millions of people still have landlines and just like cash you have such an intolerance and insulting attitude to anything that confronts your views
Rubbish!
We are all weirdos here. Although some more than others.
I would wear the weirdo tag with pride, if it didn't allign me with J D Vance...
Will it make the average person in western countries better off?
Elon Musk (for it is he that makes these incredible robots) said last night “there’s an 80% chance of a utopian outcome” - or words to that effect. ie global superabundance. A robot worker for everyone. All boring tasks automated
Let’s not think about the 20% downside risk. Not pleasant
However, it will be quite a change and painful in some ways. Many millions of jobs are about to disappear
So what is the utopian outcome? That the robot does all my ironing and manages to put the duvet cover on the duvet without the cat getting in there? This strikes me as a relatively small upside, even if it is 80% likely, for a downside of robots which wipe out humanity. And call me a flinty old northern class warrior, but I don't really like the idea of having a slave, even a robot one. I still blanche at the concept of using Siri or any of its brethren. I'm not even 100% comfortable about interacting with waiters.
Do you feel awkward demanding your toaster make toast?
No, but I would if I had to talk to it. Simply depressing the lever is fine. Pressing a few buttons is fine. But anything involving voice activation starts to feel a little like I am a colonial planation owner demanding things of my underlings.
I know what you mean but we will soon get used to it, I suspect
It must have felt equally odd for the first people using telephones. Indeed I have read that it did. You are talking into a machine yet a recognisable disembodied human voice responds even though they are not present - that’s deeply strange when you consider it. Yet it didn’t stop us adopting telephones with extreme eagerness
My understanding is that one of the first problems to address was how you start a conversation. At first, people simply picked up the phone and listened and waited. Which given the lack of dialling tones wasn't much help for whoever was on the other end. Bell favoured answering with a jaunty "Ahoy!", but it didn't catch on. "Hello" wasn't really a greeting back then - it was more a rhetorical question, a "what's going on here then". It became common in the same way Italians answer the telephone with 'pronto!' ('ready!') I think we get its current sense as a greeting from its use in answering the telephone. When I was small the household telephone was normally answered with the last four digits of your phone number in order that the caller could confirm to himself that he had dialled the right number (or at least if there was an errorthat ithad been early on in his dialling.)
Ah yes, I remember that convention. Greeting someone with a string of numbers. Quite odd if you think about it, given that the caller can soon tell if it's a wrong number by dint of who is on the other end of the line.
I suppose it was that you had to say something - and if you said '5305' your caller would instantly know whether he had got the end of your number wrong or right. Saying "hello" and leaving your caller to deduce whether that was a voice he expected or not was slightly less helpful. And saying "hello Cookie speaking" was giving away too much information.
Hmm. I always wondered what proportion of callers even knew and remembered the number they had called. Presumably many, even most, immediately forgot it as soon as they entered it, hence the convention was useless as checking mechanism?
I don't think that's right. People used to know other people's phone numbers. Hell, I can still remember the phone numbers of most of my friends' parents from school - or of the houses they lived in in the early 90s, at any rate, along with half a dozen other landlines from the Stockport area of the time. Whereas the number of current numbers I know is exactly four: my own, my wife's, my parents landline and, at a push, my own landline.
You have a landline? Weirdo!!
I know who the weirdo is here and it's not @Cookie
Many millions of people still have landlines and just like cash you have such an intolerance and insulting attitude to anything that confronts your views
Under half of households at present, I believe (still millions, of course).
We lost ours a couple of years back, formally (got a broadband contract where the telephone service was an optional extra, rather than bundled). We hadn't had a phone connected to it for several years before that, though.
So, "weirdo" is unfair (and clearly not meant seriously) but we'd have to go with something like "non-conformist".
Strictly speaking I myself have a landline as it is part of a cable TV/broadband bundle that is impossible to remove. I have had it for years, never had a handset plugged into it and don't know the number. I suspect there are many like me who are notionally on the records as landline owners but have never used the bloody thing. They are completely pointless.
Why is the robot the same size and dimension as a human?
That seems pretty impractical to me. You probably want something like a cross between a cat and a Swiss Army knife.
Because the world is designed for humans, so a robot-like-Gardenwalker can use all the same tools and appliances as Gardenwalker, without needing two of everything. It can feed your cat with your tin opener and Kitecat, and can sharpen a pencil with your Swiss Army knife, and sharpen your Swiss army knife with your own sharpening stone. The same applies to things like your robot catching a bus or driving a car to get @Leon and his robot-showgirl sex object back from the Groucho.
There's a lot in old Sci-Fi on that question.
The Asimov I Robot and Caves of Steel series in particular. Although I am not nearly as confident as Asimov was about being able to make the 3 laws of robotics central to the creation of AI: A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law
Asimov was an atheist of the "Nuance: Not a Lot" variety; subtlety was not really a thing for him. In my mental sketch of him, his rather basic core principles tended to be a bit of a cage for him when he tried to speculate.
Arthur C Clarke was imo altogether more interesting philosophically.
I'm beginning to not believe the state polls. Anybody remember UKGE2015, where everybody was convinced it'll be a tie and...it just wasn't? Or USMidterms2022, where everybody was convinced it'll be Trump wave and...it just wasn't? Or UKGE2024, where everybody was convinced there would be a massive Labour lead (in votes) and...it just wasn't?
Somebody suggest something better than state polls for states. Next five minutes will be fine. Chop, chop.
Cameron was always well ahead on preferred PM in 2015 and would comfortably have won a presidential election on the polling.
Labour to be fair did get a 10% lead on votes in 2024 too
Will it make the average person in western countries better off?
Elon Musk (for it is he that makes these incredible robots) said last night “there’s an 80% chance of a utopian outcome” - or words to that effect. ie global superabundance. A robot worker for everyone. All boring tasks automated
Let’s not think about the 20% downside risk. Not pleasant
However, it will be quite a change and painful in some ways. Many millions of jobs are about to disappear
So what is the utopian outcome? That the robot does all my ironing and manages to put the duvet cover on the duvet without the cat getting in there? This strikes me as a relatively small upside, even if it is 80% likely, for a downside of robots which wipe out humanity. And call me a flinty old northern class warrior, but I don't really like the idea of having a slave, even a robot one. I still blanche at the concept of using Siri or any of its brethren. I'm not even 100% comfortable about interacting with waiters.
Do you feel awkward demanding your toaster make toast?
No, but I would if I had to talk to it. Simply depressing the lever is fine. Pressing a few buttons is fine. But anything involving voice activation starts to feel a little like I am a colonial planation owner demanding things of my underlings.
I know what you mean but we will soon get used to it, I suspect
It must have felt equally odd for the first people using telephones. Indeed I have read that it did. You are talking into a machine yet a recognisable disembodied human voice responds even though they are not present - that’s deeply strange when you consider it. Yet it didn’t stop us adopting telephones with extreme eagerness
My understanding is that one of the first problems to address was how you start a conversation. At first, people simply picked up the phone and listened and waited. Which given the lack of dialling tones wasn't much help for whoever was on the other end. Bell favoured answering with a jaunty "Ahoy!", but it didn't catch on. "Hello" wasn't really a greeting back then - it was more a rhetorical question, a "what's going on here then". It became common in the same way Italians answer the telephone with 'pronto!' ('ready!') I think we get its current sense as a greeting from its use in answering the telephone. When I was small the household telephone was normally answered with the last four digits of your phone number in order that the caller could confirm to himself that he had dialled the right number (or at least if there was an errorthat ithad been early on in his dialling.)
Ah yes, I remember that convention. Greeting someone with a string of numbers. Quite odd if you think about it, given that the caller can soon tell if it's a wrong number by dint of who is on the other end of the line.
I suppose it was that you had to say something - and if you said '5305' your caller would instantly know whether he had got the end of your number wrong or right. Saying "hello" and leaving your caller to deduce whether that was a voice he expected or not was slightly less helpful. And saying "hello Cookie speaking" was giving away too much information.
Hmm. I always wondered what proportion of callers even knew and remembered the number they had called. Presumably many, even most, immediately forgot it as soon as they entered it, hence the convention was useless as checking mechanism?
I don't think that's right. People used to know other people's phone numbers. Hell, I can still remember the phone numbers of most of my friends' parents from school - or of the houses they lived in in the early 90s, at any rate, along with half a dozen other landlines from the Stockport area of the time. Whereas the number of current numbers I know is exactly four: my own, my wife's, my parents landline and, at a push, my own landline.
You have a landline? Weirdo!!
On PB, shouldn't that be wierdo? To rhyme with Kier, Doh !
Tommy Vietor @TVietor08 · 25m NYT on how Elon Musk is trying to buy the election for Trump: - Spending $140-180MM on Trump super PAC - Twitter coordinating with the Trump camp to throttle links to leaked campaign documents - Musk rallying other billionaires to support Trump - Musk temporarily moving to PA
Can you imagine the GOP furore if the situation was reversed. It always seems to be right wing nutjobs buying up media to try and force their world view onto others .
It was reversed, previously. Facebook and Twitter conspired with the Biden admin to suppress the Lab Leak theory as it was deemed to benefit Trump. Zuckerberg has admitted this, and now regrets it
"Mark Zuckerberg says White House ‘pressured’ Facebook to censor Covid-19 content
Meta boss regrets bowing to government power and says he would not make the same choices today"
"Zuckerberg also said that Facebook “temporarily demoted” a story about the contents of a laptop owned by Hunter Biden, the president’s son, after a warning from the FBI that Russia was preparing a disinformation campaign against the Bidens.
Zuckerberg wrote that it has since become clear that the story was not disinformation, and “in retrospect, we shouldn’t have demoted the story”."
That’s small scale compared to what Musk is doing now .
Small scale? Suppressing the real origin of a pandemic which killed 20 million people and decimated the global economy and damaged billions of human lives?
Will it make the average person in western countries better off?
Elon Musk (for it is he that makes these incredible robots) said last night “there’s an 80% chance of a utopian outcome” - or words to that effect. ie global superabundance. A robot worker for everyone. All boring tasks automated
Let’s not think about the 20% downside risk. Not pleasant
However, it will be quite a change and painful in some ways. Many millions of jobs are about to disappear
So what is the utopian outcome? That the robot does all my ironing and manages to put the duvet cover on the duvet without the cat getting in there? This strikes me as a relatively small upside, even if it is 80% likely, for a downside of robots which wipe out humanity. And call me a flinty old northern class warrior, but I don't really like the idea of having a slave, even a robot one. I still blanche at the concept of using Siri or any of its brethren. I'm not even 100% comfortable about interacting with waiters.
Do you feel awkward demanding your toaster make toast?
No, but I would if I had to talk to it. Simply depressing the lever is fine. Pressing a few buttons is fine. But anything involving voice activation starts to feel a little like I am a colonial planation owner demanding things of my underlings.
I know what you mean but we will soon get used to it, I suspect
It must have felt equally odd for the first people using telephones. Indeed I have read that it did. You are talking into a machine yet a recognisable disembodied human voice responds even though they are not present - that’s deeply strange when you consider it. Yet it didn’t stop us adopting telephones with extreme eagerness
My understanding is that one of the first problems to address was how you start a conversation. At first, people simply picked up the phone and listened and waited. Which given the lack of dialling tones wasn't much help for whoever was on the other end. Bell favoured answering with a jaunty "Ahoy!", but it didn't catch on. "Hello" wasn't really a greeting back then - it was more a rhetorical question, a "what's going on here then". It became common in the same way Italians answer the telephone with 'pronto!' ('ready!') I think we get its current sense as a greeting from its use in answering the telephone. When I was small the household telephone was normally answered with the last four digits of your phone number in order that the caller could confirm to himself that he had dialled the right number (or at least if there was an errorthat ithad been early on in his dialling.)
Ah yes, I remember that convention. Greeting someone with a string of numbers. Quite odd if you think about it, given that the caller can soon tell if it's a wrong number by dint of who is on the other end of the line.
I suppose it was that you had to say something - and if you said '5305' your caller would instantly know whether he had got the end of your number wrong or right. Saying "hello" and leaving your caller to deduce whether that was a voice he expected or not was slightly less helpful. And saying "hello Cookie speaking" was giving away too much information.
Hmm. I always wondered what proportion of callers even knew and remembered the number they had called. Presumably many, even most, immediately forgot it as soon as they entered it, hence the convention was useless as checking mechanism?
I don't think that's right. People used to know other people's phone numbers. Hell, I can still remember the phone numbers of most of my friends' parents from school - or of the houses they lived in in the early 90s, at any rate, along with half a dozen other landlines from the Stockport area of the time. Whereas the number of current numbers I know is exactly four: my own, my wife's, my parents landline and, at a push, my own landline.
You have a landline? Weirdo!!
I know who the weirdo is here and it's not @Cookie
Many millions of people still have landlines and just like cash you have such an intolerance and insulting attitude to anything that confronts your views
Rubbish!
We are all weirdos here. Although some more than others.
Maybe deal with facts
Just under 20.9 million households in UK have an active landline, 74% of all households
New @IpsosUK Political Pulse makes difficult reading for Labour as eyes turn to the budget. Quick 🧵
1/ When we look across the first '100 days' we can see a clear negative shift in favourability towards the Labour Party. Similar numbers to others now.
Round here, it's barber shop (not as in the quartets, "hello my baby, hello my honey, hello my ragtime gal").
Now, let's be fair - you can keep your Babylon 5 references, only @stodge can bring Tin Pan Alley lyrics to a Friday afternoon.
Anyway, the barber shops - all for men (there's a surprise) seem to proliferate replacing the betting shops, bakeries etc. At this rate East Ham will be destitute but the men will be well groomed.
There's a niche business opportunity for armpit grooming for ladies of a Teutonic persuasion.
(Awaits links ...)
Please, no.
The under-arm Euro-Growler was likely a major reason for Brexit. How could you lock yourselves into ever-closer union with people who do THAT?
New @IpsosUK Political Pulse makes difficult reading for Labour as eyes turn to the budget. Quick 🧵
1/ When we look across the first '100 days' we can see a clear negative shift in favourability towards the Labour Party. Similar numbers to others now.
Will it make the average person in western countries better off?
Elon Musk (for it is he that makes these incredible robots) said last night “there’s an 80% chance of a utopian outcome” - or words to that effect. ie global superabundance. A robot worker for everyone. All boring tasks automated
Let’s not think about the 20% downside risk. Not pleasant
However, it will be quite a change and painful in some ways. Many millions of jobs are about to disappear
So what is the utopian outcome? That the robot does all my ironing and manages to put the duvet cover on the duvet without the cat getting in there? This strikes me as a relatively small upside, even if it is 80% likely, for a downside of robots which wipe out humanity. And call me a flinty old northern class warrior, but I don't really like the idea of having a slave, even a robot one. I still blanche at the concept of using Siri or any of its brethren. I'm not even 100% comfortable about interacting with waiters.
Do you feel awkward demanding your toaster make toast?
No, but I would if I had to talk to it. Simply depressing the lever is fine. Pressing a few buttons is fine. But anything involving voice activation starts to feel a little like I am a colonial planation owner demanding things of my underlings.
I know what you mean but we will soon get used to it, I suspect
It must have felt equally odd for the first people using telephones. Indeed I have read that it did. You are talking into a machine yet a recognisable disembodied human voice responds even though they are not present - that’s deeply strange when you consider it. Yet it didn’t stop us adopting telephones with extreme eagerness
My understanding is that one of the first problems to address was how you start a conversation. At first, people simply picked up the phone and listened and waited. Which given the lack of dialling tones wasn't much help for whoever was on the other end. Bell favoured answering with a jaunty "Ahoy!", but it didn't catch on. "Hello" wasn't really a greeting back then - it was more a rhetorical question, a "what's going on here then". It became common in the same way Italians answer the telephone with 'pronto!' ('ready!') I think we get its current sense as a greeting from its use in answering the telephone. When I was small the household telephone was normally answered with the last four digits of your phone number in order that the caller could confirm to himself that he had dialled the right number (or at least if there was an errorthat ithad been early on in his dialling.)
Ah yes, I remember that convention. Greeting someone with a string of numbers. Quite odd if you think about it, given that the caller can soon tell if it's a wrong number by dint of who is on the other end of the line.
I suppose it was that you had to say something - and if you said '5305' your caller would instantly know whether he had got the end of your number wrong or right. Saying "hello" and leaving your caller to deduce whether that was a voice he expected or not was slightly less helpful. And saying "hello Cookie speaking" was giving away too much information.
Hmm. I always wondered what proportion of callers even knew and remembered the number they had called. Presumably many, even most, immediately forgot it as soon as they entered it, hence the convention was useless as checking mechanism?
I don't think that's right. People used to know other people's phone numbers. Hell, I can still remember the phone numbers of most of my friends' parents from school - or of the houses they lived in in the early 90s, at any rate, along with half a dozen other landlines from the Stockport area of the time. Whereas the number of current numbers I know is exactly four: my own, my wife's, my parents landline and, at a push, my own landline.
You have a landline? Weirdo!!
I know who the weirdo is here and it's not @Cookie
Many millions of people still have landlines and just like cash you have such an intolerance and insulting attitude to anything that confronts your views
Under half of households at present, I believe (still millions, of course).
We lost ours a couple of years back, formally (got a broadband contract where the telephone service was an optional extra, rather than bundled). We hadn't had a phone connected to it for several years before that, though.
So, "weirdo" is unfair (and clearly not meant seriously) but we'd have to go with something like "non-conformist".
Strictly speaking I myself have a landline as it is part of a cable TV/broadband bundle that is impossible to remove. I have had it for years, never had a handset plugged into it and don't know the number. I suspect there are many like me who are notionally on the records as landline owners but have never used the bloody thing. They are completely pointless.
Yes, me too. I know the number because I'm periodically required to provide it on forms for things, normally things where I interact with the public sector. But I don't use it. The handset doesn't work. Occasionally the cleaner* does something with it that makes it beep every ten minutes.
*Can never really refer to having a cleaner without a flash of shame, even on an anonymous internet board.
I think Reeves is going to be basically boxed in to an ultra-cautious budget, there's just not the room for tax increases without hitting the big money ones (Which Labour ruled out at the GE) and gilt market yields heading north are going to throttle any extra borrowing potential. Add in Labour's wheezes apparently not raising much money (VAT schools, Non doms). It's going to go down like a cup of cold sick whatever she does in all honesty.
Will it make the average person in western countries better off?
Elon Musk (for it is he that makes these incredible robots) said last night “there’s an 80% chance of a utopian outcome” - or words to that effect. ie global superabundance. A robot worker for everyone. All boring tasks automated
Let’s not think about the 20% downside risk. Not pleasant
However, it will be quite a change and painful in some ways. Many millions of jobs are about to disappear
So what is the utopian outcome? That the robot does all my ironing and manages to put the duvet cover on the duvet without the cat getting in there? This strikes me as a relatively small upside, even if it is 80% likely, for a downside of robots which wipe out humanity. And call me a flinty old northern class warrior, but I don't really like the idea of having a slave, even a robot one. I still blanche at the concept of using Siri or any of its brethren. I'm not even 100% comfortable about interacting with waiters.
Do you feel awkward demanding your toaster make toast?
No, but I would if I had to talk to it. Simply depressing the lever is fine. Pressing a few buttons is fine. But anything involving voice activation starts to feel a little like I am a colonial planation owner demanding things of my underlings.
I know what you mean but we will soon get used to it, I suspect
It must have felt equally odd for the first people using telephones. Indeed I have read that it did. You are talking into a machine yet a recognisable disembodied human voice responds even though they are not present - that’s deeply strange when you consider it. Yet it didn’t stop us adopting telephones with extreme eagerness
My understanding is that one of the first problems to address was how you start a conversation. At first, people simply picked up the phone and listened and waited. Which given the lack of dialling tones wasn't much help for whoever was on the other end. Bell favoured answering with a jaunty "Ahoy!", but it didn't catch on. "Hello" wasn't really a greeting back then - it was more a rhetorical question, a "what's going on here then". It became common in the same way Italians answer the telephone with 'pronto!' ('ready!') I think we get its current sense as a greeting from its use in answering the telephone. When I was small the household telephone was normally answered with the last four digits of your phone number in order that the caller could confirm to himself that he had dialled the right number (or at least if there was an errorthat ithad been early on in his dialling.)
Ah yes, I remember that convention. Greeting someone with a string of numbers. Quite odd if you think about it, given that the caller can soon tell if it's a wrong number by dint of who is on the other end of the line.
I suppose it was that you had to say something - and if you said '5305' your caller would instantly know whether he had got the end of your number wrong or right. Saying "hello" and leaving your caller to deduce whether that was a voice he expected or not was slightly less helpful. And saying "hello Cookie speaking" was giving away too much information.
Hmm. I always wondered what proportion of callers even knew and remembered the number they had called. Presumably many, even most, immediately forgot it as soon as they entered it, hence the convention was useless as checking mechanism?
I don't think that's right. People used to know other people's phone numbers. Hell, I can still remember the phone numbers of most of my friends' parents from school - or of the houses they lived in in the early 90s, at any rate, along with half a dozen other landlines from the Stockport area of the time. Whereas the number of current numbers I know is exactly four: my own, my wife's, my parents landline and, at a push, my own landline.
You have a landline? Weirdo!!
I know who the weirdo is here and it's not @Cookie
Many millions of people still have landlines and just like cash you have such an intolerance and insulting attitude to anything that confronts your views
Under half of households at present, I believe (still millions, of course).
We lost ours a couple of years back, formally (got a broadband contract where the telephone service was an optional extra, rather than bundled). We hadn't had a phone connected to it for several years before that, though.
So, "weirdo" is unfair (and clearly not meant seriously) but we'd have to go with something like "non-conformist".
Strictly speaking I myself have a landline as it is part of a cable TV/broadband bundle that is impossible to remove. I have had it for years, never had a handset plugged into it and don't know the number. I suspect there are many like me who are notionally on the records as landline owners but have never used the bloody thing. They are completely pointless.
Yes, me too. I know the number because I'm periodically required to provide it on forms for things, normally things where I interact with the public sector. But I don't use it. The handset doesn't work. Occasionally the cleaner* does something with it that makes it beep every ten minutes.
*Can never really refer to having a cleaner without a flash of shame, even on an anonymous internet board.
You can just put your mobile number in online forms for home phone, duplicating it as required.
Will it make the average person in western countries better off?
Elon Musk (for it is he that makes these incredible robots) said last night “there’s an 80% chance of a utopian outcome” - or words to that effect. ie global superabundance. A robot worker for everyone. All boring tasks automated
Let’s not think about the 20% downside risk. Not pleasant
However, it will be quite a change and painful in some ways. Many millions of jobs are about to disappear
So what is the utopian outcome? That the robot does all my ironing and manages to put the duvet cover on the duvet without the cat getting in there? This strikes me as a relatively small upside, even if it is 80% likely, for a downside of robots which wipe out humanity. And call me a flinty old northern class warrior, but I don't really like the idea of having a slave, even a robot one. I still blanche at the concept of using Siri or any of its brethren. I'm not even 100% comfortable about interacting with waiters.
Do you feel awkward demanding your toaster make toast?
No, but I would if I had to talk to it. Simply depressing the lever is fine. Pressing a few buttons is fine. But anything involving voice activation starts to feel a little like I am a colonial planation owner demanding things of my underlings.
I know what you mean but we will soon get used to it, I suspect
It must have felt equally odd for the first people using telephones. Indeed I have read that it did. You are talking into a machine yet a recognisable disembodied human voice responds even though they are not present - that’s deeply strange when you consider it. Yet it didn’t stop us adopting telephones with extreme eagerness
My understanding is that one of the first problems to address was how you start a conversation. At first, people simply picked up the phone and listened and waited. Which given the lack of dialling tones wasn't much help for whoever was on the other end. Bell favoured answering with a jaunty "Ahoy!", but it didn't catch on. "Hello" wasn't really a greeting back then - it was more a rhetorical question, a "what's going on here then". It became common in the same way Italians answer the telephone with 'pronto!' ('ready!') I think we get its current sense as a greeting from its use in answering the telephone. When I was small the household telephone was normally answered with the last four digits of your phone number in order that the caller could confirm to himself that he had dialled the right number (or at least if there was an errorthat ithad been early on in his dialling.)
Ah yes, I remember that convention. Greeting someone with a string of numbers. Quite odd if you think about it, given that the caller can soon tell if it's a wrong number by dint of who is on the other end of the line.
I suppose it was that you had to say something - and if you said '5305' your caller would instantly know whether he had got the end of your number wrong or right. Saying "hello" and leaving your caller to deduce whether that was a voice he expected or not was slightly less helpful. And saying "hello Cookie speaking" was giving away too much information.
Hmm. I always wondered what proportion of callers even knew and remembered the number they had called. Presumably many, even most, immediately forgot it as soon as they entered it, hence the convention was useless as checking mechanism?
I don't think that's right. People used to know other people's phone numbers. Hell, I can still remember the phone numbers of most of my friends' parents from school - or of the houses they lived in in the early 90s, at any rate, along with half a dozen other landlines from the Stockport area of the time. Whereas the number of current numbers I know is exactly four: my own, my wife's, my parents landline and, at a push, my own landline.
You have a landline? Weirdo!!
I know who the weirdo is here and it's not @Cookie
Many millions of people still have landlines and just like cash you have such an intolerance and insulting attitude to anything that confronts your views
Under half of households at present, I believe (still millions, of course).
We lost ours a couple of years back, formally (got a broadband contract where the telephone service was an optional extra, rather than bundled). We hadn't had a phone connected to it for several years before that, though.
So, "weirdo" is unfair (and clearly not meant seriously) but we'd have to go with something like "non-conformist".
Strictly speaking I myself have a landline as it is part of a cable TV/broadband bundle that is impossible to remove. I have had it for years, never had a handset plugged into it and don't know the number. I suspect there are many like me who are notionally on the records as landline owners but have never used the bloody thing. They are completely pointless.
I have a landline as it's needed for the care alarm. Also useful as all mobile signals are very weak where I live.
Tommy Vietor @TVietor08 · 25m NYT on how Elon Musk is trying to buy the election for Trump: - Spending $140-180MM on Trump super PAC - Twitter coordinating with the Trump camp to throttle links to leaked campaign documents - Musk rallying other billionaires to support Trump - Musk temporarily moving to PA
That was the point of the Supreme Court Citizens United decision - to remove limits on the extremely wealthy putting a very heavy thumb on the scales of democracy.
Will it make the average person in western countries better off?
Elon Musk (for it is he that makes these incredible robots) said last night “there’s an 80% chance of a utopian outcome” - or words to that effect. ie global superabundance. A robot worker for everyone. All boring tasks automated
Let’s not think about the 20% downside risk. Not pleasant
However, it will be quite a change and painful in some ways. Many millions of jobs are about to disappear
So what is the utopian outcome? That the robot does all my ironing and manages to put the duvet cover on the duvet without the cat getting in there? This strikes me as a relatively small upside, even if it is 80% likely, for a downside of robots which wipe out humanity. And call me a flinty old northern class warrior, but I don't really like the idea of having a slave, even a robot one. I still blanche at the concept of using Siri or any of its brethren. I'm not even 100% comfortable about interacting with waiters.
Do you feel awkward demanding your toaster make toast?
No, but I would if I had to talk to it. Simply depressing the lever is fine. Pressing a few buttons is fine. But anything involving voice activation starts to feel a little like I am a colonial planation owner demanding things of my underlings.
I know what you mean but we will soon get used to it, I suspect
It must have felt equally odd for the first people using telephones. Indeed I have read that it did. You are talking into a machine yet a recognisable disembodied human voice responds even though they are not present - that’s deeply strange when you consider it. Yet it didn’t stop us adopting telephones with extreme eagerness
My understanding is that one of the first problems to address was how you start a conversation. At first, people simply picked up the phone and listened and waited. Which given the lack of dialling tones wasn't much help for whoever was on the other end. Bell favoured answering with a jaunty "Ahoy!", but it didn't catch on. "Hello" wasn't really a greeting back then - it was more a rhetorical question, a "what's going on here then". It became common in the same way Italians answer the telephone with 'pronto!' ('ready!') I think we get its current sense as a greeting from its use in answering the telephone. When I was small the household telephone was normally answered with the last four digits of your phone number in order that the caller could confirm to himself that he had dialled the right number (or at least if there was an errorthat ithad been early on in his dialling.)
Ah yes, I remember that convention. Greeting someone with a string of numbers. Quite odd if you think about it, given that the caller can soon tell if it's a wrong number by dint of who is on the other end of the line.
I suppose it was that you had to say something - and if you said '5305' your caller would instantly know whether he had got the end of your number wrong or right. Saying "hello" and leaving your caller to deduce whether that was a voice he expected or not was slightly less helpful. And saying "hello Cookie speaking" was giving away too much information.
Hmm. I always wondered what proportion of callers even knew and remembered the number they had called. Presumably many, even most, immediately forgot it as soon as they entered it, hence the convention was useless as checking mechanism?
I don't think that's right. People used to know other people's phone numbers. Hell, I can still remember the phone numbers of most of my friends' parents from school - or of the houses they lived in in the early 90s, at any rate, along with half a dozen other landlines from the Stockport area of the time. Whereas the number of current numbers I know is exactly four: my own, my wife's, my parents landline and, at a push, my own landline.
You have a landline? Weirdo!!
I know who the weirdo is here and it's not @Cookie
Many millions of people still have landlines and just like cash you have such an intolerance and insulting attitude to anything that confronts your views
Rubbish!
We are all weirdos here. Although some more than others.
Maybe deal with facts
Just under 20.9 million households in UK have an active landline, 74% of all households
A better survey might ask: "Have you used a landline to make or receive a phone call from home in the last year?"
Will it make the average person in western countries better off?
Elon Musk (for it is he that makes these incredible robots) said last night “there’s an 80% chance of a utopian outcome” - or words to that effect. ie global superabundance. A robot worker for everyone. All boring tasks automated
Let’s not think about the 20% downside risk. Not pleasant
However, it will be quite a change and painful in some ways. Many millions of jobs are about to disappear
So what is the utopian outcome? That the robot does all my ironing and manages to put the duvet cover on the duvet without the cat getting in there? This strikes me as a relatively small upside, even if it is 80% likely, for a downside of robots which wipe out humanity. And call me a flinty old northern class warrior, but I don't really like the idea of having a slave, even a robot one. I still blanche at the concept of using Siri or any of its brethren. I'm not even 100% comfortable about interacting with waiters.
Do you feel awkward demanding your toaster make toast?
No, but I would if I had to talk to it. Simply depressing the lever is fine. Pressing a few buttons is fine. But anything involving voice activation starts to feel a little like I am a colonial planation owner demanding things of my underlings.
I know what you mean but we will soon get used to it, I suspect
It must have felt equally odd for the first people using telephones. Indeed I have read that it did. You are talking into a machine yet a recognisable disembodied human voice responds even though they are not present - that’s deeply strange when you consider it. Yet it didn’t stop us adopting telephones with extreme eagerness
My understanding is that one of the first problems to address was how you start a conversation. At first, people simply picked up the phone and listened and waited. Which given the lack of dialling tones wasn't much help for whoever was on the other end. Bell favoured answering with a jaunty "Ahoy!", but it didn't catch on. "Hello" wasn't really a greeting back then - it was more a rhetorical question, a "what's going on here then". It became common in the same way Italians answer the telephone with 'pronto!' ('ready!') I think we get its current sense as a greeting from its use in answering the telephone. When I was small the household telephone was normally answered with the last four digits of your phone number in order that the caller could confirm to himself that he had dialled the right number (or at least if there was an errorthat ithad been early on in his dialling.)
Ah yes, I remember that convention. Greeting someone with a string of numbers. Quite odd if you think about it, given that the caller can soon tell if it's a wrong number by dint of who is on the other end of the line.
I suppose it was that you had to say something - and if you said '5305' your caller would instantly know whether he had got the end of your number wrong or right. Saying "hello" and leaving your caller to deduce whether that was a voice he expected or not was slightly less helpful. And saying "hello Cookie speaking" was giving away too much information.
Hmm. I always wondered what proportion of callers even knew and remembered the number they had called. Presumably many, even most, immediately forgot it as soon as they entered it, hence the convention was useless as checking mechanism?
I don't think that's right. People used to know other people's phone numbers. Hell, I can still remember the phone numbers of most of my friends' parents from school - or of the houses they lived in in the early 90s, at any rate, along with half a dozen other landlines from the Stockport area of the time. Whereas the number of current numbers I know is exactly four: my own, my wife's, my parents landline and, at a push, my own landline.
You have a landline? Weirdo!!
I know who the weirdo is here and it's not @Cookie
Many millions of people still have landlines and just like cash you have such an intolerance and insulting attitude to anything that confronts your views
Under half of households at present, I believe (still millions, of course).
We lost ours a couple of years back, formally (got a broadband contract where the telephone service was an optional extra, rather than bundled). We hadn't had a phone connected to it for several years before that, though.
So, "weirdo" is unfair (and clearly not meant seriously) but we'd have to go with something like "non-conformist".
Strictly speaking I myself have a landline as it is part of a cable TV/broadband bundle that is impossible to remove. I have had it for years, never had a handset plugged into it and don't know the number. I suspect there are many like me who are notionally on the records as landline owners but have never used the bloody thing. They are completely pointless.
Yes, me too. I know the number because I'm periodically required to provide it on forms for things, normally things where I interact with the public sector. But I don't use it. The handset doesn't work. Occasionally the cleaner* does something with it that makes it beep every ten minutes.
*Can never really refer to having a cleaner without a flash of shame, even on an anonymous internet board.
You can just put your mobile number in online forms for home phone, duplicating it as required.
I'm sure I've had online forms which requiremeto provide an 0161... number. Possibly the local leisure centre, or the council for a missed bin collection, or one of the kids' schools. I can remember it with a bit of thought, though obviously its a pointless detail because it doesn't work (though I recently unearthed YEARS of answering machine messages, including some potentially quite important, like being offered a job...) Anyway, I knew you were cheerfully pulling my leg!
New @IpsosUK Political Pulse makes difficult reading for Labour as eyes turn to the budget. Quick 🧵
1/ When we look across the first '100 days' we can see a clear negative shift in favourability towards the Labour Party. Similar numbers to others now.
Will it make the average person in western countries better off?
Elon Musk (for it is he that makes these incredible robots) said last night “there’s an 80% chance of a utopian outcome” - or words to that effect. ie global superabundance. A robot worker for everyone. All boring tasks automated
Let’s not think about the 20% downside risk. Not pleasant
However, it will be quite a change and painful in some ways. Many millions of jobs are about to disappear
So what is the utopian outcome? That the robot does all my ironing and manages to put the duvet cover on the duvet without the cat getting in there? This strikes me as a relatively small upside, even if it is 80% likely, for a downside of robots which wipe out humanity. And call me a flinty old northern class warrior, but I don't really like the idea of having a slave, even a robot one. I still blanche at the concept of using Siri or any of its brethren. I'm not even 100% comfortable about interacting with waiters.
Do you feel awkward demanding your toaster make toast?
No, but I would if I had to talk to it. Simply depressing the lever is fine. Pressing a few buttons is fine. But anything involving voice activation starts to feel a little like I am a colonial planation owner demanding things of my underlings.
I know what you mean but we will soon get used to it, I suspect
It must have felt equally odd for the first people using telephones. Indeed I have read that it did. You are talking into a machine yet a recognisable disembodied human voice responds even though they are not present - that’s deeply strange when you consider it. Yet it didn’t stop us adopting telephones with extreme eagerness
My understanding is that one of the first problems to address was how you start a conversation. At first, people simply picked up the phone and listened and waited. Which given the lack of dialling tones wasn't much help for whoever was on the other end. Bell favoured answering with a jaunty "Ahoy!", but it didn't catch on. "Hello" wasn't really a greeting back then - it was more a rhetorical question, a "what's going on here then". It became common in the same way Italians answer the telephone with 'pronto!' ('ready!') I think we get its current sense as a greeting from its use in answering the telephone. When I was small the household telephone was normally answered with the last four digits of your phone number in order that the caller could confirm to himself that he had dialled the right number (or at least if there was an errorthat ithad been early on in his dialling.)
Ah yes, I remember that convention. Greeting someone with a string of numbers. Quite odd if you think about it, given that the caller can soon tell if it's a wrong number by dint of who is on the other end of the line.
I suppose it was that you had to say something - and if you said '5305' your caller would instantly know whether he had got the end of your number wrong or right. Saying "hello" and leaving your caller to deduce whether that was a voice he expected or not was slightly less helpful. And saying "hello Cookie speaking" was giving away too much information.
Hmm. I always wondered what proportion of callers even knew and remembered the number they had called. Presumably many, even most, immediately forgot it as soon as they entered it, hence the convention was useless as checking mechanism?
I don't think that's right. People used to know other people's phone numbers. Hell, I can still remember the phone numbers of most of my friends' parents from school - or of the houses they lived in in the early 90s, at any rate, along with half a dozen other landlines from the Stockport area of the time. Whereas the number of current numbers I know is exactly four: my own, my wife's, my parents landline and, at a push, my own landline.
You have a landline? Weirdo!!
I know who the weirdo is here and it's not @Cookie
Many millions of people still have landlines and just like cash you have such an intolerance and insulting attitude to anything that confronts your views
Under half of households at present, I believe (still millions, of course).
We lost ours a couple of years back, formally (got a broadband contract where the telephone service was an optional extra, rather than bundled). We hadn't had a phone connected to it for several years before that, though.
So, "weirdo" is unfair (and clearly not meant seriously) but we'd have to go with something like "non-conformist".
Strictly speaking I myself have a landline as it is part of a cable TV/broadband bundle that is impossible to remove. I have had it for years, never had a handset plugged into it and don't know the number. I suspect there are many like me who are notionally on the records as landline owners but have never used the bloody thing. They are completely pointless.
Yes, me too. I know the number because I'm periodically required to provide it on forms for things, normally things where I interact with the public sector. But I don't use it. The handset doesn't work. Occasionally the cleaner* does something with it that makes it beep every ten minutes.
*Can never really refer to having a cleaner without a flash of shame, even on an anonymous internet board.
You can just put your mobile number in online forms for home phone, duplicating it as required.
I'm sure I've had online forms which requiremeto provide an 0161... number. Possibly the local leisure centre, or the council for a missed bin collection, or one of the kids' schools. I can remember it with a bit of thought, though obviously its a pointless detail because it doesn't work (though I recently unearthed YEARS of answering machine messages, including some potentially quite important, like being offered a job...) Anyway, I knew you were cheerfully pulling my leg!
Nah, none of them require a landline in reality. You can just use your mobile number.
Albanian speaking gang, I bet multiples of that money has been through the car washes and "Turkish" barbers.
A new barber has appeared not far from me in an old takeaway joint. Been there a couple of months.
It looks like a barbers, there's someone there playing with a phone, but I'm yet to see a customer.
Bad business decision or money laundering? Your guess is as good as the fraud squad's.
Its an absolute joke. Everybody knows these places, its all in plain sight, we can all name at least one in our local area. The barbers, nail bars, the Eastern European shops with no stock, the American Candy Stores (those are Iranian / Iraqi I believe).
The nail bars around my way are always chockablock, such that it's very difficult to get an appointment, according to my wife.
Of course there are legit businesses (and dodgy ones that get popular), I go to a Turkish barber that has been about for 20+ years, that is staffed by Turks and is always rammed because it is well established. But that isn't what we are talking about, we are talking about where on a high street you all of a sudden get 4-5 of these open, they isn't anywhere near enough business for them and they are constantly empty.
Busy ones are the easiest ones to hide money in though, you can quite quickly push in pretty big cash sums into a handful of already busy companies and you've got £10-12m going in across 6-8 busy shops, the silent directors draw the cleaned dividends and invest the money into legit enterprises.
The amount some PBers know about money laundering is not reassuring.
New @IpsosUK Political Pulse makes difficult reading for Labour as eyes turn to the budget. Quick 🧵
1/ When we look across the first '100 days' we can see a clear negative shift in favourability towards the Labour Party. Similar numbers to others now.
Will it make the average person in western countries better off?
Elon Musk (for it is he that makes these incredible robots) said last night “there’s an 80% chance of a utopian outcome” - or words to that effect. ie global superabundance. A robot worker for everyone. All boring tasks automated
Let’s not think about the 20% downside risk. Not pleasant
However, it will be quite a change and painful in some ways. Many millions of jobs are about to disappear
So what is the utopian outcome? That the robot does all my ironing and manages to put the duvet cover on the duvet without the cat getting in there? This strikes me as a relatively small upside, even if it is 80% likely, for a downside of robots which wipe out humanity. And call me a flinty old northern class warrior, but I don't really like the idea of having a slave, even a robot one. I still blanche at the concept of using Siri or any of its brethren. I'm not even 100% comfortable about interacting with waiters.
Do you feel awkward demanding your toaster make toast?
No, but I would if I had to talk to it. Simply depressing the lever is fine. Pressing a few buttons is fine. But anything involving voice activation starts to feel a little like I am a colonial planation owner demanding things of my underlings.
I know what you mean but we will soon get used to it, I suspect
It must have felt equally odd for the first people using telephones. Indeed I have read that it did. You are talking into a machine yet a recognisable disembodied human voice responds even though they are not present - that’s deeply strange when you consider it. Yet it didn’t stop us adopting telephones with extreme eagerness
My understanding is that one of the first problems to address was how you start a conversation. At first, people simply picked up the phone and listened and waited. Which given the lack of dialling tones wasn't much help for whoever was on the other end. Bell favoured answering with a jaunty "Ahoy!", but it didn't catch on. "Hello" wasn't really a greeting back then - it was more a rhetorical question, a "what's going on here then". It became common in the same way Italians answer the telephone with 'pronto!' ('ready!') I think we get its current sense as a greeting from its use in answering the telephone. When I was small the household telephone was normally answered with the last four digits of your phone number in order that the caller could confirm to himself that he had dialled the right number (or at least if there was an errorthat ithad been early on in his dialling.)
Ah yes, I remember that convention. Greeting someone with a string of numbers. Quite odd if you think about it, given that the caller can soon tell if it's a wrong number by dint of who is on the other end of the line.
I suppose it was that you had to say something - and if you said '5305' your caller would instantly know whether he had got the end of your number wrong or right. Saying "hello" and leaving your caller to deduce whether that was a voice he expected or not was slightly less helpful. And saying "hello Cookie speaking" was giving away too much information.
Hmm. I always wondered what proportion of callers even knew and remembered the number they had called. Presumably many, even most, immediately forgot it as soon as they entered it, hence the convention was useless as checking mechanism?
I don't think that's right. People used to know other people's phone numbers. Hell, I can still remember the phone numbers of most of my friends' parents from school - or of the houses they lived in in the early 90s, at any rate, along with half a dozen other landlines from the Stockport area of the time. Whereas the number of current numbers I know is exactly four: my own, my wife's, my parents landline and, at a push, my own landline.
You have a landline? Weirdo!!
I know who the weirdo is here and it's not @Cookie
Many millions of people still have landlines and just like cash you have such an intolerance and insulting attitude to anything that confronts your views
Rubbish!
We are all weirdos here. Although some more than others.
Maybe deal with facts
Just under 20.9 million households in UK have an active landline, 74% of all households
A better survey might ask: "Have you used a landline to make or receive a phone call from home in the last year?"
It won't be 21 million yeses, I can assure you...
I do not have a problem with that and we have a digital BT landline but we never use it nor record it on forms
It is purely there for emergency use and our son in Vancouver uses it to call us, as it is apparently cheap for him and of course we do not get charged for incoming calls
They had a proposal last year, that any foreign citizen or Albanian can deposit up to €2 million in non-declared money into the Albanian banking system while enjoying legal immunity and a 5-10% tax
Because although its expensive to put cash in the till of a car wash or barber, the UK authorities have shown little to no willingness or ability to investigate and once its through the till its all legit money here in the UK. Its basically risk free way of doing it.
Car washes, nail bars may be full of modern slavery, illegal employment and tax evasion, but the idea that its meaningful money laundering is for the birds.
The American Sweet shops in London, again aren't money laundering but tax evasion (business rates) and you'd have to suspect landlords (for it is they who would be liable if the shops are empty) turn a blind eye at best.
474 Oxford Street (once a Vodafone shop) a couple of years ago had rates of £350k a year
As reported by Private Eye, the American Sweet shops are yes doing the tax evasion on business rates, fiddling VAT, but also alleged that they laundering money from places like Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran.
What they do have advertised for sale is mostly not allowed to be imported to the UK in the first place.
Trading Standards should have them all shut down within a week.
But trading standards have near zero budgets to do anything afters years of austerity slashed local government funding.
Comments
There was a Chinese takeaway chain that got busted a few years ago for laundering £30 million, but it was only because they didn't pay the VAT bill. The tax man then looked at the books and wasn't hard to find the amount of goods ordered didn't match the sales.
And I bet this government is stupid enough to give them up in return for nada. Cf the Chagos
Building sites where the contractor is coincidentally related to the site owner and gets paid significant amounts of money - but for some reason the place is never quite finished and the items in the fancy brochure like 'lakeside cabins' or 'fancy houses on a golf course' are never sold or completed. Eventually the site owner winds the project up but only after the contractor gets paid.
The site is basically abandoned - leaving an eyesore - but never sold.
Of course, I am not implying that there are any sites like this in the Flatlands...
Particularly with dementia patients, the difference between someone skilled (and lucky) enough to be able to form a rapport and someone who doesn't can be the patient being settled and content in a normal schedule versus them being unhappy, up all night disrupting everybody else and, worse case, angry and violent.
It makes the difference between it being feasible to care for them at home and full-time residential care.
You've made up an argument that no one's making and then opposing it. I mean sure you can do that but you're only arguing against some figment of what you think people are saying, not what we're actually saying. It's part of your denial about how shit the current government is that you need to create a new Tory boogeyman to argue against because the truth of this government is causing buyer's remorse among a lot of people who don't want to admit it.
But all these front businesses, its just factored in as the cost of washing the money.
But enough. To work!
The American Sweet shops in London, again aren't money laundering but tax evasion (business rates) and you'd have to suspect landlords (for it is they who would be liable if the shops are empty) turn a blind eye at best.
474 Oxford Street (once a Vodafone shop) a couple of years ago had rates of £350k a year
21 Harris St
https://maps.app.goo.gl/177AghTPd8zuLjNj6?g_st=ac
We did go through a period of receiving a lot of orders for lunch etc, as our number was the same, except for two transposed digits, as a local pub. Problem was solved when the pub closed, perhaps due to the perceived grumpiness of the apparent landlady (my mum
Not sure when my parents stopped answering with a string of numbers, some time between 1990 and 2000 at a guess.
Good afternoon, everybody.
But that isn't what we are talking about, we are talking about where on a high street you all of a sudden get 4-5 of these open, they isn't anywhere near enough business for them and they are constantly empty.
They looked at it (usually parked under lime trees so washes are a bit futile in the insect months), and added 50% to the price
You need a pyramid of smallish transactions to present a nice, reasonable story as to where the money comes from. Most such networks are money laundering *and* tax evasion *and* illegal employment *and* etc rolled into one.
Would be fun to see my idea for wiping them out implemented.
Nice to see the grown ups are back in charge.
At this rate we are getting 50p back in the £
You think that with the cracking of Encochat and the huge number of prosecutions in the last few years that the NCA just accept an extra £1m a year going through a nail bar.
Or accept as legitimate American Candy 'profits' while they simultaneously defraund Westminster council of tens of millions a year.
It's delusional
If you want to know where the money goes, look at Southern Spain (historically), Rathkeale in Ireland for travellers, Dubai & UAE, Turkey and Montenegro for property and boats.
Or Hawala banking and shunting gold about.
@TVietor08
·
25m
NYT on how Elon Musk is trying to buy the election for Trump:
- Spending $140-180MM on Trump super PAC
- Twitter coordinating with the Trump camp to throttle links to leaked campaign documents
- Musk rallying other billionaires to support Trump
- Musk temporarily moving to PA
https://x.com/TVietor08/status/1844726236875997248
Trading Standards should have them all shut down within a week.
Nowadays people would struggle to remember their own - unless they've been regularly typing it into girls' phones they've just met.
Round here, it's barber shop (not as in the quartets, "hello my baby, hello my honey, hello my ragtime gal").
Now, let's be fair - you can keep your Babylon 5 references, only @stodge can bring Tin Pan Alley lyrics to a Friday afternoon.
Anyway, the barber shops - all for men (there's a surprise) seem to proliferate replacing the betting shops, bakeries etc. At this rate East Ham will be destitute but the men will be well groomed.
I wonder how that will work given ITVX show ads and also has a subscription tier to get rid of them?
Wisconsin Trump 48% Harris 48%
Michigan Harris 49% Trump 47%
Pennsylvania Trump 47% Harris 46%
Georgia Harris 48% Trump 46%
North Carolina Harris 47% Trump 47%
Nevada Trump 49% Harris 43%
Arizona Harris 48% Trump 46%
https://www.wsj.com/politics/elections/trump-harris-swing-state-poll-october-2024-c3ca9414
Somebody suggest something better than state polls for states. Next five minutes will be fine. Chop, chop.
"Mark Zuckerberg says White House ‘pressured’ Facebook to censor Covid-19 content
Meta boss regrets bowing to government power and says he would not make the same choices today"
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/article/2024/aug/27/mark-zuckerberg-says-white-house-pressured-facebook-to-censor-covid-19-content
"Zuckerberg also said that Facebook “temporarily demoted” a story about the contents of a laptop owned by Hunter Biden, the president’s son, after a warning from the FBI that Russia was preparing a disinformation campaign against the Bidens.
Zuckerberg wrote that it has since become clear that the story was not disinformation, and “in retrospect, we shouldn’t have demoted the story”."
Many millions of people still have landlines and just like cash you have such an intolerance and insulting attitude to anything that confronts your views
We are all weirdos here. Although some more than others.
We lost ours a couple of years back, formally (got a broadband contract where the telephone service was an optional extra, rather than bundled). We hadn't had a phone connected to it for several years before that, though.
So, "weirdo" is unfair (and clearly not meant seriously) but we'd have to go with something like "non-conformist".
Labour to be fair did get a 10% lead on votes in 2024 too
(Awaits links ...)
Arthur C Clarke was imo altogether more interesting philosophically.
Just under 20.9 million households in UK have an active landline, 74% of all households
Keiran Pedley
@keiranpedley
New @IpsosUK Political Pulse makes difficult reading for Labour as eyes turn to the budget. Quick 🧵
1/ When we look across the first '100 days' we can see a clear negative shift in favourability towards the Labour Party. Similar numbers to others now.
https://ipsos.com/en-uk/labour-and-starmer-approval-ratings-continue-drop-government-nears-100-days-power
The under-arm Euro-Growler was likely a major reason for Brexit. How could you lock yourselves into ever-closer union with people who do THAT?
*Can never really refer to having a cleaner without a flash of shame, even on an anonymous internet board.
Add in Labour's wheezes apparently not raising much money (VAT schools, Non doms). It's going to go down like a cup of cold sick whatever she does in all honesty.
It won't be 21 million yeses, I can assure you...
Anyway, I knew you were cheerfully pulling my leg!
It is purely there for emergency use and our son in Vancouver uses it to call us, as it is apparently cheap for him and of course we do not get charged for incoming calls