I'd say it's fairly common thinking amongst educated here that having fewer/no children is absolutely fine and would do a great service to the planet, so its not really a problem.
This ignores the very serious social, political and economic consequences if it continues unchecked - which could ultimately lead to states falling apart into (and not excluding at the extremes) bankruptcy, disorder and anarchy.
What you probably want is some sort of long-term population stabilisation.
Yes, I'm quite concerned about the prospect of rapid population falls.
I suspect that culturally and economically it's quite hard to hit on close to replacement level. There are feedbacks which will push away from stability.
The idea of a world with a global fertility rate below 1.5 is quite depressing.
It is so depressing. Children are the most incredible gift and the source of almost all joy in the world. There is an upside for the natural world from a lower human population, but it's hard to see a rapidly falling population as anything other than a tragedy.
It really does depend on exactly *who* is having/raising the children. Or failing to have them.This is the uncomfortable truth.
Our society has arguably been hyper-reproductive in the 'wrong' areas, and pretty barren amongst those whose offspring would, on balance, have the potential to make a more positive impact.
I know this is a generalisation and I'd never argue for any forceful intervention of any kind, but it is the reality, however unpalatable.
Genetics, background, culture, geography, money, time, intellect, consciousness, politics - all stuff that can make a difference.
This is why it pisses me off when politicians say 'talent is evenly distributed but opportunity isn't '. What evidence is the first assertion based on? Has there been some big Trading Places-style experiment that we weren't told about.
Getting a ‘high status male’ vibe..
Let's reminisce about the times when the Right used to attack the Left for past eugenics support.
The critical re-evaluation from Spiked can't be far away, surely?
Haven't been on ChatGPT for about a year, so I thought I'd see if they've improved their factual information replies.
They haven't.
My question: "How many votes did the Conservatives poll in the Huntingdon constituency at the 1983 general election?"
Answer: "In the 1983 UK general election, the Conservative Party candidate in the Huntingdon constituency, John Major, received 32,833 votes, winning with 54.2% of the vote. This was a strong performance in a safe Conservative seat, marking the beginning of a prominent political career for Major, who would later become Prime Minister."
In fact he polled 34,254 votes at that election.
Accuracy is for low status people.
Quickly generating, big, thick documents is much more important.
GPT: garbage produced textually
The annoying thing is that LLM's such as Chat GPT et al *do* have lots of good uses. Used well, they can be invaluable in narrow areas.
But the problems are that people use them poorly, and often in areas outside those narrow areas. Because they're trendy. And also because there's a heck of a lot of money being invested in the area, and the hype train is running as people want their money back.
As ever, be cautious about hype. Sometimes hype is justified; most of the time... it isn't.
This is the real Deep State that's being voted on.
Neither candidate wants to talk about it, but the stakes today for the Supreme Court’s future are huge. A GOP win could cement this majority for another generation or two. A Dem win could protect theirs or shrink this majority. Divided gov’t means a R Senate could stymie Harris. https://x.com/sahilkapur/status/1853791927738536132
Imagine a 6/3 - or possibly 7/2 - court, to the right of the current one. For the next couple of decades.
At best, President Harris might make it 5/4 to the liberals - but with a likely GOP Senate doing the confirming,
Would the Supreme Court possibly rule a future Supreme Court expansion illegal?
Farage: "This is the sexy bit: Elon comes in and takes a knife to the [US] deep state. Just like when he bought Twitter he sacked 80 per cent of the staff.
There are going to be mass lay-offs, whole departments closing and I’m hoping and praying that’s the blueprint for what we then do on our side of the pond.
Because that’s what Reform UK believes in - that we’re over-bureaucratised and none of it works. This assault on the bureaucratic state is the thing that’s really exciting."
Really? That's what Reform voters want? 80% of the state slashed and burned.
The Red Wallers he's after???
I very much doubt it.
This is all very fascist obviously, but it’s also notable (to me) that Farage completely glosses over the reality that Musk sacked 80% of Twitter’s staff & as a result triggered an 84% drop in it’s revenue. He simply didn’t understand the product Twitter was selling.
The idea that you can simply hack away 80% of government employees & not end up causing great swathes of harm to people in the real world is for the birds.
I'm not sure that one followed from the other with Twitter. The drop in advertising revenue has more to do with his brand positioning than the reduction in headcount.
It's worth remembering that before Musk bought it, Twitter was mostly making thumping losses, and it's business model looked pretty unsustainable. The jury is still out of Musk's version, but I think it's by no means impossible he'll end up making it wash it's face.
Twitter had started making profit a few years before Musk took over. It took time to get there, but was looking sustainable.
Then Musk took over.
This isn't really true. It made money in only 2 years its entire existence before dropping again to unprofitability, and it was really just accounting trickery. It doubled its head count during COVID, which was ridiculous.
Now, under Musk ownership, a fair criticism is, is the company being improved?
The underlying problem Twitter has always had, it doesn't know its users, which makes advertising value on the platform far less attractive than Facebook. The genius of Meta is they know so much about every user on all its platforms and has tech to find out more / monetarise this. Twitter has very poor tech behind the scenes and has had limited product development way before Musk.
https://www.businessofapps.com/data/twitter-statistics/ has numbers. You can see the revenue is healthy, until Musk took over. Profits were good in 2018 and 2019, but losses were bad in 2020. 2021 was then only a small loss.
Farage: "This is the sexy bit: Elon comes in and takes a knife to the [US] deep state. Just like when he bought Twitter he sacked 80 per cent of the staff.
There are going to be mass lay-offs, whole departments closing and I’m hoping and praying that’s the blueprint for what we then do on our side of the pond.
Because that’s what Reform UK believes in - that we’re over-bureaucratised and none of it works. This assault on the bureaucratic state is the thing that’s really exciting."
Really? That's what Reform voters want? 80% of the state slashed and burned.
The Red Wallers he's after???
I very much doubt it.
Most Reform voters are either small businessmen, in the armed forces or white working class private sector workers. So I doubt they are that bothered about Farage promising to slash the civil service and public sector administrators as long as he doesn't also slash the numbers of police, soldiers and doctors and nurses
Farage: "This is the sexy bit: Elon comes in and takes a knife to the [US] deep state. Just like when he bought Twitter he sacked 80 per cent of the staff.
There are going to be mass lay-offs, whole departments closing and I’m hoping and praying that’s the blueprint for what we then do on our side of the pond.
Because that’s what Reform UK believes in - that we’re over-bureaucratised and none of it works. This assault on the bureaucratic state is the thing that’s really exciting."
Really? That's what Reform voters want? 80% of the state slashed and burned.
The Red Wallers he's after???
I very much doubt it.
This is all very fascist obviously, but it’s also notable (to me) that Farage completely glosses over the reality that Musk sacked 80% of Twitter’s staff & as a result triggered an 84% drop in it’s revenue. He simply didn’t understand the product Twitter was selling.
The idea that you can simply hack away 80% of government employees & not end up causing great swathes of harm to people in the real world is for the birds.
I'm not sure that one followed from the other with Twitter. The drop in advertising revenue has more to do with his brand positioning than the reduction in headcount.
It's worth remembering that before Musk bought it, Twitter was mostly making thumping losses, and it's business model looked pretty unsustainable. The jury is still out of Musk's version, but I think it's by no means impossible he'll end up making it wash it's face.
Twitter had started making profit a few years before Musk took over. It took time to get there, but was looking sustainable.
Then Musk took over.
This isn't really true. It made money in only 2 years its entire existence before dropping again to unprofitability, and it was really just accounting trickery. It doubled its head count during COVID, which was ridiculous.
Now, under Musk ownership, a fair criticism is, is the company being improved?
The underlying problem Twitter has always had, it doesn't know its users, which makes advertising value on the platform far less attractive than Facebook. The genius of Meta is they know so much about every user on all its platforms and has tech to find out more / monetarise this. Twitter has very poor tech behind the scenes and has had limited product development way before Musk.
https://www.businessofapps.com/data/twitter-statistics/ has numbers. You can see the revenue is healthy, until Musk took over. Profits were good in 2018 and 2019, but losses were bad in 2020. 2021 was then only a small loss.
As I say, the 2 years of profit were accountancy trickery. Also remember 2020 / 21, loads of companies that were based upon online advertising did extremely well, because we were all stuck in our homes, everybody wanted to sell us shit while we doom scrolled. Since then all tech companies took a hit in 22 / 23, cut lots of staff and now starting to turn it around with the likes of LLMs.
All tech companies massively over hired during COVID and had to cut back.
Musk paid far too much for twitter, then a valid criticism is he overdid the cuts and also his behaviour has scared off advertisers. But the fundamentals of twitter haven't changed, very poor tech on the backend (lots of people Musk called in looked at the code and went WTF, this is a shit show, total rewrite required, and Musk said no can't do it) and no idea who their users are.
This is the real Deep State that's being voted on.
Neither candidate wants to talk about it, but the stakes today for the Supreme Court’s future are huge. A GOP win could cement this majority for another generation or two. A Dem win could protect theirs or shrink this majority. Divided gov’t means a R Senate could stymie Harris. https://x.com/sahilkapur/status/1853791927738536132
Imagine a 6/3 - or possibly 7/2 - court, to the right of the current one. For the next couple of decades.
At best, President Harris might make it 5/4 to the liberals - but with a likely GOP Senate doing the confirming,
Would the Supreme Court possibly rule a future Supreme Court expansion illegal?
First they'd need to decide whether or not they had jurisdiction on the matter. They might decide they don't
Haven't been on ChatGPT for about a year, so I thought I'd see if they've improved their factual information replies.
They haven't.
My question: "How many votes did the Conservatives poll in the Huntingdon constituency at the 1983 general election?"
Answer: "In the 1983 UK general election, the Conservative Party candidate in the Huntingdon constituency, John Major, received 32,833 votes, winning with 54.2% of the vote. This was a strong performance in a safe Conservative seat, marking the beginning of a prominent political career for Major, who would later become Prime Minister."
In fact he polled 34,254 votes at that election.
Accuracy is for low status people.
Quickly generating, big, thick documents is much more important.
GPT: garbage produced textually
The annoying thing is that LLM's such as Chat GPT et al *do* have lots of good uses. Used well, they can be invaluable in narrow areas.
But the problems are that people use them poorly, and often in areas outside those narrow areas. Because they're trendy. And also because there's a heck of a lot of money being invested in the area, and the hype train is running as people want their money back.
As ever, be cautious about hype. Sometimes hype is justified; most of the time... it isn't.
According to Ed Zitron, Microsoft is using CoPilot as an analysis tool for employee assessment. I’m sure that’s doing wonders for staff morale.
Farage: "This is the sexy bit: Elon comes in and takes a knife to the [US] deep state. Just like when he bought Twitter he sacked 80 per cent of the staff.
There are going to be mass lay-offs, whole departments closing and I’m hoping and praying that’s the blueprint for what we then do on our side of the pond.
Because that’s what Reform UK believes in - that we’re over-bureaucratised and none of it works. This assault on the bureaucratic state is the thing that’s really exciting."
Really? That's what Reform voters want? 80% of the state slashed and burned.
The Red Wallers he's after???
I very much doubt it.
Most Reform voters are either small businessmen, in the armed forces or white working class private sector workers. So I doubt they are that bothered about Farage promising to slash the civil service and public sector administrators as long as he doesn't also slash the numbers of police, soldiers and doctors and nurses
I think we need a bucket load of citations to confirm that post.
Farage: "This is the sexy bit: Elon comes in and takes a knife to the [US] deep state. Just like when he bought Twitter he sacked 80 per cent of the staff.
There are going to be mass lay-offs, whole departments closing and I’m hoping and praying that’s the blueprint for what we then do on our side of the pond.
Because that’s what Reform UK believes in - that we’re over-bureaucratised and none of it works. This assault on the bureaucratic state is the thing that’s really exciting."
Really? That's what Reform voters want? 80% of the state slashed and burned.
The Red Wallers he's after???
I very much doubt it.
This is all very fascist obviously, but it’s also notable (to me) that Farage completely glosses over the reality that Musk sacked 80% of Twitter’s staff & as a result triggered an 84% drop in it’s revenue. He simply didn’t understand the product Twitter was selling.
The idea that you can simply hack away 80% of government employees & not end up causing great swathes of harm to people in the real world is for the birds.
I'm not sure that one followed from the other with Twitter. The drop in advertising revenue has more to do with his brand positioning than the reduction in headcount.
It's worth remembering that before Musk bought it, Twitter was mostly making thumping losses, and it's business model looked pretty unsustainable. The jury is still out of Musk's version, but I think it's by no means impossible he'll end up making it wash it's face.
Twitter had started making profit a few years before Musk took over. It took time to get there, but was looking sustainable.
Then Musk took over.
This isn't really true. It made money in only 2 years its entire existence before dropping again to unprofitability, and it was really just accounting trickery. It doubled its head count during COVID, which was ridiculous.
Now, under Musk ownership, a fair criticism is, is the company being improved?
The underlying problem Twitter has always had, it doesn't know its users, which makes advertising value on the platform far less attractive than Facebook. The genius of Meta is they know so much about every user on all its platforms and has tech to find out more / monetarise this. Twitter has very poor tech behind the scenes and has had limited product development way before Musk.
https://www.businessofapps.com/data/twitter-statistics/ has numbers. You can see the revenue is healthy, until Musk took over. Profits were good in 2018 and 2019, but losses were bad in 2020. 2021 was then only a small loss.
Did anything happen to the global economy that made 2020 really bad and 2021 still tough but not as bad as 2020?
Farage: "This is the sexy bit: Elon comes in and takes a knife to the [US] deep state. Just like when he bought Twitter he sacked 80 per cent of the staff.
There are going to be mass lay-offs, whole departments closing and I’m hoping and praying that’s the blueprint for what we then do on our side of the pond.
Because that’s what Reform UK believes in - that we’re over-bureaucratised and none of it works. This assault on the bureaucratic state is the thing that’s really exciting."
Really? That's what Reform voters want? 80% of the state slashed and burned.
The Red Wallers he's after???
I very much doubt it.
Most Reform voters are either small businessmen, in the armed forces or white working class private sector workers. So I doubt they are that bothered about Farage promising to slash the civil service and public sector administrators as long as he doesn't also slash the numbers of police, soldiers and doctors and nurses
Farage needs to start naming the specific jobs he intends to axe, so we can then make an informed assessment about the cuts he's proposing. Vague talk about the 'bureaucratic state' is just so much waffle.
Haven't been on ChatGPT for about a year, so I thought I'd see if they've improved their factual information replies.
They haven't.
My question: "How many votes did the Conservatives poll in the Huntingdon constituency at the 1983 general election?"
Answer: "In the 1983 UK general election, the Conservative Party candidate in the Huntingdon constituency, John Major, received 32,833 votes, winning with 54.2% of the vote. This was a strong performance in a safe Conservative seat, marking the beginning of a prominent political career for Major, who would later become Prime Minister."
In fact he polled 34,254 votes at that election.
Can you follow up to ask for the source of that incorrect number?
It doesn't know the source of the incorrect number it's an hallucination..
I was just curious how it would justify the number.
I don't think LLM's do justification.
You can't ask for sources. That's the whole problem.
So what is the playlist tonight as we wait for results? I'll start off with Steely Dan - Haitian Divorce.
Sorry, Donald, they have fallen out of love....
Kamala Chameleon
Then one for the pollsters: Springsteen - "The Ties that Bind"....
Streets of Philadelphia, surely ?
Where they'll be Dancin' in the Street.
Green Day's American Idiot if it's Trump.
The Revolution Will Not Be Televised (Gil Scott-Heron). An oldie but goodie, which had passed me by until I moved to the US. Not sure UK audiences will know this one
Farage: "This is the sexy bit: Elon comes in and takes a knife to the [US] deep state. Just like when he bought Twitter he sacked 80 per cent of the staff.
There are going to be mass lay-offs, whole departments closing and I’m hoping and praying that’s the blueprint for what we then do on our side of the pond.
Because that’s what Reform UK believes in - that we’re over-bureaucratised and none of it works. This assault on the bureaucratic state is the thing that’s really exciting."
Really? That's what Reform voters want? 80% of the state slashed and burned.
The Red Wallers he's after???
I very much doubt it.
Most Reform voters are either small businessmen, in the armed forces or white working class private sector workers. So I doubt they are that bothered about Farage promising to slash the civil service and public sector administrators as long as he doesn't also slash the numbers of police, soldiers and doctors and nurses
Farage: "This is the sexy bit: Elon comes in and takes a knife to the [US] deep state. Just like when he bought Twitter he sacked 80 per cent of the staff.
There are going to be mass lay-offs, whole departments closing and I’m hoping and praying that’s the blueprint for what we then do on our side of the pond.
Because that’s what Reform UK believes in - that we’re over-bureaucratised and none of it works. This assault on the bureaucratic state is the thing that’s really exciting."
Really? That's what Reform voters want? 80% of the state slashed and burned.
The Red Wallers he's after???
I very much doubt it.
Most Reform voters are either small businessmen, in the armed forces or white working class private sector workers. So I doubt they are that bothered about Farage promising to slash the civil service and public sector administrators as long as he doesn't also slash the numbers of police, soldiers and doctors and nurses
This is such an idiotic take because if you cut "public sector administrators" you end up paying doctors and police officers to do admin tasks.
I have a slightly different take on Musk buying twitter. I don't really buy the free speech absolutism, same as the eco-warrior spin on EV cars.
I think he saw a bloated company that never really made any money and thought he could low ball his way into buying it. At worst he gets a company that ticks along, but on the upside, data. Remember he was an early investor in OpenAI, so he is well aware of the power of data, LLMs, etc.
But he screwed up over the amount he paid and then was forced to radical cost cutting. But at the same time, he has got sucked down into the twitter rabbit hole, which made things worse, in terms of keeping advertisers happy. And he is a weird dude, who when criticised he fires from the hip unwisely.
It is worth pointing out, quietly he cut off every bodies elses access to twitter data, formed a spin off and recently set up a 100k GPU cluster....I think that was the original plan all along.
So what is the playlist tonight as we wait for results? I'll start off with Steely Dan - Haitian Divorce.
Sorry, Donald, they have fallen out of love....
Kamala Chameleon
Then one for the pollsters: Springsteen - "The Ties that Bind"....
Streets of Philadelphia, surely ?
Where they'll be Dancin' in the Street.
Green Day's American Idiot if it's Trump.
The Revolution Will Not Be Televised (Gil Scott-Heron). An oldie but goodie, which had passed me by until I moved to the US. Not sure UK audiences will know this one
We do, great song. Gil's old dad first black player for Celtic.
Farage: "This is the sexy bit: Elon comes in and takes a knife to the [US] deep state. Just like when he bought Twitter he sacked 80 per cent of the staff.
There are going to be mass lay-offs, whole departments closing and I’m hoping and praying that’s the blueprint for what we then do on our side of the pond.
Because that’s what Reform UK believes in - that we’re over-bureaucratised and none of it works. This assault on the bureaucratic state is the thing that’s really exciting."
Really? That's what Reform voters want? 80% of the state slashed and burned.
The Red Wallers he's after???
I very much doubt it.
Most Reform voters are either small businessmen, in the armed forces or white working class private sector workers. So I doubt they are that bothered about Farage promising to slash the civil service and public sector administrators as long as he doesn't also slash the numbers of police, soldiers and doctors and nurses
Farage: "This is the sexy bit: Elon comes in and takes a knife to the [US] deep state. Just like when he bought Twitter he sacked 80 per cent of the staff.
There are going to be mass lay-offs, whole departments closing and I’m hoping and praying that’s the blueprint for what we then do on our side of the pond.
Because that’s what Reform UK believes in - that we’re over-bureaucratised and none of it works. This assault on the bureaucratic state is the thing that’s really exciting."
Really? That's what Reform voters want? 80% of the state slashed and burned.
The Red Wallers he's after???
I very much doubt it.
Most Reform voters are either small businessmen, in the armed forces or white working class private sector workers. So I doubt they are that bothered about Farage promising to slash the civil service and public sector administrators as long as he doesn't also slash the numbers of police, soldiers and doctors and nurses
This is such an idiotic take because if you cut "public sector administrators" you end up paying doctors and police officers to do admin tasks.
But when you do that, guess what? Less admin is done vs more real work. Most admin is work for work’s sake, expanding to fill the space.
For a real-life case, read Frederic Laloux’s Reinventing Organizations, and the Buurtzorg experience. He has other examples
Farage: "This is the sexy bit: Elon comes in and takes a knife to the [US] deep state. Just like when he bought Twitter he sacked 80 per cent of the staff.
There are going to be mass lay-offs, whole departments closing and I’m hoping and praying that’s the blueprint for what we then do on our side of the pond.
Because that’s what Reform UK believes in - that we’re over-bureaucratised and none of it works. This assault on the bureaucratic state is the thing that’s really exciting."
Really? That's what Reform voters want? 80% of the state slashed and burned.
The Red Wallers he's after???
I very much doubt it.
Most Reform voters are either small businessmen, in the armed forces or white working class private sector workers. So I doubt they are that bothered about Farage promising to slash the civil service and public sector administrators as long as he doesn't also slash the numbers of police, soldiers and doctors and nurses
This is such an idiotic take because if you cut "public sector administrators" you end up paying doctors and police officers to do admin tasks.
Because of an NHS cock-up, I was once in the same waiting room on consecutive days. On the first day, there were loads of 'plain clothes' NHS administrators (i.e. did not look like nurses) sitting around chatting, even though the waiting room was busy.
The next day I saw the same faces, and the waiting room was just as busy, but the staff were far, far busier, with them bustling around doing stuff.
I think many jobs are like that: periods of inaction then loads of stuff going on.
Farage: "This is the sexy bit: Elon comes in and takes a knife to the [US] deep state. Just like when he bought Twitter he sacked 80 per cent of the staff.
There are going to be mass lay-offs, whole departments closing and I’m hoping and praying that’s the blueprint for what we then do on our side of the pond.
Because that’s what Reform UK believes in - that we’re over-bureaucratised and none of it works. This assault on the bureaucratic state is the thing that’s really exciting."
Really? That's what Reform voters want? 80% of the state slashed and burned.
The Red Wallers he's after???
I very much doubt it.
Most Reform voters are either small businessmen, in the armed forces or white working class private sector workers. So I doubt they are that bothered about Farage promising to slash the civil service and public sector administrators as long as he doesn't also slash the numbers of police, soldiers and doctors and nurses
This is such an idiotic take because if you cut "public sector administrators" you end up paying doctors and police officers to do admin tasks.
But when you do that, guess what? Less admin is done vs more real work. Most admin is work for work’s sake, expanding to fill the space.
That's just not true at all. Management consultancy bollocks.
Farage: "This is the sexy bit: Elon comes in and takes a knife to the [US] deep state. Just like when he bought Twitter he sacked 80 per cent of the staff.
There are going to be mass lay-offs, whole departments closing and I’m hoping and praying that’s the blueprint for what we then do on our side of the pond.
Because that’s what Reform UK believes in - that we’re over-bureaucratised and none of it works. This assault on the bureaucratic state is the thing that’s really exciting."
Really? That's what Reform voters want? 80% of the state slashed and burned.
The Red Wallers he's after???
I very much doubt it.
This is all very fascist obviously, but it’s also notable (to me) that Farage completely glosses over the reality that Musk sacked 80% of Twitter’s staff & as a result triggered an 84% drop in it’s revenue. He simply didn’t understand the product Twitter was selling.
The idea that you can simply hack away 80% of government employees & not end up causing great swathes of harm to people in the real world is for the birds.
I'm not sure that one followed from the other with Twitter. The drop in advertising revenue has more to do with his brand positioning than the reduction in headcount.
It's worth remembering that before Musk bought it, Twitter was mostly making thumping losses, and it's business model looked pretty unsustainable. The jury is still out of Musk's version, but I think it's by no means impossible he'll end up making it wash it's face.
Twitter had started making profit a few years before Musk took over. It took time to get there, but was looking sustainable.
Then Musk took over.
This isn't really true. It made money in only 2 years its entire existence before dropping again to unprofitability, and it was really just accounting trickery. It doubled its head count during COVID, which was ridiculous.
Now, under Musk ownership, a fair criticism is, is the company being improved?
The underlying problem Twitter has always had, it doesn't know its users, which makes advertising value on the platform far less attractive than Facebook. The genius of Meta is they know so much about every user on all its platforms and has tech to find out more / monetarise this. Twitter has very poor tech behind the scenes and has had limited product development way before Musk.
https://www.businessofapps.com/data/twitter-statistics/ has numbers. You can see the revenue is healthy, until Musk took over. Profits were good in 2018 and 2019, but losses were bad in 2020. 2021 was then only a small loss.
As I say, the 2 years of profit were accountancy trickery. Also remember 2020 / 21, loads of companies that were based upon online advertising did extremely well, because we were all stuck in our homes, everybody wanted to sell us shit while we doom scrolled. Since then all tech companies took a hit in 22 / 23, cut lots of staff and now starting to turn it around with the likes of LLMs.
All tech companies massively over hired during COVID and had to cut back.
Musk paid far too much for twitter, then a valid criticism is he overdid the cuts and also his behaviour has scared off advertisers. But the fundamentals of twitter haven't changed, very poor tech on the backend (lots of people Musk called in looked at the code and went WTF, this is a shit show), no idea who their users are.
It’s not just his behaviour - he destroyed the brand safety aspect that made advertisers feel safe advertising on Twitter. Since Twitter was such a small market they could easily drop it altogether.
Farage: "This is the sexy bit: Elon comes in and takes a knife to the [US] deep state. Just like when he bought Twitter he sacked 80 per cent of the staff.
There are going to be mass lay-offs, whole departments closing and I’m hoping and praying that’s the blueprint for what we then do on our side of the pond.
Because that’s what Reform UK believes in - that we’re over-bureaucratised and none of it works. This assault on the bureaucratic state is the thing that’s really exciting."
Really? That's what Reform voters want? 80% of the state slashed and burned.
The Red Wallers he's after???
I very much doubt it.
This is all very fascist obviously, but it’s also notable (to me) that Farage completely glosses over the reality that Musk sacked 80% of Twitter’s staff & as a result triggered an 84% drop in it’s revenue. He simply didn’t understand the product Twitter was selling.
The idea that you can simply hack away 80% of government employees & not end up causing great swathes of harm to people in the real world is for the birds.
I'm not sure that one followed from the other with Twitter. The drop in advertising revenue has more to do with his brand positioning than the reduction in headcount.
It's worth remembering that before Musk bought it, Twitter was mostly making thumping losses, and it's business model looked pretty unsustainable. The jury is still out of Musk's version, but I think it's by no means impossible he'll end up making it wash it's face.
Twitter had started making profit a few years before Musk took over. It took time to get there, but was looking sustainable.
Then Musk took over.
This isn't really true. It made money in only 2 years its entire existence before dropping again to unprofitability, and it was really just accounting trickery. It doubled its head count during COVID, which was ridiculous.
Now, under Musk ownership, a fair criticism is, is the company being improved?
The underlying problem Twitter has always had, it doesn't know its users, which makes advertising value on the platform far less attractive than Facebook. The genius of Meta is they know so much about every user on all its platforms and has tech to find out more / monetarise this. Twitter has very poor tech behind the scenes and has had limited product development way before Musk.
https://www.businessofapps.com/data/twitter-statistics/ has numbers. You can see the revenue is healthy, until Musk took over. Profits were good in 2018 and 2019, but losses were bad in 2020. 2021 was then only a small loss.
As I say, the 2 years of profit were accountancy trickery. Also remember 2020 / 21, loads of companies that were based upon online advertising did extremely well, because we were all stuck in our homes, everybody wanted to sell us shit while we doom scrolled. Since then all tech companies took a hit in 22 / 23, cut lots of staff and now starting to turn it around with the likes of LLMs.
All tech companies massively over hired during COVID and had to cut back.
Musk paid far too much for twitter, then a valid criticism is he overdid the cuts and also his behaviour has scared off advertisers. But the fundamentals of twitter haven't changed, very poor tech on the backend (lots of people Musk called in looked at the code and went WTF, this is a shit show), no idea who their users are.
It’s not just his behaviour - he destroyed the brand safety aspect that made advertisers feel safe advertising on Twitter. Since Twitter was such a small market they could easily drop it altogether.
That’s a trust that’s hard to regain once lost.
Yes I think that is fair. Also as I said, twitter was never a premier place to advertise. Speak to anybody with a business, where / how do you advertise, Google PPC and Meta, because you can carefully target people (although it can be somewhat overstated how accurate it is). The value prop of advertising on twitter has never been that good.
That is why Meta can have scandals and people still end up on wanting / needing to advertise on Facebook and Instagram. Their knowledge of users and their tech is just way better.
I have a slightly different take on Musk buying twitter. I don't really buy the free speech absolutism, same as the eco-warrior spin on EV cars.
I think he saw a bloated company that never really made any money and thought he could low ball his way into buying it. At worst he gets a company that ticks along, but on the upside, data. Remember he was an early investor in OpenAI, so he is well aware of the power of data, LLMs, etc.
But he screwed up over the amount he paid and then was forced to radical cost cutting. But at the same time, he has got sucked down into the twitter rabbit hole, which made things worse, in terms of keeping advertisers happy. And he is a weird dude, who when criticised he fires from the hip unwisely.
It is worth pointing out, quietly he cut off every bodies elses access to twitter data, formed a spin off and recently set up a 100k GPU cluster....I think that was the original plan all along.
Musk was on Rogan’s podcast yesterday. They spend half the time talking about politics and the other half talking about various forms of technology.
Musk says that he primarily wanted a platform with freedom of speech, he didn’t see why he needed tens of thousands of content censors, hadn’t banked on organised advertising boycotts, admits he way overpaid but that it was worth it for the greater good of humanity!
Farage: "This is the sexy bit: Elon comes in and takes a knife to the [US] deep state. Just like when he bought Twitter he sacked 80 per cent of the staff.
There are going to be mass lay-offs, whole departments closing and I’m hoping and praying that’s the blueprint for what we then do on our side of the pond.
Because that’s what Reform UK believes in - that we’re over-bureaucratised and none of it works. This assault on the bureaucratic state is the thing that’s really exciting."
Really? That's what Reform voters want? 80% of the state slashed and burned.
The Red Wallers he's after???
I very much doubt it.
Most Reform voters are either small businessmen, in the armed forces or white working class private sector workers. So I doubt they are that bothered about Farage promising to slash the civil service and public sector administrators as long as he doesn't also slash the numbers of police, soldiers and doctors and nurses
This is such an idiotic take because if you cut "public sector administrators" you end up paying doctors and police officers to do admin tasks.
This is the frustration.
"Cut administration" is one thing, but it's involved and difficult - you have to carry out a process analysis and determine what is necessary administration, beneficial-but-not-essential administration, and unnecessary administration, and then determine the efficiency/inefficiency level and how to get rid of the unnecessary admin and how to streamline and make more efficient the necessary and beneficial admin. Which requires a lot of specific knowledge and is challenging.
"Cut administrators" is something else entirely, is very popular as a quick and easy soundbite where all you need to do is find out the raw numbers involved, lament the number, and propose slashing them. Without affecting the actual amount or efficiency of the administration itself.
Doing the former is very welcome, but very rarely is even attempted. Doing the latter is often thrown forwards and invariably results in reduced efficiency and overall output because you have highly paid specialists in their actual field of work being required to spend ever-increasing proportions of their time inexpertly attempting the administration (which is still un-streamlined and probably ever more inefficient) rather than doing their actual jobs.
Farage: "This is the sexy bit: Elon comes in and takes a knife to the [US] deep state. Just like when he bought Twitter he sacked 80 per cent of the staff.
There are going to be mass lay-offs, whole departments closing and I’m hoping and praying that’s the blueprint for what we then do on our side of the pond.
Because that’s what Reform UK believes in - that we’re over-bureaucratised and none of it works. This assault on the bureaucratic state is the thing that’s really exciting."
Really? That's what Reform voters want? 80% of the state slashed and burned.
The Red Wallers he's after???
I very much doubt it.
Most Reform voters are either small businessmen, in the armed forces or white working class private sector workers. So I doubt they are that bothered about Farage promising to slash the civil service and public sector administrators as long as he doesn't also slash the numbers of police, soldiers and doctors and nurses
Farage: "This is the sexy bit: Elon comes in and takes a knife to the [US] deep state. Just like when he bought Twitter he sacked 80 per cent of the staff.
There are going to be mass lay-offs, whole departments closing and I’m hoping and praying that’s the blueprint for what we then do on our side of the pond.
Because that’s what Reform UK believes in - that we’re over-bureaucratised and none of it works. This assault on the bureaucratic state is the thing that’s really exciting."
Really? That's what Reform voters want? 80% of the state slashed and burned.
The Red Wallers he's after???
I very much doubt it.
Most Reform voters are either small businessmen, in the armed forces or white working class private sector workers. So I doubt they are that bothered about Farage promising to slash the civil service and public sector administrators as long as he doesn't also slash the numbers of police, soldiers and doctors and nurses
This is such an idiotic take because if you cut "public sector administrators" you end up paying doctors and police officers to do admin tasks.
I think there's a large saving for streamlining paperwork (Ok Laptop/work pad work) in the police for one. Officers and ex officers who phone in to the chat shows seem to have to do a ridiculous amount of paperwork for say a shoplifter. There must be ways to make processes like that more efficient.
I have a slightly different take on Musk buying twitter. I don't really buy the free speech absolutism, same as the eco-warrior spin on EV cars.
I think he saw a bloated company that never really made any money and thought he could low ball his way into buying it. At worst he gets a company that ticks along, but on the upside, data. Remember he was an early investor in OpenAI, so he is well aware of the power of data, LLMs, etc.
But he screwed up over the amount he paid and then was forced to radical cost cutting. But at the same time, he has got sucked down into the twitter rabbit hole, which made things worse, in terms of keeping advertisers happy. And he is a weird dude, who when criticised he fires from the hip unwisely.
It is worth pointing out, quietly he cut off every bodies elses access to twitter data, formed a spin off and recently set up a 100k GPU cluster....I think that was the original plan all along.
Musk was on Rogan’s podcast yesterday. They spend half the time talking about politics and the other half talking about various forms of technology.
Musk says that he primarily wanted a platform with freedom of speech, he didn’t see why he needed tens of thousands of content censors, hadn’t banked on organised advertising boycotts, admits he way overpaid but that it was worth it for the greater good of humanity!
Last paragraph. Full of it as usual. Does he want is self-driving car technology passed asap and believes he has backed the right party for that? Just a thought.
Farage: "This is the sexy bit: Elon comes in and takes a knife to the [US] deep state. Just like when he bought Twitter he sacked 80 per cent of the staff.
There are going to be mass lay-offs, whole departments closing and I’m hoping and praying that’s the blueprint for what we then do on our side of the pond.
Because that’s what Reform UK believes in - that we’re over-bureaucratised and none of it works. This assault on the bureaucratic state is the thing that’s really exciting."
Really? That's what Reform voters want? 80% of the state slashed and burned.
The Red Wallers he's after???
I very much doubt it.
Most Reform voters are either small businessmen, in the armed forces or white working class private sector workers. So I doubt they are that bothered about Farage promising to slash the civil service and public sector administrators as long as he doesn't also slash the numbers of police, soldiers and doctors and nurses
This is such an idiotic take because if you cut "public sector administrators" you end up paying doctors and police officers to do admin tasks.
But when you do that, guess what? Less admin is done vs more real work. Most admin is work for work’s sake, expanding to fill the space.
That's just not true at all. Management consultancy bollocks.
Haven't been on ChatGPT for about a year, so I thought I'd see if they've improved their factual information replies.
They haven't.
My question: "How many votes did the Conservatives poll in the Huntingdon constituency at the 1983 general election?"
Answer: "In the 1983 UK general election, the Conservative Party candidate in the Huntingdon constituency, John Major, received 32,833 votes, winning with 54.2% of the vote. This was a strong performance in a safe Conservative seat, marking the beginning of a prominent political career for Major, who would later become Prime Minister."
In fact he polled 34,254 votes at that election.
Claude 3.6’s answer:
“Since this is a very specific historical electoral statistic from a single constituency, I should note that while I try to be accurate, I may hallucinate specific numbers like this. The Conservatives won Huntingdon in 1983 (with John Major as their candidate), but I don't want to state a specific vote total without being completely certain of the figure. I'd recommend checking official electoral records or the BBC's historical election database for the exact number.”
I have a slightly different take on Musk buying twitter. I don't really buy the free speech absolutism, same as the eco-warrior spin on EV cars.
I think he saw a bloated company that never really made any money and thought he could low ball his way into buying it. At worst he gets a company that ticks along, but on the upside, data. Remember he was an early investor in OpenAI, so he is well aware of the power of data, LLMs, etc.
But he screwed up over the amount he paid and then was forced to radical cost cutting. But at the same time, he has got sucked down into the twitter rabbit hole, which made things worse, in terms of keeping advertisers happy. And he is a weird dude, who when criticised he fires from the hip unwisely.
It is worth pointing out, quietly he cut off every bodies elses access to twitter data, formed a spin off and recently set up a 100k GPU cluster....I think that was the original plan all along.
Musk was on Rogan’s podcast yesterday. They spend half the time talking about politics and the other half talking about various forms of technology.
Musk says that he primarily wanted a platform with freedom of speech, he didn’t see why he needed tens of thousands of content censors, hadn’t banked on organised advertising boycotts, admits he way overpaid but that it was worth it for the greater good of humanity!
Yes, like I said: he didn’t understand what he had bought & clearly still doesn’t. So he’s trying to turn it into something he does understand instead. It might even work!
Farage: "This is the sexy bit: Elon comes in and takes a knife to the [US] deep state. Just like when he bought Twitter he sacked 80 per cent of the staff.
There are going to be mass lay-offs, whole departments closing and I’m hoping and praying that’s the blueprint for what we then do on our side of the pond.
Because that’s what Reform UK believes in - that we’re over-bureaucratised and none of it works. This assault on the bureaucratic state is the thing that’s really exciting."
Really? That's what Reform voters want? 80% of the state slashed and burned.
The Red Wallers he's after???
I very much doubt it.
Most Reform voters are either small businessmen, in the armed forces or white working class private sector workers. So I doubt they are that bothered about Farage promising to slash the civil service and public sector administrators as long as he doesn't also slash the numbers of police, soldiers and doctors and nurses
This is such an idiotic take because if you cut "public sector administrators" you end up paying doctors and police officers to do admin tasks.
I think there's a large saving for streamlining paperwork (Ok Laptop/work pad work) in the police for one. Officers and ex officers who phone in to the chat shows seem to have to do a ridiculous amount of paperwork for say a shoplifter. There must be ways to make processes like that more efficient.
I agree but streamlining processes is something entirely different to simply cutting vast swathes of "administrators" and then letting the doctors and nurses and police officers etc pick up the pieces.
I have a slightly different take on Musk buying twitter. I don't really buy the free speech absolutism, same as the eco-warrior spin on EV cars.
I think he saw a bloated company that never really made any money and thought he could low ball his way into buying it. At worst he gets a company that ticks along, but on the upside, data. Remember he was an early investor in OpenAI, so he is well aware of the power of data, LLMs, etc.
But he screwed up over the amount he paid and then was forced to radical cost cutting. But at the same time, he has got sucked down into the twitter rabbit hole, which made things worse, in terms of keeping advertisers happy. And he is a weird dude, who when criticised he fires from the hip unwisely.
It is worth pointing out, quietly he cut off every bodies elses access to twitter data, formed a spin off and recently set up a 100k GPU cluster....I think that was the original plan all along.
Musk was on Rogan’s podcast yesterday. They spend half the time talking about politics and the other half talking about various forms of technology.
Musk says that he primarily wanted a platform with freedom of speech, he didn’t see why he needed tens of thousands of content censors, hadn’t banked on organised advertising boycotts, admits he way overpaid but that it was worth it for the greater good of humanity!
As I say, I am not totally convinced by that.
Look at every Musk play in the past, there is always another angle. Tesla, he has bought up so many of the prime locations for charging, such that between the charging tech and locations, everybody is now having to pay them for access...look at SpaceX / Starlink, he is getting himself a monopoly on internet for airlines.... And he got the government to basically provide a big chunk of capital in loans and subsides, for these endeavours.
They are not the stated missions of the companies.
Pretty much straight away setting up an AI sister company, and training LLMs, cutting off outside access to data, and now doubling down by setting up a 100k GPU compute cluster, says I have a different motive than (just) I want a free speech social network.
So what is the playlist tonight as we wait for results? I'll start off with Steely Dan - Haitian Divorce.
Sorry, Donald, they have fallen out of love....
Kamala Chameleon
Then one for the pollsters: Springsteen - "The Ties that Bind"....
Streets of Philadelphia, surely ?
Where they'll be Dancin' in the Street.
Green Day's American Idiot if it's Trump.
The Revolution Will Not Be Televised (Gil Scott-Heron). An oldie but goodie, which had passed me by until I moved to the US. Not sure UK audiences will know this one
Farage: "This is the sexy bit: Elon comes in and takes a knife to the [US] deep state. Just like when he bought Twitter he sacked 80 per cent of the staff.
There are going to be mass lay-offs, whole departments closing and I’m hoping and praying that’s the blueprint for what we then do on our side of the pond.
Because that’s what Reform UK believes in - that we’re over-bureaucratised and none of it works. This assault on the bureaucratic state is the thing that’s really exciting."
Really? That's what Reform voters want? 80% of the state slashed and burned.
The Red Wallers he's after???
I very much doubt it.
Most Reform voters are either small businessmen, in the armed forces or white working class private sector workers. So I doubt they are that bothered about Farage promising to slash the civil service and public sector administrators as long as he doesn't also slash the numbers of police, soldiers and doctors and nurses
This is such an idiotic take because if you cut "public sector administrators" you end up paying doctors and police officers to do admin tasks.
I think there's a large saving for streamlining paperwork (Ok Laptop/work pad work) in the police for one. Officers and ex officers who phone in to the chat shows seem to have to do a ridiculous amount of paperwork for say a shoplifter. There must be ways to make processes like that more efficient.
There are a whole set of apps already available to simplify police paperwork - https://node4.co.uk/ have done a lot of work there for Cumbria and Durham Police.
Whether other police forces are using the software is a different question but the work Node 4 did was designed to allow police officers to do all the paperwork there and then as quickly as possible.
I was impressed by your analyses and have added them and you to a backstage discussion. If you want to add further data or argue perhaps there will be good and I'll write it up for the team later.
Farage: "This is the sexy bit: Elon comes in and takes a knife to the [US] deep state. Just like when he bought Twitter he sacked 80 per cent of the staff.
There are going to be mass lay-offs, whole departments closing and I’m hoping and praying that’s the blueprint for what we then do on our side of the pond.
Because that’s what Reform UK believes in - that we’re over-bureaucratised and none of it works. This assault on the bureaucratic state is the thing that’s really exciting."
Really? That's what Reform voters want? 80% of the state slashed and burned.
The Red Wallers he's after???
I very much doubt it.
Most Reform voters are either small businessmen, in the armed forces or white working class private sector workers. So I doubt they are that bothered about Farage promising to slash the civil service and public sector administrators as long as he doesn't also slash the numbers of police, soldiers and doctors and nurses
This is such an idiotic take because if you cut "public sector administrators" you end up paying doctors and police officers to do admin tasks.
Reform voters don't want things to work; they just want to punish those they think responsible for making things not work. If they thought things through in any detail they wouldn't be voting Reform in the first place.
Which is why it's incumbent on the mainstream parties to actually bother with some political education about how the public sector *does* work, and why (for example) medical administrators are necessary.
Listening to Shelagh Fogerty on LBC she had a guy called Dan, a Brit from New Jersey, who claims NJ is going red. Previously a woman called Gemma from Britain who voted for Harris in NY says that her friends are all voting Trump. They are suggesting a Trump landslide based on the economy.
I have a slightly different take on Musk buying twitter. I don't really buy the free speech absolutism, same as the eco-warrior spin on EV cars.
I think he saw a bloated company that never really made any money and thought he could low ball his way into buying it. At worst he gets a company that ticks along, but on the upside, data. Remember he was an early investor in OpenAI, so he is well aware of the power of data, LLMs, etc.
But he screwed up over the amount he paid and then was forced to radical cost cutting. But at the same time, he has got sucked down into the twitter rabbit hole, which made things worse, in terms of keeping advertisers happy. And he is a weird dude, who when criticised he fires from the hip unwisely.
It is worth pointing out, quietly he cut off every bodies elses access to twitter data, formed a spin off and recently set up a 100k GPU cluster....I think that was the original plan all along.
Musk was on Rogan’s podcast yesterday. They spend half the time talking about politics and the other half talking about various forms of technology.
Musk says that he primarily wanted a platform with freedom of speech, he didn’t see why he needed tens of thousands of content censors, hadn’t banked on organised advertising boycotts, admits he way overpaid but that it was worth it for the greater good of humanity!
If he doesn't understand the need for content censors he's not running it for the greater good of humanity...
What's interesting at the moment is that having removed the content censors he's now removing the methods by which readers can restrict what they see with his half baked changes to account blocking..
Sir, I note your insistence that women predominantly vote for KH, and men for DJT. Do you have a source for this pleased based on a survey or some recorded fact?
I'd say it's fairly common thinking amongst educated here that having fewer/no children is absolutely fine and would do a great service to the planet, so its not really a problem.
This ignores the very serious social, political and economic consequences if it continues unchecked - which could ultimately lead to states falling apart into (and not excluding at the extremes) bankruptcy, disorder and anarchy.
What you probably want is some sort of long-term population stabilisation.
Yes, I'm quite concerned about the prospect of rapid population falls.
I suspect that culturally and economically it's quite hard to hit on close to replacement level. There are feedbacks which will push away from stability.
The idea of a world with a global fertility rate below 1.5 is quite depressing.
It is so depressing. Children are the most incredible gift and the source of almost all joy in the world. There is an upside for the natural world from a lower human population, but it's hard to see a rapidly falling population as anything other than a tragedy.
It really does depend on exactly *who* is having/raising the children. Or failing to have them.This is the uncomfortable truth.
Our society has arguably been hyper-reproductive in the 'wrong' areas, and pretty barren amongst those whose offspring would, on balance, have the potential to make a more positive impact.
I know this is a generalisation and I'd never argue for any forceful intervention of any kind, but it is the reality, however unpalatable.
Genetics, background, culture, geography, money, time, intellect, consciousness, politics - all stuff that can make a difference.
This is why it pisses me off when politicians say 'talent is evenly distributed but opportunity isn't '. What evidence is the first assertion based on? Has there been some big Trading Places-style experiment that we weren't told about.
Getting a ‘high status male’ vibe..
Let's reminisce about the times when the Right used to attack the Left for past eugenics support.
The critical re-evaluation from Spiked can't be far away, surely?
Oh I'm dead against Eurgenics. Or indeed, as I said, any form of forced intervention. I feel exactly the same way about poverty and inequal starts in life and all manner of other things.
And this is, fundamentally, what the Left just don't get about us LIbertarians: We are capable of noticing things and analysing stuff without jumping to the conclusion that they must be 'fixed', and that said fixing should be done by an all-powerful state.
Listening to Shelagh Fogerty on LBC she had a guy called Dan, a Brit from New Jersey, who claims NJ is going red. Previously a woman called Gemma from Britain who voted for Harris in NY says that her friends are all voting Trump. They are suggesting a Trump landslide based on the economy.
I have a slightly different take on Musk buying twitter. I don't really buy the free speech absolutism, same as the eco-warrior spin on EV cars.
I think he saw a bloated company that never really made any money and thought he could low ball his way into buying it. At worst he gets a company that ticks along, but on the upside, data. Remember he was an early investor in OpenAI, so he is well aware of the power of data, LLMs, etc.
But he screwed up over the amount he paid and then was forced to radical cost cutting. But at the same time, he has got sucked down into the twitter rabbit hole, which made things worse, in terms of keeping advertisers happy. And he is a weird dude, who when criticised he fires from the hip unwisely.
It is worth pointing out, quietly he cut off every bodies elses access to twitter data, formed a spin off and recently set up a 100k GPU cluster....I think that was the original plan all along.
Musk was on Rogan’s podcast yesterday. They spend half the time talking about politics and the other half talking about various forms of technology.
Musk says that he primarily wanted a platform with freedom of speech, he didn’t see why he needed tens of thousands of content censors, hadn’t banked on organised advertising boycotts, admits he way overpaid but that it was worth it for the greater good of humanity!
If he doesn't understand the need for content censors he's not running it for the greater good of humanity...
He didn’t see the need for tens of thousands of them proactively deleting posts and banning people, no. Twitter’s staff numbers had doubled during the pandemic.
Haven't been on ChatGPT for about a year, so I thought I'd see if they've improved their factual information replies.
They haven't.
My question: "How many votes did the Conservatives poll in the Huntingdon constituency at the 1983 general election?"
Answer: "In the 1983 UK general election, the Conservative Party candidate in the Huntingdon constituency, John Major, received 32,833 votes, winning with 54.2% of the vote. This was a strong performance in a safe Conservative seat, marking the beginning of a prominent political career for Major, who would later become Prime Minister."
In fact he polled 34,254 votes at that election.
Claude 3.6’s answer:
“Since this is a very specific historical electoral statistic from a single constituency, I should note that while I try to be accurate, I may hallucinate specific numbers like this. The Conservatives won Huntingdon in 1983 (with John Major as their candidate), but I don't want to state a specific vote total without being completely certain of the figure. I'd recommend checking official electoral records or the BBC's historical election database for the exact number.”
Listening to Shelagh Fogerty on LBC she had a guy called Dan, a Brit from New Jersey, who claims NJ is going red. Previously a woman called Gemma from Britain who voted for Harris in NY says that her friends are all voting Trump. They are suggesting a Trump landslide based on the economy.
William Glenn has called this.
Damn
Just imagine if New Jersey and Virginia went red with Iowa and Kansas blue.
Farage: "This is the sexy bit: Elon comes in and takes a knife to the [US] deep state. Just like when he bought Twitter he sacked 80 per cent of the staff.
There are going to be mass lay-offs, whole departments closing and I’m hoping and praying that’s the blueprint for what we then do on our side of the pond.
Because that’s what Reform UK believes in - that we’re over-bureaucratised and none of it works. This assault on the bureaucratic state is the thing that’s really exciting."
Really? That's what Reform voters want? 80% of the state slashed and burned.
The Red Wallers he's after???
I very much doubt it.
Most Reform voters are either small businessmen, in the armed forces or white working class private sector workers. So I doubt they are that bothered about Farage promising to slash the civil service and public sector administrators as long as he doesn't also slash the numbers of police, soldiers and doctors and nurses
This is such an idiotic take because if you cut "public sector administrators" you end up paying doctors and police officers to do admin tasks.
But when you do that, guess what? Less admin is done vs more real work. Most admin is work for work’s sake, expanding to fill the space.
That's just not true at all. Management consultancy bollocks.
Well, it can be.
But the solution is to remove the excess process or change it to a more efficient/automated pathway and then consider whether you can reduce the admin head count.
Simply firing administrators but not changing the processes means, as you said, that people who should be doing the other jobs end up doing the admin. Badly.
Taking the NHS, because there's neither a single IT system nor a sensible way of systems talking to each other, administrators write up notes and email them (or post) to the GP and then another administrator then enters the information on the primary care record. You could save a lot of admin time with systems that can talk to each other and send and receive updates automatically (as well as reducing the scope for error and delay).
Another example would be trying to book or change appointments - you call someone up who sits in front of some kind of online calendar/booking system and translates your voice commands into making a booking on that system. For most people it would be a hell of a lot more efficient to be able to do that online themselves (there could be a generic telephone booking service for those less able to use an online system).
I have a slightly different take on Musk buying twitter. I don't really buy the free speech absolutism, same as the eco-warrior spin on EV cars.
I think he saw a bloated company that never really made any money and thought he could low ball his way into buying it. At worst he gets a company that ticks along, but on the upside, data. Remember he was an early investor in OpenAI, so he is well aware of the power of data, LLMs, etc.
But he screwed up over the amount he paid and then was forced to radical cost cutting. But at the same time, he has got sucked down into the twitter rabbit hole, which made things worse, in terms of keeping advertisers happy. And he is a weird dude, who when criticised he fires from the hip unwisely.
It is worth pointing out, quietly he cut off every bodies elses access to twitter data, formed a spin off and recently set up a 100k GPU cluster....I think that was the original plan all along.
Musk was on Rogan’s podcast yesterday. They spend half the time talking about politics and the other half talking about various forms of technology.
Musk says that he primarily wanted a platform with freedom of speech, he didn’t see why he needed tens of thousands of content censors, hadn’t banked on organised advertising boycotts, admits he way overpaid but that it was worth it for the greater good of humanity!
If he doesn't understand the need for content censors he's not running it for the greater good of humanity...
He didn’t see the need for tens of thousands of them proactively deleting posts and banning people, no. Twitter’s staff numbers had doubled during the pandemic.
That's the problem with running a social media network - you need to employ a lot of people to moderate what dubious people want to post..
If Harris won Nevada, as Ralston predicts, then she can afford to lose Penn as long as she gains either Georgia or N Carolina.
Bear in mind that Biden won 306 ECVs and Trump still dragged the process out into January, with violence on the streets. Harris does only need 270 ECVs to win but if she does land in the 270s, it'll get very ugly before it gets better - assuming that Trump doesn't manage to persuade Congress and/or the courts to fiddle the result for him (which is unlikely but certainly not impossible).
Unless it is 268 each Congress has no power to intervene directly and in 2020 remember even most GOP Senators voted that Biden had won even if most GOP House Reps voted to challenge state results and say Trump had won.
The courts cannot intervene either unless to stop the count but Trump would have to be ahead in that states count anyway at that point
It's 269 for a tie. But leaving that aside:
Congress has absolute discretion to count the votes, which also means validating the votes. It can throw out a state's votes if it considers those votes to be invalid - and it can use whatever argument it likes to come to such a determination. There is no obligation on Congress to produce a 538 total, or to 'find' votes in place of a set it doesn't like.
The count in Congress has generally been entirely procedural but it isn't, necessarily: it's a functional part of the process and if there is dispute as to who the valid Electors are, or should be, or whether they have cast their votes correctly or not, Congress can choose not to count them.
Now, I agree that it's unlikely that the GOP would have the votes to play such shenanigans and that Trump also actually lost the election. In reality, it'd take a Red Wave to give the Republicans the votes - and such a wave would almost certainly bring Trump victory via the normal route. Nonetheless, if he wants to play silly, it's an option.
How the courts could intervene, and to do what, is pretty much unclear but US courts, and especially the Supreme Court, tend not to be shy about asserting their powers over pretty much everything else.
No it can't, Congress needs 2/3 majorities in both Chambers to invalidate state votes.
As I said in 2020 not even a majority of GOP Senators voted for that let alone a majority of Democratic Congressional representatives and Senators so it is not happening.
As I also said the Courts have no constitutional power to do anything but stop the count, as they did in Florida in 2000 but if Harris is ahead in a state already when they do that it makes no difference anyway
What's your source for the two-thirds provision? It's not in either the constitution or the Electoral Count Reform and Presidential Transition Improvement Act 2022, as far as I can see. I think the vote would operate under a straight plurality.
@Steven_Swinford Kemi Badenoch was left infuriated after The Times disclosed that she had appointed Robert Jenrick as her shadow justice secretary yesterday
Badenoch had wanted to announce Jenrick’s appointment today so the appointments of Priti Patel as shadow foreign secretary and Mel Stride as shadow chancellor would take the headlines
She must have leaked the news to someone in the first place.
Jenrick would have known, of course, but so would all the others who were not offered the job, and it would not be hard to deduce from the Shadow Cabinet teamsheet with a blank space and no mention of their star striker.
Farage: "This is the sexy bit: Elon comes in and takes a knife to the [US] deep state. Just like when he bought Twitter he sacked 80 per cent of the staff.
There are going to be mass lay-offs, whole departments closing and I’m hoping and praying that’s the blueprint for what we then do on our side of the pond.
Because that’s what Reform UK believes in - that we’re over-bureaucratised and none of it works. This assault on the bureaucratic state is the thing that’s really exciting."
Really? That's what Reform voters want? 80% of the state slashed and burned.
The Red Wallers he's after???
I very much doubt it.
Most Reform voters are either small businessmen, in the armed forces or white working class private sector workers. So I doubt they are that bothered about Farage promising to slash the civil service and public sector administrators as long as he doesn't also slash the numbers of police, soldiers and doctors and nurses
This is such an idiotic take because if you cut "public sector administrators" you end up paying doctors and police officers to do admin tasks.
Because of an NHS cock-up, I was once in the same waiting room on consecutive days. On the first day, there were loads of 'plain clothes' NHS administrators (i.e. did not look like nurses) sitting around chatting, even though the waiting room was busy.
The next day I saw the same faces, and the waiting room was just as busy, but the staff were far, far busier, with them bustling around doing stuff.
I think many jobs are like that: periods of inaction then loads of stuff going on.
It's the thing we saw during the plague; some of that fat in organisations is there to provide resilience when things get hectic. An insurance policy, in other words. Tempting to cut, but you regret its lack when it's not there.
I have a slightly different take on Musk buying twitter. I don't really buy the free speech absolutism, same as the eco-warrior spin on EV cars.
I think he saw a bloated company that never really made any money and thought he could low ball his way into buying it. At worst he gets a company that ticks along, but on the upside, data. Remember he was an early investor in OpenAI, so he is well aware of the power of data, LLMs, etc.
But he screwed up over the amount he paid and then was forced to radical cost cutting. But at the same time, he has got sucked down into the twitter rabbit hole, which made things worse, in terms of keeping advertisers happy. And he is a weird dude, who when criticised he fires from the hip unwisely.
It is worth pointing out, quietly he cut off every bodies elses access to twitter data, formed a spin off and recently set up a 100k GPU cluster....I think that was the original plan all along.
Musk was on Rogan’s podcast yesterday. They spend half the time talking about politics and the other half talking about various forms of technology.
Musk says that he primarily wanted a platform with freedom of speech, he didn’t see why he needed tens of thousands of content censors, hadn’t banked on organised advertising boycotts, admits he way overpaid but that it was worth it for the greater good of humanity!
As I say, I am not totally convinced by that.
Look at every Musk play in the past, there is always another angle. Tesla, he has bought up so many of the prime locations for charging, such that between the charging tech and locations, everybody is now having to pay them for access...look at SpaceX / Starlink, he is getting himself a monopoly on internet for airlines....
They are not the stated missions of the companies.
Pretty much straight away setting up an AI sister company, and training LLMs, cutting off outside access to data, and now doubling down by setting up a 100k GPU compute cluster, says I have a different motive than (just) I want a free speech social network.
Or, it’s a bit of all seven. He ended up vastly overpaying for Twitter, he then further fucked it up with the rebrand however he hugely reduced costs. He realised it gave him a free speech megaphone with which to influence the world - but also annoy people - not good. And now he’s noticed he can harvest mega data for his Grok AI
He’s an innovator and a twat and an entrepreneur. He makes terrible errors but he learns from those errors and can sometimes turn them to huge advantage
Listening to Shelagh Fogerty on LBC she had a guy called Dan, a Brit from New Jersey, who claims NJ is going red. Previously a woman called Gemma from Britain who voted for Harris in NY says that her friends are all voting Trump. They are suggesting a Trump landslide based on the economy.
William Glenn has called this.
Damn
Just imagine if New Jersey and Virginia went red with Iowa and Kansas blue.
Just hold that thought for one second.
I think more likely is NJ and Virginia are much closer but narrow Harris wins still but Iowa and Kansas are also closer but Iowa goes for Harris and Kansas still goes Trump. So main impact is boost for Trump in popular vote as former 2 are more populous but boost for Harris in EC with Iowa
Listening to Shelagh Fogerty on LBC she had a guy called Dan, a Brit from New Jersey, who claims NJ is going red. Previously a woman called Gemma from Britain who voted for Harris in NY says that her friends are all voting Trump. They are suggesting a Trump landslide based on the economy.
William Glenn and Darkage have called this.
If NY and NJ are in play then it’s a Trump landslide. Can’t see it personally, still think it’s 50/50.
Both sides on Twitter have mostly stopped screaming insults at each other, and are now very clearly working to get out their own vote.
I have a slightly different take on Musk buying twitter. I don't really buy the free speech absolutism, same as the eco-warrior spin on EV cars.
I think he saw a bloated company that never really made any money and thought he could low ball his way into buying it. At worst he gets a company that ticks along, but on the upside, data. Remember he was an early investor in OpenAI, so he is well aware of the power of data, LLMs, etc.
But he screwed up over the amount he paid and then was forced to radical cost cutting. But at the same time, he has got sucked down into the twitter rabbit hole, which made things worse, in terms of keeping advertisers happy. And he is a weird dude, who when criticised he fires from the hip unwisely.
It is worth pointing out, quietly he cut off every bodies elses access to twitter data, formed a spin off and recently set up a 100k GPU cluster....I think that was the original plan all along.
Musk was on Rogan’s podcast yesterday. They spend half the time talking about politics and the other half talking about various forms of technology.
Musk says that he primarily wanted a platform with freedom of speech, he didn’t see why he needed tens of thousands of content censors, hadn’t banked on organised advertising boycotts, admits he way overpaid but that it was worth it for the greater good of humanity!
As I say, I am not totally convinced by that.
Look at every Musk play in the past, there is always another angle. Tesla, he has bought up so many of the prime locations for charging, such that between the charging tech and locations, everybody is now having to pay them for access...look at SpaceX / Starlink, he is getting himself a monopoly on internet for airlines....
They are not the stated missions of the companies.
Pretty much straight away setting up an AI sister company, and training LLMs, cutting off outside access to data, and now doubling down by setting up a 100k GPU compute cluster, says I have a different motive than (just) I want a free speech social network.
Or, it’s a bit of all seven. He ended up vastly overpaying for Twitter, he then further fucked it up with the rebrand however he hugely reduced costs. He realised it gave him a free speech megaphone with which to influence the world - but also annoy people - not good. And now he’s noticed he can harvest mega data for his Grok AI
He’s an innovator and a twat and an entrepreneur. He makes terrible errors but he learns from those errors and can sometimes turn them to huge advantage
He’s not a man to bet against, not lightly
The harvest mega data / cut everybody else off / train LLMs, started from the get-go. They had the first version of Grok LLM out in a year, you don't just train those things overnight.
Farage: "This is the sexy bit: Elon comes in and takes a knife to the [US] deep state. Just like when he bought Twitter he sacked 80 per cent of the staff.
There are going to be mass lay-offs, whole departments closing and I’m hoping and praying that’s the blueprint for what we then do on our side of the pond.
Because that’s what Reform UK believes in - that we’re over-bureaucratised and none of it works. This assault on the bureaucratic state is the thing that’s really exciting."
Really? That's what Reform voters want? 80% of the state slashed and burned.
The Red Wallers he's after???
I very much doubt it.
This is all very fascist obviously, but it’s also notable (to me) that Farage completely glosses over the reality that Musk sacked 80% of Twitter’s staff & as a result triggered an 84% drop in it’s revenue. He simply didn’t understand the product Twitter was selling.
The idea that you can simply hack away 80% of government employees & not end up causing great swathes of harm to people in the real world is for the birds.
Well, that will be the interesting bit if Trump and Musk try to do it - and they may well.
And if they do, that will provide a very high-profile case study for anyone like Farage who tries to do the same (or to advocate that it be done) elsewhere.
Farage: "This is the sexy bit: Elon comes in and takes a knife to the [US] deep state. Just like when he bought Twitter he sacked 80 per cent of the staff.
There are going to be mass lay-offs, whole departments closing and I’m hoping and praying that’s the blueprint for what we then do on our side of the pond.
Because that’s what Reform UK believes in - that we’re over-bureaucratised and none of it works. This assault on the bureaucratic state is the thing that’s really exciting."
Really? That's what Reform voters want? 80% of the state slashed and burned.
The Red Wallers he's after???
I very much doubt it.
Most Reform voters are either small businessmen, in the armed forces or white working class private sector workers. So I doubt they are that bothered about Farage promising to slash the civil service and public sector administrators as long as he doesn't also slash the numbers of police, soldiers and doctors and nurses
This is such an idiotic take because if you cut "public sector administrators" you end up paying doctors and police officers to do admin tasks.
But when you do that, guess what? Less admin is done vs more real work. Most admin is work for work’s sake, expanding to fill the space.
For a real-life case, read Frederic Laloux’s Reinventing Organizations, and the Buurtzorg experience. He has other examples
Admin work is real work. You can have too many administrators, just as you can have too many nurses, but this idea that admin work isn’t real work is just reactionary bullshit.
Someone has to make sure the patients are going to come in at the right times, corral the support staff & do all the tracking that has to happen to make a service work. You can pay a consultant to do that work, compromising their healthcare output in the process. Or you can pay an administrator to do it, leaving the consultants to concentrate on doing the thing we actually pay them to do.
I know which I would prefer.
It’s notable that by comparison with European healthcare services, which generally now get better outcomes than the NHS (IIRC) the NHS has far fewer administrative staff. We need more admins & support staff (IT especially) in order to free up healthcare staff to do the thing we’re actually paying them to do: deliver healthcare.
Farage: "This is the sexy bit: Elon comes in and takes a knife to the [US] deep state. Just like when he bought Twitter he sacked 80 per cent of the staff.
There are going to be mass lay-offs, whole departments closing and I’m hoping and praying that’s the blueprint for what we then do on our side of the pond.
Because that’s what Reform UK believes in - that we’re over-bureaucratised and none of it works. This assault on the bureaucratic state is the thing that’s really exciting."
Really? That's what Reform voters want? 80% of the state slashed and burned.
The Red Wallers he's after???
I very much doubt it.
Most Reform voters are either small businessmen, in the armed forces or white working class private sector workers. So I doubt they are that bothered about Farage promising to slash the civil service and public sector administrators as long as he doesn't also slash the numbers of police, soldiers and doctors and nurses
Trouble is it is common knowledge on the right that the police have gone woke and the NHS is full of paper-pushers, so there is no reason to spare either.
Farage: "This is the sexy bit: Elon comes in and takes a knife to the [US] deep state. Just like when he bought Twitter he sacked 80 per cent of the staff.
There are going to be mass lay-offs, whole departments closing and I’m hoping and praying that’s the blueprint for what we then do on our side of the pond.
Because that’s what Reform UK believes in - that we’re over-bureaucratised and none of it works. This assault on the bureaucratic state is the thing that’s really exciting."
Really? That's what Reform voters want? 80% of the state slashed and burned.
The Red Wallers he's after???
I very much doubt it.
Most Reform voters are either small businessmen, in the armed forces or white working class private sector workers. So I doubt they are that bothered about Farage promising to slash the civil service and public sector administrators as long as he doesn't also slash the numbers of police, soldiers and doctors and nurses
This is such an idiotic take because if you cut "public sector administrators" you end up paying doctors and police officers to do admin tasks.
Farage: "This is the sexy bit: Elon comes in and takes a knife to the [US] deep state. Just like when he bought Twitter he sacked 80 per cent of the staff.
There are going to be mass lay-offs, whole departments closing and I’m hoping and praying that’s the blueprint for what we then do on our side of the pond.
Because that’s what Reform UK believes in - that we’re over-bureaucratised and none of it works. This assault on the bureaucratic state is the thing that’s really exciting."
Really? That's what Reform voters want? 80% of the state slashed and burned.
The Red Wallers he's after???
I very much doubt it.
This is all very fascist obviously, but it’s also notable (to me) that Farage completely glosses over the reality that Musk sacked 80% of Twitter’s staff & as a result triggered an 84% drop in it’s revenue. He simply didn’t understand the product Twitter was selling.
The idea that you can simply hack away 80% of government employees & not end up causing great swathes of harm to people in the real world is for the birds.
All very fascist? I thought they were lovers of bureaucracy and the big state (provided it was putting their policies into action). The one thing they weren't was libertarian individualists like Musk.
Another example of how the word 'fascist' has been debased and become essentially a synonym for 'people I dont' like'. Idiot shorthand for those who can't be bothered to think things through.
Massively cutting the size of the state cannot, by definition, be fascistic because Fascism depends on a large and all-powerful state in order to enforce its fundamentally authoritarian ethos.
And if we extend that logic, trimming the state would be seen as an admirable act of anti-Fascism. But logic is typically lost on the vacuous.
Listening to Shelagh Fogerty on LBC she had a guy called Dan, a Brit from New Jersey, who claims NJ is going red. Previously a woman called Gemma from Britain who voted for Harris in NY says that her friends are all voting Trump. They are suggesting a Trump landslide based on the economy.
William Glenn and Darkage have called this.
If Gemma is from Britain, how did she vote in NY? You'll get very good odds on the likes of New Jersey going Republican. That doesn't mean it's hard to find Trump supporters there.
Sir, I note your insistence that women predominantly vote for KH, and men for DJT. Do you have a source for this pleased based on a survey or some recorded fact?
Latest NBC poll shows Harris winning women 57/41 and Trump winning men 58/40. All the polls are showing a big gender gap
Farage: "This is the sexy bit: Elon comes in and takes a knife to the [US] deep state. Just like when he bought Twitter he sacked 80 per cent of the staff.
There are going to be mass lay-offs, whole departments closing and I’m hoping and praying that’s the blueprint for what we then do on our side of the pond.
Because that’s what Reform UK believes in - that we’re over-bureaucratised and none of it works. This assault on the bureaucratic state is the thing that’s really exciting."
Really? That's what Reform voters want? 80% of the state slashed and burned.
The Red Wallers he's after???
I very much doubt it.
Most Reform voters are either small businessmen, in the armed forces or white working class private sector workers. So I doubt they are that bothered about Farage promising to slash the civil service and public sector administrators as long as he doesn't also slash the numbers of police, soldiers and doctors and nurses
This is such an idiotic take because if you cut "public sector administrators" you end up paying doctors and police officers to do admin tasks.
I doubt most Reform voters care about that either
Only because dishonest politicians will lie to them about the answers being "easy" with no negative side effects.
LBC.I watched James O'Brien on mastermind once. He did not answer all the general knowledge questions correctly. I believed he knew it all. He does not.
Sir, I note your insistence that women predominantly vote for KH, and men for DJT. Do you have a source for this pleased based on a survey or some recorded fact?
Latest NBC poll shows Harris winning women 57/41 and Trump winning men 58/40. All the polls are showing a big gender gap
I have a slightly different take on Musk buying twitter. I don't really buy the free speech absolutism, same as the eco-warrior spin on EV cars.
I think he saw a bloated company that never really made any money and thought he could low ball his way into buying it. At worst he gets a company that ticks along, but on the upside, data. Remember he was an early investor in OpenAI, so he is well aware of the power of data, LLMs, etc.
But he screwed up over the amount he paid and then was forced to radical cost cutting. But at the same time, he has got sucked down into the twitter rabbit hole, which made things worse, in terms of keeping advertisers happy. And he is a weird dude, who when criticised he fires from the hip unwisely.
It is worth pointing out, quietly he cut off every bodies elses access to twitter data, formed a spin off and recently set up a 100k GPU cluster....I think that was the original plan all along.
Musk was on Rogan’s podcast yesterday. They spend half the time talking about politics and the other half talking about various forms of technology.
Musk says that he primarily wanted a platform with freedom of speech, he didn’t see why he needed tens of thousands of content censors, hadn’t banked on organised advertising boycotts, admits he way overpaid but that it was worth it for the greater good of humanity!
If he doesn't understand the need for content censors he's not running it for the greater good of humanity...
He didn’t see the need for tens of thousands of them proactively deleting posts and banning people, no. Twitter’s staff numbers had doubled during the pandemic.
That's the problem with running a social media network - you need to employ a lot of people to moderate what dubious people want to post..
The trouble is how to do that without doing it in a politically-biased way, as pre-Musk Twitter did.
Listening to Shelagh Fogerty on LBC she had a guy called Dan, a Brit from New Jersey, who claims NJ is going red. Previously a woman called Gemma from Britain who voted for Harris in NY says that her friends are all voting Trump. They are suggesting a Trump landslide based on the economy.
William Glenn has called this.
Damn
Just imagine if New Jersey and Virginia went red with Iowa and Kansas blue.
Just hold that thought for one second.
I think more likely is NJ and Virginia are much closer but narrow Harris wins still but Iowa and Kansas are also closer but Iowa goes for Harris and Kansas still goes Trump. So main impact is boost for Trump in popular vote as former 2 are more populous but boost for Harris in EC with Iowa
Based on early votes and mail ins Democrats ahead 59% to 21% for GOP in NJ and 50% to 38% for the GOP in Virginia.
Dems tied 39% each with GOP in Iowa but GOP ahead in Kansas 52% to 33%.
Republicans also ahead on early votes in Nevada, Arizona, Georgia and by 1% in NC. Democrats ahead on early votes in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin with Michigan tied.
Though the Research Michigan poll had fewer 2020 Biden voters voting Trump than 2020 Trump voters voting Harris with Harris leading with Independents in Michigan (whereas in Pennsylvania more 2020 Biden voters are voting Trump than 2020 Trump voters voting Harris albeit Harris still had a 1% lead there overall)
The turnout in US Presidential elections hasn't been above 70% since 1900 (73.7%). The highest turnout was 82.6% in 1876. The turnout last time was the highest since 1900 at 66.6%
I don't see any bets on turnout percentage, but if it's up on last time then the bets on a high vote tally for both candidates look pretty good. Harris is 4/7 to receive 80+ million votes, and Trump is 4/6.
Last time Biden received 81 million votes and Trump 74 million. Do your own research...
Haven't been on ChatGPT for about a year, so I thought I'd see if they've improved their factual information replies.
They haven't.
My question: "How many votes did the Conservatives poll in the Huntingdon constituency at the 1983 general election?"
Answer: "In the 1983 UK general election, the Conservative Party candidate in the Huntingdon constituency, John Major, received 32,833 votes, winning with 54.2% of the vote. This was a strong performance in a safe Conservative seat, marking the beginning of a prominent political career for Major, who would later become Prime Minister."
In fact he polled 34,254 votes at that election.
Claude 3.6’s answer:
“Since this is a very specific historical electoral statistic from a single constituency, I should note that while I try to be accurate, I may hallucinate specific numbers like this. The Conservatives won Huntingdon in 1983 (with John Major as their candidate), but I don't want to state a specific vote total without being completely certain of the figure. I'd recommend checking official electoral records or the BBC's historical election database for the exact number.”
Admirable self-awareness
Stop talking about AI, you know the rules.
PB will be left sadly uneducated, but fair enough in this instance
Here’s a photo of Gyeong-ju
I love and hate Korea all at the same time. It has really annoying rules - no booze without food! - enforced by quite odd people, but at the right moment it enchants. It is, in other words, PB turned into a nation, with a similarly ageing population
The no booze without food thing does get really old very quickly, in Korea
Also it’s near impossible to buy Tabasco in central Seoul
These tiny things begin to grate
What's the point in being rich if you can't order both - then not touch the food?
I’ve found a really cool little Taiwanese sort-of izakaya and I’m having Taiwanese food ordered from a special ipad and using my iPhone to translate with photos
It’s all tremendous fun and Korea is brilliant
Never been yet. It's on the list.
Although it look like Mauritania first...
Be careful. It is one of the dodgier places in North Africa to travel to. A few friends have worked there and do not have a good opinion of the place.
Why is that? Know nothing about the place
Its a poor country where Islamic extremists are rife. Western contractors heading to the rigs were/are taken to the hotels and told to stay in their rooms with the lights off as Extremists drive up and down outside the hotels at night looking for occupied rooms so they can kidnap foreigners. The nearest consular help is in Senegal and the same applies to hospital treatment (if you want to survive).
Farage: "This is the sexy bit: Elon comes in and takes a knife to the [US] deep state. Just like when he bought Twitter he sacked 80 per cent of the staff.
There are going to be mass lay-offs, whole departments closing and I’m hoping and praying that’s the blueprint for what we then do on our side of the pond.
Because that’s what Reform UK believes in - that we’re over-bureaucratised and none of it works. This assault on the bureaucratic state is the thing that’s really exciting."
Really? That's what Reform voters want? 80% of the state slashed and burned.
The Red Wallers he's after???
I very much doubt it.
This is all very fascist obviously, but it’s also notable (to me) that Farage completely glosses over the reality that Musk sacked 80% of Twitter’s staff & as a result triggered an 84% drop in it’s revenue. He simply didn’t understand the product Twitter was selling.
The idea that you can simply hack away 80% of government employees & not end up causing great swathes of harm to people in the real world is for the birds.
Well, that will be the interesting bit if Trump and Musk try to do it - and they may well.
And if they do, that will provide a very high-profile case study for anyone like Farage who tries to do the same (or to advocate that it be done) elsewhere.
I’d suggest that the British State is considerably more efficient than the American Federal government, which currently has a budget north of $6trn despite a lot of devolution. So much of the US is in hock to vested interests and lobbyists, in a way that isn’t the case almost anywhere else. See discussions about American healthcare ad nauseam on here.
Farage: "This is the sexy bit: Elon comes in and takes a knife to the [US] deep state. Just like when he bought Twitter he sacked 80 per cent of the staff.
There are going to be mass lay-offs, whole departments closing and I’m hoping and praying that’s the blueprint for what we then do on our side of the pond.
Because that’s what Reform UK believes in - that we’re over-bureaucratised and none of it works. This assault on the bureaucratic state is the thing that’s really exciting."
Really? That's what Reform voters want? 80% of the state slashed and burned.
The Red Wallers he's after???
I very much doubt it.
Most Reform voters are either small businessmen, in the armed forces or white working class private sector workers. So I doubt they are that bothered about Farage promising to slash the civil service and public sector administrators as long as he doesn't also slash the numbers of police, soldiers and doctors and nurses
This is such an idiotic take because if you cut "public sector administrators" you end up paying doctors and police officers to do admin tasks.
But when you do that, guess what? Less admin is done vs more real work. Most admin is work for work’s sake, expanding to fill the space.
That's just not true at all. Management consultancy bollocks.
Nope - at CitiGroup, for example, pre 2008 they had floors of people who went to meetings to write PowerPoints to present at other meetings to….
In 2008, a manager was shouting, can anyone tell me out exposure to Lehmans ? Literally. One bloke put his hand up - a contractor from my company. The rest knew nothing..
After 2008, they were firing by the floor…
All organisations go through this. They accumulate bullshit like dust.
Farage: "This is the sexy bit: Elon comes in and takes a knife to the [US] deep state. Just like when he bought Twitter he sacked 80 per cent of the staff.
There are going to be mass lay-offs, whole departments closing and I’m hoping and praying that’s the blueprint for what we then do on our side of the pond.
Because that’s what Reform UK believes in - that we’re over-bureaucratised and none of it works. This assault on the bureaucratic state is the thing that’s really exciting."
Really? That's what Reform voters want? 80% of the state slashed and burned.
The Red Wallers he's after???
I very much doubt it.
Most Reform voters are either small businessmen, in the armed forces or white working class private sector workers. So I doubt they are that bothered about Farage promising to slash the civil service and public sector administrators as long as he doesn't also slash the numbers of police, soldiers and doctors and nurses
This is such an idiotic take because if you cut "public sector administrators" you end up paying doctors and police officers to do admin tasks.
Comments
Dems voting more than Republicans in Pennsylvania, at least on early votes on those charts
https://projects.votehub.com/pages/early-voting-tracker
The critical re-evaluation from Spiked can't be far away, surely?
But the problems are that people use them poorly, and often in areas outside those narrow areas. Because they're trendy. And also because there's a heck of a lot of money being invested in the area, and the hype train is running as people want their money back.
As ever, be cautious about hype. Sometimes hype is justified; most of the time... it isn't.
All tech companies massively over hired during COVID and had to cut back.
Musk paid far too much for twitter, then a valid criticism is he overdid the cuts and also his behaviour has scared off advertisers. But the fundamentals of twitter haven't changed, very poor tech on the backend (lots of people Musk called in looked at the code and went WTF, this is a shit show, total rewrite required, and Musk said no can't do it) and no idea who their users are.
Dixville Notch, NH has declared Harris 3, Trump 3.
It was 5-0 Biden and 4-2 Hilary.
https://joeisdone.github.io/florida/
(see about 3/4 of the way down this entertaining rant on the “Growth Mindset” cult thinking that has taken over Microsoft management: https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-cult-of-microsoft/ )
You can't ask for sources. That's the whole problem.
I think he saw a bloated company that never really made any money and thought he could low ball his way into buying it. At worst he gets a company that ticks along, but on the upside, data. Remember he was an early investor in OpenAI, so he is well aware of the power of data, LLMs, etc.
But he screwed up over the amount he paid and then was forced to radical cost cutting. But at the same time, he has got sucked down into the twitter rabbit hole, which made things worse, in terms of keeping advertisers happy. And he is a weird dude, who when criticised he fires from the hip unwisely.
It is worth pointing out, quietly he cut off every bodies elses access to twitter data, formed a spin off and recently set up a 100k GPU cluster....I think that was the original plan all along.
Gil's old dad first black player for Celtic.
For a real-life case, read Frederic Laloux’s Reinventing Organizations, and the Buurtzorg experience. He has other examples
The next day I saw the same faces, and the waiting room was just as busy, but the staff were far, far busier, with them bustling around doing stuff.
I think many jobs are like that: periods of inaction then loads of stuff going on.
That’s a trust that’s hard to regain once lost.
That is why Meta can have scandals and people still end up on wanting / needing to advertise on Facebook and Instagram. Their knowledge of users and their tech is just way better.
Musk says that he primarily wanted a platform with freedom of speech, he didn’t see why he needed tens of thousands of content censors, hadn’t banked on organised advertising boycotts, admits he way overpaid but that it was worth it for the greater good of humanity!
"Cut administration" is one thing, but it's involved and difficult - you have to carry out a process analysis and determine what is necessary administration, beneficial-but-not-essential administration, and unnecessary administration, and then determine the efficiency/inefficiency level and how to get rid of the unnecessary admin and how to streamline and make more efficient the necessary and beneficial admin. Which requires a lot of specific knowledge and is challenging.
"Cut administrators" is something else entirely, is very popular as a quick and easy soundbite where all you need to do is find out the raw numbers involved, lament the number, and propose slashing them. Without affecting the actual amount or efficiency of the administration itself.
Doing the former is very welcome, but very rarely is even attempted.
Doing the latter is often thrown forwards and invariably results in reduced efficiency and overall output because you have highly paid specialists in their actual field of work being required to spend ever-increasing proportions of their time inexpertly attempting the administration (which is still un-streamlined and probably ever more inefficient) rather than doing their actual jobs.
“Since this is a very specific historical electoral statistic from a single constituency, I should note that while I try to be accurate, I may hallucinate specific numbers like this. The Conservatives won Huntingdon in 1983 (with John Major as their candidate), but I don't want to state a specific vote total without being completely certain of the figure. I'd recommend checking official electoral records or the BBC's historical election database for the exact number.”
Admirable self-awareness
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WhqokQ-BEpA
Look at every Musk play in the past, there is always another angle. Tesla, he has bought up so many of the prime locations for charging, such that between the charging tech and locations, everybody is now having to pay them for access...look at SpaceX / Starlink, he is getting himself a monopoly on internet for airlines.... And he got the government to basically provide a big chunk of capital in loans and subsides, for these endeavours.
They are not the stated missions of the companies.
Pretty much straight away setting up an AI sister company, and training LLMs, cutting off outside access to data, and now doubling down by setting up a 100k GPU compute cluster, says I have a different motive than (just) I want a free speech social network.
Whether other police forces are using the software is a different question but the work Node 4 did was designed to allow police officers to do all the paperwork there and then as quickly as possible.
I was impressed by your analyses and have added them and you to a backstage discussion. If you want to add further data or argue perhaps there will be good and I'll write it up for the team later.
Which is why it's incumbent on the mainstream parties to actually bother with some political education about how the public sector *does* work, and why (for example) medical administrators are necessary.
William Glenn and Darkage have called this.
What's interesting at the moment is that having removed the content censors he's now removing the methods by which readers can restrict what they see with his half baked changes to account blocking..
From: @viewcode
Sir, I note your insistence that women predominantly vote for KH, and men for DJT. Do you have a source for this pleased based on a survey or some recorded fact?
Oh I'm dead against Eurgenics. Or indeed, as I said, any form of forced intervention. I feel exactly the same way about poverty and inequal starts in life and all manner of other things.
And this is, fundamentally, what the Left just don't get about us LIbertarians: We are capable of noticing things and analysing stuff without jumping to the conclusion that they must be 'fixed', and that said fixing should be done by an all-powerful state.
Just hold that thought for one second.
But the solution is to remove the excess process or change it to a more efficient/automated pathway and then consider whether you can reduce the admin head count.
Simply firing administrators but not changing the processes means, as you said, that people who should be doing the other jobs end up doing the admin. Badly.
Taking the NHS, because there's neither a single IT system nor a sensible way of systems talking to each other, administrators write up notes and email them (or post) to the GP and then another administrator then enters the information on the primary care record. You could save a lot of admin time with systems that can talk to each other and send and receive updates automatically (as well as reducing the scope for error and delay).
Another example would be trying to book or change appointments - you call someone up who sits in front of some kind of online calendar/booking system and translates your voice commands into making a booking on that system. For most people it would be a hell of a lot more efficient to be able to do that online themselves (there could be a generic telephone booking service for those less able to use an online system).
He’s an innovator and a twat and an entrepreneur. He makes terrible errors but he learns from those errors and can sometimes turn them to huge advantage
He’s not a man to bet against, not lightly
Both sides on Twitter have mostly stopped screaming insults at each other, and are now very clearly working to get out their own vote.
when you accidentally write the most pro-Kamala tweet of the election
https://x.com/MikeDrucker/status/1853792800006910221
And if they do, that will provide a very high-profile case study for anyone like Farage who tries to do the same (or to advocate that it be done) elsewhere.
Someone has to make sure the patients are going to come in at the right times, corral the support staff & do all the tracking that has to happen to make a service work. You can pay a consultant to do that work, compromising their healthcare output in the process. Or you can pay an administrator to do it, leaving the consultants to concentrate on doing the thing we actually pay them to do.
I know which I would prefer.
It’s notable that by comparison with European healthcare services, which generally now get better outcomes than the NHS (IIRC) the NHS has far fewer administrative staff. We need more admins & support staff (IT especially) in order to free up healthcare staff to do the thing we’re actually paying them to do: deliver healthcare.
Another example of how the word 'fascist' has been debased and become essentially a synonym for 'people I dont' like'. Idiot shorthand for those who can't be bothered to think things through.
Massively cutting the size of the state cannot, by definition, be fascistic because Fascism depends on a large and all-powerful state in order to enforce its fundamentally authoritarian ethos.
And if we extend that logic, trimming the state would be seen as an admirable act of anti-Fascism. But logic is typically lost on the vacuous.
You'll get very good odds on the likes of New Jersey going Republican. That doesn't mean it's hard to find Trump supporters there.
I have cautiously placed the emergency champagne in the refrigerator.
https://x.com/GayLaVie/status/1853783816743145595
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c1dpeyqk4x4o
Chris Webb MP, Labour, Blackpool South.
Dems tied 39% each with GOP in Iowa but GOP ahead in Kansas 52% to 33%.
Republicans also ahead on early votes in Nevada, Arizona, Georgia and by 1% in NC. Democrats ahead on early votes in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin with Michigan tied.
Though the Research Michigan poll had fewer 2020 Biden voters voting Trump than 2020 Trump voters voting Harris with Harris leading with Independents in Michigan (whereas in Pennsylvania more 2020 Biden voters are voting Trump than 2020 Trump voters voting Harris albeit Harris still had a 1% lead there overall)
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-elections/early-vote
https://researchco.ca/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/Tables_USStates_04Nov2024.pdf
I don't see any bets on turnout percentage, but if it's up on last time then the bets on a high vote tally for both candidates look pretty good. Harris is 4/7 to receive 80+ million votes, and Trump is 4/6.
Last time Biden received 81 million votes and Trump 74 million. Do your own research...
Here’s a photo of Gyeong-ju
I love and hate Korea all at the same time. It has really annoying rules - no booze without food! - enforced by quite odd people, but at the right moment it enchants. It is, in other words, PB turned into a nation, with a similarly ageing population
In 2008, a manager was shouting, can anyone tell me out exposure to Lehmans ? Literally. One bloke put his hand up - a contractor from my company. The rest knew nothing..
After 2008, they were firing by the floor…
All organisations go through this. They accumulate bullshit like dust.
On 19 October the Telegraph described him as ceo of a $500m startup.
(But it’s all paper money anyway)