He's a greedy, pompous, lying, charmless, grifting, humourless, entitled, dismal, Woketastic anti-charisma machine, with weird little eyes and a stupid pursed mouth of disapproval, and he can't think of a Christmas movie he likes. He's Loathsome
The speed limit in Birmingham could be cut to 20mph under plans which would make it easier for any local authority across the country to impose lower limits in built-up areas.
Eventually all councils will fund themselves from speeding fines.
Perhaps they should buy out the private parking companies too to go with their own parking enforcement,
The speed limit in Birmingham could be cut to 20mph under plans which would make it easier for any local authority across the country to impose lower limits in built-up areas.
A proposal to turn the whole city, with a population of 1.1 million, into a 20mph zone will be considered by Birmingham city council on Tuesday.
Just the usual displacement activity. The main cause behind road deaths is crap driving, but no government has the balls to actually do something about that.
Sure, because one is objective and requires simple proof of a fact, the other is subjective and actually requires a case to be proven.
What if they really DO have a coup and no one believes it happened?
We can’t know until tomorrow. But the thing to watch is the reactions of countries with embassies/consulates in place and/or aid workers out there in numbers.
Can’t remember off hand if we or the rest of the west still have diplomatic relations.
If there really is a coup taking place by now we'd be seeing a flood of images and videos from locals in Damascus. We are not
My guess is there has perhaps been some sporadic gunfire from rebels in the city (because rebels clearly ARE on the march elsewhere in Syria) and they're trying to spook and roil the regime while Assad is away, by making it out to be much bigger
Assad does look imperilled, however
Weren't there reports he is in Moscow currently?
Apparently landed in Damascus several hours ago...
Ah ok thanks, I'm just catching up. Have rather selfishly been focused on living my life today.
Call yourself a PBer? There is no such thing as "life"
I dunno. We once had a poster called @SeanT who had about twelve of them.
I think he retired, having made his millions as an early investor in What3Words.
I heard he retired because he correctly predicted the pandemic about a month before everyone else. But the past is shrouded in myth
No, that was someone called eadric, as I recall
Just for the record, so that I can claim this one over @Leon - the US outbreak of avian flu now spreading widely to milking cows and some pigs is gonna be a bastard human pandemic in a year or so's time.
Yes. That virus is busy mutating and edging closer to fully making the transition to a human flu.
We are pretty good at flu vaccination. Prior to 2020 there was no corona virus vaccines in existence. I wouldnt worry. I’d wait until Feigel dingbat starts shrieking.
He's a greedy, pompous, lying, charmless, grifting, humourless, entitled, dismal, Woketastic anti-charisma machine, with weird little eyes and a stupid pursed mouth of disapproval, and he can't think of a Christmas movie he likes. He's Loathsome
I don't think he can turn this around, TBH
He's OK; but he is no good at hopey changey; maybe no-one can turn it around for now. If anyone has decent and doable ideas they are keeping quiet. There is only one other party of government and IIRC they weren't very effective in various ways right up to about July this year.
What he should do (perhaps now is too late) is basically from 5th July: "Your glass was half empty and getting emptier; it is now half full and getting fuller. And this is what 'full' looks like, and this is how we are going to get there". And he should still, every day, be explaining the enterprise and pointing out the signposts and mile stones and how marvellous we all are.....
They do not understand how bad the boats thing is. They don't get it, on the necessary visceral level. For them the sight of an asylum seeker in a Marriott Hotel with private healthcare is probably a warming moment, a Britain that cares! They surely strive to see it from the perspective of a Briton stuck in an NHS queue in a dying town, but they cannot manage it: they do not have the empathy
This shit is going to kill them, they lack Theory of Mind. It will quite possibly put Farage in Downing Street
However, despite having lower approvals than Badenoch, Starmer is still seen as making the best Prime Minister compared to Kemi Badenoch. He has a 5% lead.
The most-picked option is “none of these”, at 39%.
Badenoch has a gravitas problem which will make it hard for her to hold the line against Reform. It's as if it doesn't matter very much what she thinks about anything.
I think it's more about policies - Jenrick's plan was to outflank Reform (ECHR, deportations that Farage had declared impossible). Badenoch decided to be very vague, and as a consequence she's now playing catch up. She needs to find a very good set of policies that are very eye-catching, quite distinct from Reform (perhaps too technical for Reform to be trusted to deliver?? - though I don't think the Tories have a massive edge on perceived professionalism over Reform any more), but credibly right wing.
Some areas to consider - go lower on tax than Reform. Go bigger on cuts than Reform. Adopt a more radical, clever and technically fleshed out approach to NHS reform than, um Reform. Rural - go for policies popular in the Shires. Tories will have to be the party of nimbyism. Pick some eye-catching infrastructure projects to back and get behind - potentially identify enough savings to complete HS2 as far as Crewe and Euston (though Euston will probably happen anyway). I don't actually agree with all these policies, but I think they might give the Tories a little breathing space from Reform.
Which cuts? What exactly should the Tories propose cutting that will be popular?
However, despite having lower approvals than Badenoch, Starmer is still seen as making the best Prime Minister compared to Kemi Badenoch. He has a 5% lead.
The most-picked option is “none of these”, at 39%.
Not really
It was not on my feed but 5% lead is hardly something to shout about
It's literally in the Twitter thread you quoted.
I didn't notice it but it is hardly something for Starmer to be proud of v a new young conservative leader yet to make her mark
But at this stage, it really really really doesn't matter.
What would the Blessed Margaret have said to MPs worrying about poll ratings when no election was in sight? (Because, whatever the petition pushers would have you think, there isn't one.)
She would have sent them away with a flea in their ear.
The Conservatives were behind Labour in every poll for 21 months following the 1979 GE.
Yes, but there was a substantial, minority of course, body of people - on the centre right/right in the voting public who could see that there was a project, and it was an interesting one, and that it could be articulated, and that, contrary to reason, it was going somewhere. I was one of them. Other PBers I am sure were too.
The difference now is that that group of informed opinion is in turmoil. Read the New Statesman, the house journal of the social democrat centre left (someone has to). It is full of writers, mostly worthy and dull, who are utterly devoid of ideas and hope and have no great thoughts about where we are going let alone how we are going to get there.
He's a greedy, pompous, lying, charmless, grifting, humourless, entitled, dismal, Woketastic anti-charisma machine, with weird little eyes and a stupid pursed mouth of disapproval, and he can't think of a Christmas movie he likes. He's Loathsome
I don't think he can turn this around, TBH
He's OK; but he is no good at hopey changey; maybe no-one can turn it around for now. If anyone has decent and doable ideas they are keeping quiet. There is only one other party of government and IIRC they weren't very effective in various ways right up to about July this year.
What he should do (perhaps now is too late) is basically from 5th July: "Your glass was half empty and getting emptier; it is now half full and getting fuller. And this is what 'full' looks like, and this is how we are going to get there". And he should still, every day, be explaining the enterprise and pointing out the signposts and mile stones and how marvellous we all are.....
They do not understand how bad the boats thing is. They don't get it, on a visceral level. For them the sight of an asylum seeker in a Marriot Hotel with private healthcare is probably a warming moment, a Britain that care!. They surely strive to see it from the perspective of a Briton stuck in an NHS queue in a dying town, but they cannot manage it, they do not have the empathy
This shit is going to kill them, they lack Theory of Mind. It will quite possibly put Farage in Downing Street
No one cares about the boats apart from you and the Daily Mail.
The speed limit in Birmingham could be cut to 20mph under plans which would make it easier for any local authority across the country to impose lower limits in built-up areas.
A proposal to turn the whole city, with a population of 1.1 million, into a 20mph zone will be considered by Birmingham city council on Tuesday.
Crucially, the Labour-controlled council has asked the Department for Transport (DfT) for permission to erect signs at the city boundary, rather than spend millions of pounds on endless signs showing the 20mph limit on every single street.
In many cities, the 20mph limit is only in place where there is a sign. On some roads in London, there can be several signs in the space of just 100 metres, which is expensive for the council and an eyesore for residents.
Since 1935, Britain has had a 30mph speed limit in built-up areas, imposed in response to a death toll of 7,343 in the previous year on the roads, at a time when there was only a tenth as much traffic as today. By comparison, there were 1,645 road deaths last year, according to the DfT.
It's taken longer than many (including me) predicted, but the prediction IS now coming true
When have I ever said "they would never happen"? Indeed, I hoped (and hope) they will happen, as it would be rather neat for me.
But these geofenced robotaxis are rather limited compared to what you were claiming.
Well over ten years have passed, and lorry drivers still exist. In fact, there's no indication they're going away.
You were wrong. Own it.
I wasn't wrong, but nor were you. We were both half right. Self driving came later than I predicted and earlier than you did.
However, where I was entirely right is in machine translation, which -IIRC - you said was basically impossible for machines to truly master. lol
We now have translators which are literal Babel fish except arguably better
IIRC, you stated that in ten years, there would be no lorry drivers. You compounded that by saying that it was pointless training to be a lorry driver, as the jobs would go. Those 'predictions' were well over ten years ago.
And again, show where I said translation was 'basically impossible for machines to truly master'. Go on. Because I'm pretty sure I did not.
Yeah you did you stupid twat
Welsh: "Ie, wnest ti, ti'n dwp twp." Armenian: "Այո, արեցիր, հիմար ապուշ." (Ayo, arecir, himar apush.) Georgian: "ჰო, გააკეთე, შენ სულელი დებილი." (Ho, gaakete, shen suleli debili.) Mandarin: "是的，你做了，你这个蠢蛋。" (Shì de, nǐ zuò le, nǐ zhège chǔn dàn.) Hebrew: "כן, עשית את זה, טיפש מטומטם." (Ken, asita et ze, tipesh metumtam.)
How do you know that those are accurate? Though Ydoethur can help with No. 1.
However, despite having lower approvals than Badenoch, Starmer is still seen as making the best Prime Minister compared to Kemi Badenoch. He has a 5% lead.
The most-picked option is “none of these”, at 39%.
Badenoch has a gravitas problem which will make it hard for her to hold the line against Reform. It's as if it doesn't matter very much what she thinks about anything.
I have heard from a few focus groups that the most common adjective to be used about Badenoch is lightweight/insubstantial.
Oddly, there's a bit of warmth towards her for being the first black woman leader of a major GB party.
Presumably, she gets a bit of warmth from the male voter, coz she is..... quite hot
However, despite having lower approvals than Badenoch, Starmer is still seen as making the best Prime Minister compared to Kemi Badenoch. He has a 5% lead.
The most-picked option is “none of these”, at 39%.
Badenoch has a gravitas problem which will make it hard for her to hold the line against Reform. It's as if it doesn't matter very much what she thinks about anything.
I have heard from a few focus groups that the most common adjective to be used about Badenoch is lightweight/insubstantial.
Oddly, there's a bit of warmth towards her for being the first black woman leader of a major GB party.
Presumably, she gets a bit of warmth from the male voter, coz she is..... quite hot
A mate of mine is keen. He has a thing for women with gaps in their front teeth. Takes all sorts I guess.
However, despite having lower approvals than Badenoch, Starmer is still seen as making the best Prime Minister compared to Kemi Badenoch. He has a 5% lead.
The most-picked option is “none of these”, at 39%.
Badenoch has a gravitas problem which will make it hard for her to hold the line against Reform. It's as if it doesn't matter very much what she thinks about anything.
I have heard from a few focus groups that the most common adjective to be used about Badenoch is lightweight/insubstantial.
Oddly, there's a bit of warmth towards her for being the first black woman leader of a major GB party.
Presumably, she gets a bit of warmth from the male voter, coz she is..... quite hot
It's taken longer than many (including me) predicted, but the prediction IS now coming true
When have I ever said "they would never happen"? Indeed, I hoped (and hope) they will happen, as it would be rather neat for me.
But these geofenced robotaxis are rather limited compared to what you were claiming.
Well over ten years have passed, and lorry drivers still exist. In fact, there's no indication they're going away.
You were wrong. Own it.
I wasn't wrong, but nor were you. We were both half right. Self driving came later than I predicted and earlier than you did.
However, where I was entirely right is in machine translation, which -IIRC - you said was basically impossible for machines to truly master. lol
We now have translators which are literal Babel fish except arguably better
IIRC, you stated that in ten years, there would be no lorry drivers. You compounded that by saying that it was pointless training to be a lorry driver, as the jobs would go. Those 'predictions' were well over ten years ago.
And again, show where I said translation was 'basically impossible for machines to truly master'. Go on. Because I'm pretty sure I did not.
Yeah you did you stupid twat
Welsh: "Ie, wnest ti, ti'n dwp twp." Armenian: "Այո, արեցիր, հիմար ապուշ." (Ayo, arecir, himar apush.) Georgian: "ჰო, გააკეთე, შენ სულელი დებილი." (Ho, gaakete, shen suleli debili.) Mandarin: "是的，你做了，你这个蠢蛋。" (Shì de, nǐ zuò le, nǐ zhège chǔn dàn.) Hebrew: "כן, עשית את זה, טיפש מטומטם." (Ken, asita et ze, tipesh metumtam.)
How do you know that those are accurate? Though Ydoethur can help with No. 1.
Energy provider Electricity North West (ENW) has said its engineers were “left speechless” after discovering that a telecoms operator in the Lancashire (England) town of Burnley had erected a steel mast “just one metre away” from 132,000-volt overhead electricity lines. “One wrong move could have resulted in a death,” said ENW.
The “potentially fatal” situation in Burnley is said to have been discovered on Wednesday by ENW’s “tree cutting teams“, who were carrying out maintenance in the area. The team reported the situation immediately, and engineers attended the Kiddrow Lane site and quickly made the decision to switch out and earth the circuit for safety reasons. No customers were without power as a result.
You’d think that even the most basic understanding of science and electricity, the sort children tend to learn at the youngest of ages and that we all carry through our lives, would have avoided such a Darwin Awards level error of safety competence. But clearly, in this case, something has gone shockingly wrong, and we can all thank our lucky sparks stars that no lives were lost. This is about as dangerous as you can get.
This sort of 'elf n safety nonsense is what is holding this country back. 132,000 volts is just a wee zap.
As a Northerner growing up as a kid in the 1980s before assembly every morning we were zapped with 264,000 volts.
Kids these days...
You 80s public school kids. In our day we didn't even have these newfangled metric 'volts'. I didn't vote for Brexit to have to keep using these EUolts to torture children.
It might be named for a foreigner, but it's as Northerner (or, for me, North Southerner) as a SI unit can get. Named by two Brits and defined by the British Association for the Advancement of Science a century and a half ago. At a meeting in Manc no less, if the printed report is to be trusted.
It's taken longer than many (including me) predicted, but the prediction IS now coming true
When have I ever said "they would never happen"? Indeed, I hoped (and hope) they will happen, as it would be rather neat for me.
But these geofenced robotaxis are rather limited compared to what you were claiming.
Well over ten years have passed, and lorry drivers still exist. In fact, there's no indication they're going away.
You were wrong. Own it.
I wasn't wrong, but nor were you. We were both half right. Self driving came later than I predicted and earlier than you did.
However, where I was entirely right is in machine translation, which -IIRC - you said was basically impossible for machines to truly master. lol
We now have translators which are literal Babel fish except arguably better
IIRC, you stated that in ten years, there would be no lorry drivers. You compounded that by saying that it was pointless training to be a lorry driver, as the jobs would go. Those 'predictions' were well over ten years ago.
And again, show where I said translation was 'basically impossible for machines to truly master'. Go on. Because I'm pretty sure I did not.
Yeah you did you stupid twat
Welsh: "Ie, wnest ti, ti'n dwp twp." Armenian: "Այո, արեցիր, հիմար ապուշ." (Ayo, arecir, himar apush.) Georgian: "ჰო, გააკეთე, შენ სულელი დებილი." (Ho, gaakete, shen suleli debili.) Mandarin: "是的，你做了，你这个蠢蛋。" (Shì de, nǐ zuò le, nǐ zhège chǔn dàn.) Hebrew: "כן, עשית את זה, טיפש מטומטם." (Ken, asita et ze, tipesh metumtam.)
How do you know that those are accurate? Though Ydoethur can help with No. 1.
However, despite having lower approvals than Badenoch, Starmer is still seen as making the best Prime Minister compared to Kemi Badenoch. He has a 5% lead.
The most-picked option is “none of these”, at 39%.
Badenoch has a gravitas problem which will make it hard for her to hold the line against Reform. It's as if it doesn't matter very much what she thinks about anything.
I think it's more about policies - Jenrick's plan was to outflank Reform (ECHR, deportations that Farage had declared impossible). Badenoch decided to be very vague, and as a consequence she's now playing catch up. She needs to find a very good set of policies that are very eye-catching, quite distinct from Reform (perhaps too technical for Reform to be trusted to deliver?? - though I don't think the Tories have a massive edge on perceived professionalism over Reform any more), but credibly right wing.
Some areas to consider - go lower on tax than Reform. Go bigger on cuts than Reform. Adopt a more radical, clever and technically fleshed out approach to NHS reform than, um Reform. Rural - go for policies popular in the Shires. Tories will have to be the party of nimbyism. Pick some eye-catching infrastructure projects to back and get behind - potentially identify enough savings to complete HS2 as far as Crewe and Euston (though Euston will probably happen anyway). I don't actually agree with all these policies, but I think they might give the Tories a little breathing space from Reform.
No. Reform's job is to present palpably untrue falsely costed nonsense as policy. The Tories tried that, especially under Truss. It didn't work and it can't. Toryism is a party of potential government not populist protest.
Badenoch's job is to spend time being serious, and work on political philosophy, political principle and policy so that, for a change, they start having something interesting to say, and clarity of direction.
However, despite having lower approvals than Badenoch, Starmer is still seen as making the best Prime Minister compared to Kemi Badenoch. He has a 5% lead.
The most-picked option is “none of these”, at 39%.
Badenoch has a gravitas problem which will make it hard for her to hold the line against Reform. It's as if it doesn't matter very much what she thinks about anything.
I have heard from a few focus groups that the most common adjective to be used about Badenoch is lightweight/insubstantial.
Oddly, there's a bit of warmth towards her for being the first black woman leader of a major GB party.
Presumably, she gets a bit of warmth from the male voter, coz she is..... quite hot
A mate of mine is keen. He has a thing for women with gaps in their front teeth. Takes all sorts I guess.
I genuinely fancy her. I have a lust for pretty, smart women who look a bit nerdy. And indeed the gappy teeth thingy is fine by me. A pleasing quirk
It's a shame Starmer has suddenly got fat, old and creepy, because about five years ago he was quite notably handsome
In a world where Britain has little to boast about, we could have had the most attractive "governing party and opposition leaders" in the world. I mean, yeah OK, Canada has Justin (who is very good looking), and France has Macron (pretty boy), but they don't face attractive opponents
Oh well. It's a bit like us missing out on the whole electric vehicle revolution. Close, but no Cohiba
The speed limit in Birmingham could be cut to 20mph under plans which would make it easier for any local authority across the country to impose lower limits in built-up areas.
A proposal to turn the whole city, with a population of 1.1 million, into a 20mph zone will be considered by Birmingham city council on Tuesday.
Crucially, the Labour-controlled council has asked the Department for Transport (DfT) for permission to erect signs at the city boundary, rather than spend millions of pounds on endless signs showing the 20mph limit on every single street.
In many cities, the 20mph limit is only in place where there is a sign. On some roads in London, there can be several signs in the space of just 100 metres, which is expensive for the council and an eyesore for residents.
Since 1935, Britain has had a 30mph speed limit in built-up areas, imposed in response to a death toll of 7,343 in the previous year on the roads, at a time when there was only a tenth as much traffic as today. By comparison, there were 1,645 road deaths last year, according to the DfT.
The assumption that drivers in Birmingham will follow the limits is bold.
They do have a reputation as distinctly terrible. Large proportions are uninsured. Still, it's good to see the malign influence of the devolved administrations bear down on the English.
He's a greedy, pompous, lying, charmless, grifting, humourless, entitled, dismal, Woketastic anti-charisma machine, with weird little eyes and a stupid pursed mouth of disapproval, and he can't think of a Christmas movie he likes. He's Loathsome
I don't think he can turn this around, TBH
Classic Leon rant!
To be fair to Starmer he probably likes Doe Hard but hadn’t seen the polling on whether people think of it as a Christmas movie or not
What if they really DO have a coup and no one believes it happened?
We can’t know until tomorrow. But the thing to watch is the reactions of countries with embassies/consulates in place and/or aid workers out there in numbers.
Can’t remember off hand if we or the rest of the west still have diplomatic relations.
If there really is a coup taking place by now we'd be seeing a flood of images and videos from locals in Damascus. We are not
My guess is there has perhaps been some sporadic gunfire from rebels in the city (because rebels clearly ARE on the march elsewhere in Syria) and they're trying to spook and roil the regime while Assad is away, by making it out to be much bigger
Assad does look imperilled, however
Weren't there reports he is in Moscow currently?
Apparently landed in Damascus several hours ago...
Ah ok thanks, I'm just catching up. Have rather selfishly been focused on living my life today.
Call yourself a PBer? There is no such thing as "life"
I dunno. We once had a poster called @SeanT who had about twelve of them.
I think he retired, having made his millions as an early investor in What3Words.
I heard he retired because he correctly predicted the pandemic about a month before everyone else. But the past is shrouded in myth
No, that was someone called eadric, as I recall
Just for the record, so that I can claim this one over @Leon - the US outbreak of avian flu now spreading widely to milking cows and some pigs is gonna be a bastard human pandemic in a year or so's time.
Yes. That virus is busy mutating and edging closer to fully making the transition to a human flu.
We are pretty good at flu vaccination. Prior to 2020 there was no corona virus vaccines in existence. I wouldnt worry. I’d wait until Feigel dingbat starts shrieking.
Yes. My understanding is that there's already an H5 vaccine. But there's likely to be a bit of a gap between it definitively making the species jump and a vaccine being widely available. A shorter time compared to Covid, but some time nevertheless.
It's taken longer than many (including me) predicted, but the prediction IS now coming true
When have I ever said "they would never happen"? Indeed, I hoped (and hope) they will happen, as it would be rather neat for me.
But these geofenced robotaxis are rather limited compared to what you were claiming.
Well over ten years have passed, and lorry drivers still exist. In fact, there's no indication they're going away.
You were wrong. Own it.
I wasn't wrong, but nor were you. We were both half right. Self driving came later than I predicted and earlier than you did.
However, where I was entirely right is in machine translation, which -IIRC - you said was basically impossible for machines to truly master. lol
We now have translators which are literal Babel fish except arguably better
IIRC, you stated that in ten years, there would be no lorry drivers. You compounded that by saying that it was pointless training to be a lorry driver, as the jobs would go. Those 'predictions' were well over ten years ago.
And again, show where I said translation was 'basically impossible for machines to truly master'. Go on. Because I'm pretty sure I did not.
Yeah you did you stupid twat
Welsh: "Ie, wnest ti, ti'n dwp twp." Armenian: "Այո, արեցիր, հիմար ապուշ." (Ayo, arecir, himar apush.) Georgian: "ჰო, გააკეთე, შენ სულელი დებილი." (Ho, gaakete, shen suleli debili.) Mandarin: "是的，你做了，你这个蠢蛋。" (Shì de, nǐ zuò le, nǐ zhège chǔn dàn.) Hebrew: "כן, עשית את זה, טיפש מטומטם." (Ken, asita et ze, tipesh metumtam.)
How do you know that those are accurate? Though Ydoethur can help with No. 1.
I just checked: the translations are good
How did you do that? Ask it?
Are you really this fucking dim?
I checked with other, different AI translation devices. eg Google and iTranslate and the like
Now, maybe they are all conspiring to give us fake translations, even tho they are rival companies with absolutely no cause to do this (quite the opposite), or the translations are good
He's a greedy, pompous, lying, charmless, grifting, humourless, entitled, dismal, Woketastic anti-charisma machine, with weird little eyes and a stupid pursed mouth of disapproval, and he can't think of a Christmas movie he likes. He's Loathsome
I don't think he can turn this around, TBH
Classic Leon rant!
To be fair to Starmer he probably likes Doe Hard but hadn’t seen the polling on whether people think of it as a Christmas movie or not
He's a greedy, pompous, lying, charmless, grifting, humourless, entitled, dismal, Woketastic anti-charisma machine, with weird little eyes and a stupid pursed mouth of disapproval, and he can't think of a Christmas movie he likes. He's Loathsome
I don't think he can turn this around, TBH
He's OK; but he is no good at hopey changey; maybe no-one can turn it around for now. If anyone has decent and doable ideas they are keeping quiet. There is only one other party of government and IIRC they weren't very effective in various ways right up to about July this year.
What he should do (perhaps now is too late) is basically from 5th July: "Your glass was half empty and getting emptier; it is now half full and getting fuller. And this is what 'full' looks like, and this is how we are going to get there". And he should still, every day, be explaining the enterprise and pointing out the signposts and mile stones and how marvellous we all are.....
They do not understand how bad the boats thing is. They don't get it, on a visceral level. For them the sight of an asylum seeker in a Marriot Hotel with private healthcare is probably a warming moment, a Britain that care!. They surely strive to see it from the perspective of a Briton stuck in an NHS queue in a dying town, but they cannot manage it, they do not have the empathy
This shit is going to kill them, they lack Theory of Mind. It will quite possibly put Farage in Downing Street
No one cares about the boats apart from you and the Daily Mail.
Why do you think Farage is the least unpopular leader in the country, and Reform have a chance of overtaking the Tories or Labour? Hint: it's not their transport agenda
It's taken longer than many (including me) predicted, but the prediction IS now coming true
When have I ever said "they would never happen"? Indeed, I hoped (and hope) they will happen, as it would be rather neat for me.
But these geofenced robotaxis are rather limited compared to what you were claiming.
Well over ten years have passed, and lorry drivers still exist. In fact, there's no indication they're going away.
You were wrong. Own it.
I wasn't wrong, but nor were you. We were both half right. Self driving came later than I predicted and earlier than you did.
However, where I was entirely right is in machine translation, which -IIRC - you said was basically impossible for machines to truly master. lol
We now have translators which are literal Babel fish except arguably better
IIRC, you stated that in ten years, there would be no lorry drivers. You compounded that by saying that it was pointless training to be a lorry driver, as the jobs would go. Those 'predictions' were well over ten years ago.
And again, show where I said translation was 'basically impossible for machines to truly master'. Go on. Because I'm pretty sure I did not.
Yeah you did you stupid twat
Welsh: "Ie, wnest ti, ti'n dwp twp." Armenian: "Այո, արեցիր, հիմար ապուշ." (Ayo, arecir, himar apush.) Georgian: "ჰო, გააკეთე, შენ სულელი დებილი." (Ho, gaakete, shen suleli debili.) Mandarin: "是的，你做了，你这个蠢蛋。" (Shì de, nǐ zuò le, nǐ zhège chǔn dàn.) Hebrew: "כן, עשית את זה, טיפש מטומטם." (Ken, asita et ze, tipesh metumtam.)
How do you know that those are accurate? Though Ydoethur can help with No. 1.
I just checked: the translations are good
How did you do that? Ask it?
Are you really this fucking dim?
I checked with other, different AI translation devices. eg Google and iTranslate and the like
Now, maybe they are all conspiring to give us fake translations, even tho they are rival companies with absolutely no cause to do this (quite the opposite), or the translations are good
No: just checking. And a pretty good reply, thank you.
(I've been sceptical about machine translation for decades, but that was probably because of reading The Man in the High Castle as a teenager.)
He's a greedy, pompous, lying, charmless, grifting, humourless, entitled, dismal, Woketastic anti-charisma machine, with weird little eyes and a stupid pursed mouth of disapproval, and he can't think of a Christmas movie he likes. He's Loathsome
I don't think he can turn this around, TBH
Classic Leon rant!
To be fair to Starmer he probably likes Doe Hard but hadn’t seen the polling on whether people think of it as a Christmas movie or not
Energy provider Electricity North West (ENW) has said its engineers were “left speechless” after discovering that a telecoms operator in the Lancashire (England) town of Burnley had erected a steel mast “just one metre away” from 132,000-volt overhead electricity lines. “One wrong move could have resulted in a death,” said ENW.
The “potentially fatal” situation in Burnley is said to have been discovered on Wednesday by ENW’s “tree cutting teams“, who were carrying out maintenance in the area. The team reported the situation immediately, and engineers attended the Kiddrow Lane site and quickly made the decision to switch out and earth the circuit for safety reasons. No customers were without power as a result.
You’d think that even the most basic understanding of science and electricity, the sort children tend to learn at the youngest of ages and that we all carry through our lives, would have avoided such a Darwin Awards level error of safety competence. But clearly, in this case, something has gone shockingly wrong, and we can all thank our lucky sparks stars that no lives were lost. This is about as dangerous as you can get.
This sort of 'elf n safety nonsense is what is holding this country back. 132,000 volts is just a wee zap.
As a Northerner growing up as a kid in the 1980s before assembly every morning we were zapped with 264,000 volts.
Kids these days...
You 80s public school kids. In our day we didn't even have these newfangled metric 'volts'. I didn't vote for Brexit to have to keep using these EUolts to torture children.
It might be named for a foreigner, but it's as Northerner (or, for me, North Southerner) as a SI unit can get. Named by two Brits and defined by the British Association for the Advancement of Science a century and a half ago. At a meeting in Manc no less, if the printed report is to be trusted.
My favourite northern unit will always be the tog.
I do think the tog rating of the earth's atmosphere should be a key global warming metric. The change is fractional, but then again the atmosphere is holding a temperature difference of about 300°.
It's taken longer than many (including me) predicted, but the prediction IS now coming true
When have I ever said "they would never happen"? Indeed, I hoped (and hope) they will happen, as it would be rather neat for me.
But these geofenced robotaxis are rather limited compared to what you were claiming.
Well over ten years have passed, and lorry drivers still exist. In fact, there's no indication they're going away.
You were wrong. Own it.
I wasn't wrong, but nor were you. We were both half right. Self driving came later than I predicted and earlier than you did.
However, where I was entirely right is in machine translation, which -IIRC - you said was basically impossible for machines to truly master. lol
We now have translators which are literal Babel fish except arguably better
IIRC, you stated that in ten years, there would be no lorry drivers. You compounded that by saying that it was pointless training to be a lorry driver, as the jobs would go. Those 'predictions' were well over ten years ago.
And again, show where I said translation was 'basically impossible for machines to truly master'. Go on. Because I'm pretty sure I did not.
Yeah you did you stupid twat
Welsh: "Ie, wnest ti, ti'n dwp twp." Armenian: "Այո, արեցիր, հիմար ապուշ." (Ayo, arecir, himar apush.) Georgian: "ჰო, გააკეთე, შენ სულელი დებილი." (Ho, gaakete, shen suleli debili.) Mandarin: "是的，你做了，你这个蠢蛋。" (Shì de, nǐ zuò le, nǐ zhège chǔn dàn.) Hebrew: "כן, עשית את זה, טיפש מטומטם." (Ken, asita et ze, tipesh metumtam.)
How do you know that those are accurate? Though Ydoethur can help with No. 1.
I just checked: the translations are good
How did you do that? Ask it?
Are you really this fucking dim?
I checked with other, different AI translation devices. eg Google and iTranslate and the like
Now, maybe they are all conspiring to give us fake translations, even tho they are rival companies with absolutely no cause to do this (quite the opposite), or the translations are good
No: just checking. And a pretty good reply, thank you.
(I've been sceptical about machine translation for decades, but that was probably because of reading The Man in the High Castle as a teenager.)
Do you ever check the results from your calculator on your phone? Do you think "oooh, that might be wrong" and then go away and do the long division sums by hand?
What if they really DO have a coup and no one believes it happened?
We can’t know until tomorrow. But the thing to watch is the reactions of countries with embassies/consulates in place and/or aid workers out there in numbers.
Can’t remember off hand if we or the rest of the west still have diplomatic relations.
If there really is a coup taking place by now we'd be seeing a flood of images and videos from locals in Damascus. We are not
My guess is there has perhaps been some sporadic gunfire from rebels in the city (because rebels clearly ARE on the march elsewhere in Syria) and they're trying to spook and roil the regime while Assad is away, by making it out to be much bigger
Assad does look imperilled, however
Weren't there reports he is in Moscow currently?
Apparently landed in Damascus several hours ago...
Ah ok thanks, I'm just catching up. Have rather selfishly been focused on living my life today.
Call yourself a PBer? There is no such thing as "life"
I dunno. We once had a poster called @SeanT who had about twelve of them.
I think he retired, having made his millions as an early investor in What3Words.
I heard he retired because he correctly predicted the pandemic about a month before everyone else. But the past is shrouded in myth
No, that was someone called eadric, as I recall
Just for the record, so that I can claim this one over @Leon - the US outbreak of avian flu now spreading widely to milking cows and some pigs is gonna be a bastard human pandemic in a year or so's time.
Yes. That virus is busy mutating and edging closer to fully making the transition to a human flu.
We are pretty good at flu vaccination. Prior to 2020 there was no corona virus vaccines in existence. I wouldnt worry. I’d wait until Feigel dingbat starts shrieking.
Yes. My understanding is that there's already an H5 vaccine. But there's likely to be a bit of a gap between it definitively making the species jump and a vaccine being widely available. A shorter time compared to Covid, but some time nevertheless.
Flu tends not to be infectious without symptoms. That was the real kicker for covid. It made isolation and track and trace very, very hard. We are all scarred by covid (some very much so, as X will show) but we need to remember that covid was a 1 in a century event. We’d be bloody unlucky to get two of those in five years.
The speed limit in Birmingham could be cut to 20mph under plans which would make it easier for any local authority across the country to impose lower limits in built-up areas.
A proposal to turn the whole city, with a population of 1.1 million, into a 20mph zone will be considered by Birmingham city council on Tuesday.
Just the usual displacement activity. The main cause behind road deaths is crap driving, but no government has the balls to actually do something about that.
Nah, it is cars getting heavier (that's even before mahoosive EV batteries) and the shape of vehicles changing.
Heavier cars just mean the results of crap driving are worse, more injuries and deaths from the same number of accidents. The current licencing regime requires too little skill to get behind the wheel and has no requirement at all to maintain that skill.
20mph limits just make those crashes a bit less likely to kill someone. It's far better to have fewer crashes in the first place, but no government is going to take any substantive steps on that because there are a lot of drivers and most of them have a vote.
In the UK it is more difficult to get a licence for a 125cc moped than a 3-ton SUV...
However, despite having lower approvals than Badenoch, Starmer is still seen as making the best Prime Minister compared to Kemi Badenoch. He has a 5% lead.
The most-picked option is “none of these”, at 39%.
Badenoch has a gravitas problem which will make it hard for her to hold the line against Reform. It's as if it doesn't matter very much what she thinks about anything.
I have heard from a few focus groups that the most common adjective to be used about Badenoch is lightweight/insubstantial.
Oddly, there's a bit of warmth towards her for being the first black woman leader of a major GB party.
Presumably, she gets a bit of warmth from the male voter, coz she is..... quite hot
A mate of mine is keen. He has a thing for women with gaps in their front teeth. Takes all sorts I guess.
Ooof. Pete Hegseth - Trump's pick for Secretary of Defence has been denounced by his mum as an abuser of women in an email she sent him in 2018.
The guy presents as a right-wing nationalist Evangelical.
(Aside: Trump has refused to have the FBI background check his candidates.)
Son,
I have tried to keep quiet about your character and behavior, but after listening to the way you made Samantha feel today, I cannot stay silent. And as a woman and your mother I feel I must speak out..
You are an abuser of women — that is the ugly truth and I have no respect for any man that belittles, lies, cheats, sleeps around, and uses women for his own power and ego. You are that man (and have been for years) and as your mother, it pains me and embarrasses me to say that, but it is the sad, sad truth.
I am not a saint, far from it.. so don’t throw that in my face,. but your abuse over the years to women (dishonesty, sleeping around, betrayal, debasing, belittling) needs to be called out...
He's a greedy, pompous, lying, charmless, grifting, humourless, entitled, dismal, Woketastic anti-charisma machine, with weird little eyes and a stupid pursed mouth of disapproval, and he can't think of a Christmas movie he likes. He's Loathsome
I don't think he can turn this around, TBH
He's OK; but he is no good at hopey changey; maybe no-one can turn it around for now. If anyone has decent and doable ideas they are keeping quiet. There is only one other party of government and IIRC they weren't very effective in various ways right up to about July this year.
What he should do (perhaps now is too late) is basically from 5th July: "Your glass was half empty and getting emptier; it is now half full and getting fuller. And this is what 'full' looks like, and this is how we are going to get there". And he should still, every day, be explaining the enterprise and pointing out the signposts and mile stones and how marvellous we all are.....
They do not understand how bad the boats thing is. They don't get it, on the necessary visceral level. For them the sight of an asylum seeker in a Marriott Hotel with private healthcare is probably a warming moment, a Britain that cares! They surely strive to see it from the perspective of a Briton stuck in an NHS queue in a dying town, but they cannot manage it: they do not have the empathy
This shit is going to kill them, they lack Theory of Mind. It will quite possibly put Farage in Downing Street
Maybe. By the way, has anyone stopped to consider what a Farage government will actually, in fact, really, in truth, DO about the boats?
You leave the ECHR. So what, exactly, follows? You implement a bit of Rwanda. And numbers continue to rise, and disappearances into the UK ether massively increase. What next?
I have never seen a discussion of the possibilities here. It is worth analysis. Do Reform want to talk about these concrete and precise things?
Energy provider Electricity North West (ENW) has said its engineers were “left speechless” after discovering that a telecoms operator in the Lancashire (England) town of Burnley had erected a steel mast “just one metre away” from 132,000-volt overhead electricity lines. “One wrong move could have resulted in a death,” said ENW.
The “potentially fatal” situation in Burnley is said to have been discovered on Wednesday by ENW’s “tree cutting teams“, who were carrying out maintenance in the area. The team reported the situation immediately, and engineers attended the Kiddrow Lane site and quickly made the decision to switch out and earth the circuit for safety reasons. No customers were without power as a result.
You’d think that even the most basic understanding of science and electricity, the sort children tend to learn at the youngest of ages and that we all carry through our lives, would have avoided such a Darwin Awards level error of safety competence. But clearly, in this case, something has gone shockingly wrong, and we can all thank our lucky sparks stars that no lives were lost. This is about as dangerous as you can get.
This sort of 'elf n safety nonsense is what is holding this country back. 132,000 volts is just a wee zap.
As a Northerner growing up as a kid in the 1980s before assembly every morning we were zapped with 264,000 volts.
Kids these days...
You 80s public school kids. In our day we didn't even have these newfangled metric 'volts'. I didn't vote for Brexit to have to keep using these EUolts to torture children.
It might be named for a foreigner, but it's as Northerner (or, for me, North Southerner) as a SI unit can get. Named by two Brits and defined by the British Association for the Advancement of Science a century and a half ago. At a meeting in Manc no less, if the printed report is to be trusted.
My favourite northern unit will always be the tog.
I do think the tog rating of the earth's atmosphere should be a key global warming metric. The change is fractional, but then again the atmosphere is holding a temperature difference of about 300°.
Now the only thing I want for Christmas is a Shirley Togmeter.
However, despite having lower approvals than Badenoch, Starmer is still seen as making the best Prime Minister compared to Kemi Badenoch. He has a 5% lead.
The most-picked option is “none of these”, at 39%.
Badenoch has a gravitas problem which will make it hard for her to hold the line against Reform. It's as if it doesn't matter very much what she thinks about anything.
I have heard from a few focus groups that the most common adjective to be used about Badenoch is lightweight/insubstantial.
Oddly, there's a bit of warmth towards her for being the first black woman leader of a major GB party.
Presumably, she gets a bit of warmth from the male voter, coz she is..... quite hot
A mate of mine is keen. He has a thing for women with gaps in their front teeth. Takes all sorts I guess.
Chaucer's Wife of Bath was gap-toothed.
It was known back then to be a sign of lustiness.
This is going to age me, but there was an episode of the 1970s TV sitcom Rhoda (Jeez, remember that?) where the heroine gets all angsty because her husband has noticed a woman with a cute "gap in her teeth"
It is a real thing. Not a fetish I obsessively share, but I don't mind it at all. Possibly my sexiest ever girlfriend had the gap
He's a greedy, pompous, lying, charmless, grifting, humourless, entitled, dismal, Woketastic anti-charisma machine, with weird little eyes and a stupid pursed mouth of disapproval, and he can't think of a Christmas movie he likes. He's Loathsome
I don't think he can turn this around, TBH
He's OK; but he is no good at hopey changey; maybe no-one can turn it around for now. If anyone has decent and doable ideas they are keeping quiet. There is only one other party of government and IIRC they weren't very effective in various ways right up to about July this year.
What he should do (perhaps now is too late) is basically from 5th July: "Your glass was half empty and getting emptier; it is now half full and getting fuller. And this is what 'full' looks like, and this is how we are going to get there". And he should still, every day, be explaining the enterprise and pointing out the signposts and mile stones and how marvellous we all are.....
I'm looking forward to his speech.
My sources tell me he's going to acknowledge that the Government has made a few steaks, but claim that they are the party best placed to liver the changes the UK needs. These changes will include new initiatives to strengthen the justice system by demanding all criminals are prosciutto to the full extent of the law, and that for crimes like burger, tripe will now mean tripe. He will announce new funding for the airforce, the navy, and the salami. The bulk of his speech will be taken up by our much cherished NHS, where he will claim that Labour's new approach of properly funding the service will result in plunging rates of mortadella, and a service fit for the future, biltong strong foundations. Building up to his crescendo, he will say that through the impenetrable overcast gloom of Britain in 2024, Labour are going to split the clouds like a blinding lard, ushering in a country all our kidneys will be proud to call their bone.
Ooof. Pete Hegseth - Trump's pick for Secretary of Defence has been denounced by his mum as an abuser of women in an email she sent him in 2018.
The guy presents as a right-wing nationalist Evangelical.
(Aside: Trump has refused to have the FBI background check his candidates.)
Son,
I have tried to keep quiet about your character and behavior, but after listening to the way you made Samantha feel today, I cannot stay silent. And as a woman and your mother I feel I must speak out..
You are an abuser of women — that is the ugly truth and I have no respect for any man that belittles, lies, cheats, sleeps around, and uses women for his own power and ego. You are that man (and have been for years) and as your mother, it pains me and embarrasses me to say that, but it is the sad, sad truth.
I am not a saint, far from it.. so don’t throw that in my face,. but your abuse over the years to women (dishonesty, sleeping around, betrayal, debasing, belittling) needs to be called out...
Looks like the outgoing health secretary in the government, Stephen Donnelly, is going to lose his seat. This is a notable personal judgement given that his party, FF, are generally having a good result.
EDIT: They've decided to stop counting for the night in that constituency (Wicklow) and restart tomorrow morning at 9am (do none of the counters need to go to Mass?)
However, despite having lower approvals than Badenoch, Starmer is still seen as making the best Prime Minister compared to Kemi Badenoch. He has a 5% lead.
The most-picked option is “none of these”, at 39%.
Badenoch has a gravitas problem which will make it hard for her to hold the line against Reform. It's as if it doesn't matter very much what she thinks about anything.
I have heard from a few focus groups that the most common adjective to be used about Badenoch is lightweight/insubstantial.
Oddly, there's a bit of warmth towards her for being the first black woman leader of a major GB party.
Presumably, she gets a bit of warmth from the male voter, coz she is..... quite hot
A mate of mine is keen. He has a thing for women with gaps in their front teeth. Takes all sorts I guess.
Chaucer's Wife of Bath was gap-toothed.
It was known back then to be a sign of lustiness.
This is going to age me, but there was an episode of the 1970s TV sitcom Rhoda (Jeez, remember that?) where the heroine gets all angsty because her husband has noticed a woman with a cute "gap in her teeth"
It is a real thing. Not a fetish I obsessively share, but I don't mind it at all. Possibly my sexiest ever girlfriend had the gap
Whe you said "This is going to age me", I thought you were going to say you knocked around with that Chaucer...
He's a greedy, pompous, lying, charmless, grifting, humourless, entitled, dismal, Woketastic anti-charisma machine, with weird little eyes and a stupid pursed mouth of disapproval, and he can't think of a Christmas movie he likes. He's Loathsome
I don't think he can turn this around, TBH
He's OK; but he is no good at hopey changey; maybe no-one can turn it around for now. If anyone has decent and doable ideas they are keeping quiet. There is only one other party of government and IIRC they weren't very effective in various ways right up to about July this year.
What he should do (perhaps now is too late) is basically from 5th July: "Your glass was half empty and getting emptier; it is now half full and getting fuller. And this is what 'full' looks like, and this is how we are going to get there". And he should still, every day, be explaining the enterprise and pointing out the signposts and mile stones and how marvellous we all are.....
They do not understand how bad the boats thing is. They don't get it, on the necessary visceral level. For them the sight of an asylum seeker in a Marriott Hotel with private healthcare is probably a warming moment, a Britain that cares! They surely strive to see it from the perspective of a Briton stuck in an NHS queue in a dying town, but they cannot manage it: they do not have the empathy
This shit is going to kill them, they lack Theory of Mind. It will quite possibly put Farage in Downing Street
Maybe. By the way, has anyone stopped to consider what a Farage government will actually, in fact, really, in truth, DO about the boats?
You leave the ECHR. So what, exactly, follows? You implement a bit of Rwanda. And numbers continue to rise, and disappearances into the UK ether massively increase. What next?
I have never seen a discussion of the possibilities here. It is worth analysis. Do Reform want to talk about these concrete and precise things?
Of course not. Because the moment they start talking about realistic details, it all falls apart.
He's a greedy, pompous, lying, charmless, grifting, humourless, entitled, dismal, Woketastic anti-charisma machine, with weird little eyes and a stupid pursed mouth of disapproval, and he can't think of a Christmas movie he likes. He's Loathsome
I don't think he can turn this around, TBH
He's OK; but he is no good at hopey changey; maybe no-one can turn it around for now. If anyone has decent and doable ideas they are keeping quiet. There is only one other party of government and IIRC they weren't very effective in various ways right up to about July this year.
What he should do (perhaps now is too late) is basically from 5th July: "Your glass was half empty and getting emptier; it is now half full and getting fuller. And this is what 'full' looks like, and this is how we are going to get there". And he should still, every day, be explaining the enterprise and pointing out the signposts and mile stones and how marvellous we all are.....
They do not understand how bad the boats thing is. They don't get it, on a visceral level. For them the sight of an asylum seeker in a Marriot Hotel with private healthcare is probably a warming moment, a Britain that care!. They surely strive to see it from the perspective of a Briton stuck in an NHS queue in a dying town, but they cannot manage it, they do not have the empathy
This shit is going to kill them, they lack Theory of Mind. It will quite possibly put Farage in Downing Street
No one cares about the boats apart from you and the Daily Mail.
Why do you think Farage is the least unpopular leader in the country, and Reform have a chance of overtaking the Tories or Labour? Hint: it's not their transport agenda
Because Reform are the largest party in the country who have never yet had to participate in running anything anywhere ever.
He's a greedy, pompous, lying, charmless, grifting, humourless, entitled, dismal, Woketastic anti-charisma machine, with weird little eyes and a stupid pursed mouth of disapproval, and he can't think of a Christmas movie he likes. He's Loathsome
I don't think he can turn this around, TBH
He's OK; but he is no good at hopey changey; maybe no-one can turn it around for now. If anyone has decent and doable ideas they are keeping quiet. There is only one other party of government and IIRC they weren't very effective in various ways right up to about July this year.
What he should do (perhaps now is too late) is basically from 5th July: "Your glass was half empty and getting emptier; it is now half full and getting fuller. And this is what 'full' looks like, and this is how we are going to get there". And he should still, every day, be explaining the enterprise and pointing out the signposts and mile stones and how marvellous we all are.....
They do not understand how bad the boats thing is. They don't get it, on the necessary visceral level. For them the sight of an asylum seeker in a Marriott Hotel with private healthcare is probably a warming moment, a Britain that cares! They surely strive to see it from the perspective of a Briton stuck in an NHS queue in a dying town, but they cannot manage it: they do not have the empathy
This shit is going to kill them, they lack Theory of Mind. It will quite possibly put Farage in Downing Street
Maybe. By the way, has anyone stopped to consider what a Farage government will actually, in fact, really, in truth, DO about the boats?
You leave the ECHR. So what, exactly, follows? You implement a bit of Rwanda. And numbers continue to rise, and disappearances into the UK ether massively increase. What next?
I have never seen a discussion of the possibilities here. It is worth analysis. Do Reform want to talk about these concrete and precise things?
I imagine it would involve pushing the boats back to France, and if people drown HMG would cope
Then the boats would stop immediately - and they would
I am not - let us be clear - advocating this, let alone praising it. But in the end the influx cannot be sustained, let alone afforded. And boat-people drown all the time in the Channel (as they drown many times more in the Med)
OR they go for a Rwanda scheme but they really mean it and really do it, as Oz did. But that is harder for the UK thah Oz (but not impossible)
In a deep irony, if we do elect a Reform government in 2028 (with the Tories as junior partners?) they will likely be more in tune with a much more rightwing EU, from France to Italy to Austria and Denmark, and might end up doing this in concert with Europe
Energy provider Electricity North West (ENW) has said its engineers were “left speechless” after discovering that a telecoms operator in the Lancashire (England) town of Burnley had erected a steel mast “just one metre away” from 132,000-volt overhead electricity lines. “One wrong move could have resulted in a death,” said ENW.
The “potentially fatal” situation in Burnley is said to have been discovered on Wednesday by ENW’s “tree cutting teams“, who were carrying out maintenance in the area. The team reported the situation immediately, and engineers attended the Kiddrow Lane site and quickly made the decision to switch out and earth the circuit for safety reasons. No customers were without power as a result.
You’d think that even the most basic understanding of science and electricity, the sort children tend to learn at the youngest of ages and that we all carry through our lives, would have avoided such a Darwin Awards level error of safety competence. But clearly, in this case, something has gone shockingly wrong, and we can all thank our lucky sparks stars that no lives were lost. This is about as dangerous as you can get.
Energy provider Electricity North West (ENW) has said its engineers were “left speechless” after discovering that a telecoms operator in the Lancashire (England) town of Burnley had erected a steel mast “just one metre away” from 132,000-volt overhead electricity lines. “One wrong move could have resulted in a death,” said ENW.
The “potentially fatal” situation in Burnley is said to have been discovered on Wednesday by ENW’s “tree cutting teams“, who were carrying out maintenance in the area. The team reported the situation immediately, and engineers attended the Kiddrow Lane site and quickly made the decision to switch out and earth the circuit for safety reasons. No customers were without power as a result.
You’d think that even the most basic understanding of science and electricity, the sort children tend to learn at the youngest of ages and that we all carry through our lives, would have avoided such a Darwin Awards level error of safety competence. But clearly, in this case, something has gone shockingly wrong, and we can all thank our lucky sparks stars that no lives were lost. This is about as dangerous as you can get.
This sort of 'elf n safety nonsense is what is holding this country back. 132,000 volts is just a wee zap.
As a Northerner growing up as a kid in the 1980s before assembly every morning we were zapped with 264,000 volts.
Kids these days...
You 80s public school kids. In our day we didn't even have these newfangled metric 'volts'. I didn't vote for Brexit to have to keep using these EUolts to torture children.
It might be named for a foreigner, but it's as Northerner (or, for me, North Southerner) as a SI unit can get. Named by two Brits and defined by the British Association for the Advancement of Science a century and a half ago. At a meeting in Manc no less, if the printed report is to be trusted.
My favourite northern unit will always be the tog.
I do think the tog rating of the earth's atmosphere should be a key global warming metric. The change is fractional, but then again the atmosphere is holding a temperature difference of about 300°.
Now the only thing I want for Christmas is a Shirley Togmeter.
I'm going to need a bloody big one for my suggested usage.
What if they really DO have a coup and no one believes it happened?
We can’t know until tomorrow. But the thing to watch is the reactions of countries with embassies/consulates in place and/or aid workers out there in numbers.
Can’t remember off hand if we or the rest of the west still have diplomatic relations.
If there really is a coup taking place by now we'd be seeing a flood of images and videos from locals in Damascus. We are not
My guess is there has perhaps been some sporadic gunfire from rebels in the city (because rebels clearly ARE on the march elsewhere in Syria) and they're trying to spook and roil the regime while Assad is away, by making it out to be much bigger
Assad does look imperilled, however
Weren't there reports he is in Moscow currently?
Apparently landed in Damascus several hours ago...
Ah ok thanks, I'm just catching up. Have rather selfishly been focused on living my life today.
Call yourself a PBer? There is no such thing as "life"
I dunno. We once had a poster called @SeanT who had about twelve of them.
I think he retired, having made his millions as an early investor in What3Words.
I heard he retired because he correctly predicted the pandemic about a month before everyone else. But the past is shrouded in myth
No, that was someone called eadric, as I recall
Just for the record, so that I can claim this one over @Leon - the US outbreak of avian flu now spreading widely to milking cows and some pigs is gonna be a bastard human pandemic in a year or so's time.
Yes. That virus is busy mutating and edging closer to fully making the transition to a human flu.
We are pretty good at flu vaccination. Prior to 2020 there was no corona virus vaccines in existence. I wouldnt worry. I’d wait until Feigel dingbat starts shrieking.
Yes. My understanding is that there's already an H5 vaccine. But there's likely to be a bit of a gap between it definitively making the species jump and a vaccine being widely available. A shorter time compared to Covid, but some time nevertheless.
Flu tends not to be infectious without symptoms. That was the real kicker for covid. It made isolation and track and trace very, very hard. We are all scarred by covid (some very much so, as X will show) but we need to remember that covid was a 1 in a century event. We’d be bloody unlucky to get two of those in five years.
No-one with flu should be allowed to sign up for assisted dying. I have had the real thing only a couple of times, and would have been sorely tempted. Even proper manflu is not comparable. The chance of voluntarily mixing with anyone Zero.
He's a greedy, pompous, lying, charmless, grifting, humourless, entitled, dismal, Woketastic anti-charisma machine, with weird little eyes and a stupid pursed mouth of disapproval, and he can't think of a Christmas movie he likes. He's Loathsome
I don't think he can turn this around, TBH
He's OK; but he is no good at hopey changey; maybe no-one can turn it around for now. If anyone has decent and doable ideas they are keeping quiet. There is only one other party of government and IIRC they weren't very effective in various ways right up to about July this year.
What he should do (perhaps now is too late) is basically from 5th July: "Your glass was half empty and getting emptier; it is now half full and getting fuller. And this is what 'full' looks like, and this is how we are going to get there". And he should still, every day, be explaining the enterprise and pointing out the signposts and mile stones and how marvellous we all are.....
They do not understand how bad the boats thing is. They don't get it, on the necessary visceral level. For them the sight of an asylum seeker in a Marriott Hotel with private healthcare is probably a warming moment, a Britain that cares! They surely strive to see it from the perspective of a Briton stuck in an NHS queue in a dying town, but they cannot manage it: they do not have the empathy
This shit is going to kill them, they lack Theory of Mind. It will quite possibly put Farage in Downing Street
Maybe. By the way, has anyone stopped to consider what a Farage government will actually, in fact, really, in truth, DO about the boats?
You leave the ECHR. So what, exactly, follows? You implement a bit of Rwanda. And numbers continue to rise, and disappearances into the UK ether massively increase. What next?
I have never seen a discussion of the possibilities here. It is worth analysis. Do Reform want to talk about these concrete and precise things?
I imagine it would involve pushing the boats back to France, and if people drown HMG would cope
Then the boats would stop immediately - and they would
I am not - let us be clear - advocating this, let alone praising it. But in the end the influx cannot be sustained, let alone afforded. And boat-people drown all the time in the Channel (as they drown many times more in the Med)
OR they go for a Rwanda scheme but they really mean it and really do it, as Oz did. But that is harder for the UK thah Oz (but not impossible)
In a deep irony, if we do elect a Reform government in 2028 (with the Tories as junior partners?) they will likely be more in tune with a much more rightwing EU, from France to Italy to Austria and Denmark, and might end up doing this in concert with Europe
It doesn't matter what a Farage government would "actually, in fact, really, in truth, DO".
This is the absolute key lesson of Trump 2.0 win.
What matters is to appear to understand the pain and to promise that they are listening and will do something.
He's a greedy, pompous, lying, charmless, grifting, humourless, entitled, dismal, Woketastic anti-charisma machine, with weird little eyes and a stupid pursed mouth of disapproval, and he can't think of a Christmas movie he likes. He's Loathsome
I don't think he can turn this around, TBH
He's OK; but he is no good at hopey changey; maybe no-one can turn it around for now. If anyone has decent and doable ideas they are keeping quiet. There is only one other party of government and IIRC they weren't very effective in various ways right up to about July this year.
What he should do (perhaps now is too late) is basically from 5th July: "Your glass was half empty and getting emptier; it is now half full and getting fuller. And this is what 'full' looks like, and this is how we are going to get there". And he should still, every day, be explaining the enterprise and pointing out the signposts and mile stones and how marvellous we all are.....
They do not understand how bad the boats thing is. They don't get it, on a visceral level. For them the sight of an asylum seeker in a Marriot Hotel with private healthcare is probably a warming moment, a Britain that care!. They surely strive to see it from the perspective of a Briton stuck in an NHS queue in a dying town, but they cannot manage it, they do not have the empathy
This shit is going to kill them, they lack Theory of Mind. It will quite possibly put Farage in Downing Street
No one cares about the boats apart from you and the Daily Mail.
Why do you think Farage is the least unpopular leader in the country, and Reform have a chance of overtaking the Tories or Labour? Hint: it's not their transport agenda
Because Reform are the largest party in the country who have never yet had to participate in running anything anywhere ever.
Yeah, but that sounds quite appealing to the average voter who has noted the country going to shit, and pay levels stagnating since... 2008... an entire generation! For many many Brits, it is a case of "tried Labour, tried the Tories, tried Labour again, they're all shit, let's try Reform, something new, let's try the populist right"
The speed limit in Birmingham could be cut to 20mph under plans which would make it easier for any local authority across the country to impose lower limits in built-up areas.
A proposal to turn the whole city, with a population of 1.1 million, into a 20mph zone will be considered by Birmingham city council on Tuesday.
Just the usual displacement activity. The main cause behind road deaths is crap driving, but no government has the balls to actually do something about that.
Nah, it is cars getting heavier (that's even before mahoosive EV batteries) and the shape of vehicles changing.
Heavier cars just mean the results of crap driving are worse, more injuries and deaths from the same number of accidents. The current licencing regime requires too little skill to get behind the wheel and has no requirement at all to maintain that skill.
20mph limits just make those crashes a bit less likely to kill someone. It's far better to have fewer crashes in the first place, but no government is going to take any substantive steps on that because there are a lot of drivers and most of them have a vote.
In the UK it is more difficult to get a licence for a 125cc moped than a 3-ton SUV...
The main effect of 20mph is to reduce the number of collisions via much longer reaction times/distances. That's what we found in Edinburgh - in fact, the biggest fall in injuries was slight injuries for car occupants.
In the space of time it took me to have a beer and some pizza, PB has swung from 'OMG, this is it - there's a massive coup against Assad and Syria and possibly Putin will fall' to 'are gap teeth hot or not?'
He's a greedy, pompous, lying, charmless, grifting, humourless, entitled, dismal, Woketastic anti-charisma machine, with weird little eyes and a stupid pursed mouth of disapproval, and he can't think of a Christmas movie he likes. He's Loathsome
I don't think he can turn this around, TBH
He's OK; but he is no good at hopey changey; maybe no-one can turn it around for now. If anyone has decent and doable ideas they are keeping quiet. There is only one other party of government and IIRC they weren't very effective in various ways right up to about July this year.
What he should do (perhaps now is too late) is basically from 5th July: "Your glass was half empty and getting emptier; it is now half full and getting fuller. And this is what 'full' looks like, and this is how we are going to get there". And he should still, every day, be explaining the enterprise and pointing out the signposts and mile stones and how marvellous we all are.....
They do not understand how bad the boats thing is. They don't get it, on a visceral level. For them the sight of an asylum seeker in a Marriot Hotel with private healthcare is probably a warming moment, a Britain that care!. They surely strive to see it from the perspective of a Briton stuck in an NHS queue in a dying town, but they cannot manage it, they do not have the empathy
This shit is going to kill them, they lack Theory of Mind. It will quite possibly put Farage in Downing Street
No one cares about the boats apart from you and the Daily Mail.
Why do you think Farage is the least unpopular leader in the country, and Reform have a chance of overtaking the Tories or Labour? Hint: it's not their transport agenda
Because Reform are the largest party in the country who have never yet had to participate in running anything anywhere ever.
Yeah, but that sounds quite appealing to the average voter who has noted the country going to shit, and pay levels stagnating since... 2008... an entire generation! For many many Brits, it is a case of "tried Labour, tried the Tories, tried Labour again, they're all shit, let's try Reform, something new, let's try the populist right"
And who are you to say the "people" are wrong?
So now you have explained why Farage is the least unpopular leader - no mention of boats.
However, despite having lower approvals than Badenoch, Starmer is still seen as making the best Prime Minister compared to Kemi Badenoch. He has a 5% lead.
The most-picked option is “none of these”, at 39%.
Badenoch has a gravitas problem which will make it hard for her to hold the line against Reform. It's as if it doesn't matter very much what she thinks about anything.
I have heard from a few focus groups that the most common adjective to be used about Badenoch is lightweight/insubstantial.
Oddly, there's a bit of warmth towards her for being the first black woman leader of a major GB party.
I don't find that particularly surprising just a few weeks into her leadership, I would be more worried if that was their findings a year or two down the road. But one thing that Badenoch has that neither May or Truss possessed, and that is a far more charismatic, natural and relaxed persona in front of the camera, and up against Starmer in the longer term that will work to her advantage. She can think on her feet and she gave a much underated speech at the Farmers protest in London which again points to a promising start. But she definitely needs an elected and politically astute wingman/woman like George Osborne was to David Cameron right from the start of his leaderhip in Opposition honing the policy and political messaging.
And while the blame for Labour slipping into second place in some recent polls can be squarely laid at Starmer and Reeves doors, if that polling trend continues it will certainly be helpful to Badenoch's leadership in the longer term too, especially if the Conservatives continue to make weekly gains over Labour in local by-elections.
It's taken longer than many (including me) predicted, but the prediction IS now coming true
When have I ever said "they would never happen"? Indeed, I hoped (and hope) they will happen, as it would be rather neat for me.
But these geofenced robotaxis are rather limited compared to what you were claiming.
Well over ten years have passed, and lorry drivers still exist. In fact, there's no indication they're going away.
You were wrong. Own it.
I wasn't wrong, but nor were you. We were both half right. Self driving came later than I predicted and earlier than you did.
However, where I was entirely right is in machine translation, which -IIRC - you said was basically impossible for machines to truly master. lol
We now have translators which are literal Babel fish except arguably better
IIRC, you stated that in ten years, there would be no lorry drivers. You compounded that by saying that it was pointless training to be a lorry driver, as the jobs would go. Those 'predictions' were well over ten years ago.
And again, show where I said translation was 'basically impossible for machines to truly master'. Go on. Because I'm pretty sure I did not.
Yeah you did you stupid twat
Welsh: "Ie, wnest ti, ti'n dwp twp." Armenian: "Այո, արեցիր, հիմար ապուշ." (Ayo, arecir, himar apush.) Georgian: "ჰო, გააკეთე, შენ სულელი დებილი." (Ho, gaakete, shen suleli debili.) Mandarin: "是的，你做了，你这个蠢蛋。" (Shì de, nǐ zuò le, nǐ zhège chǔn dàn.) Hebrew: "כן, עשית את זה, טיפש מטומטם." (Ken, asita et ze, tipesh metumtam.)
How do you know that those are accurate? Though Ydoethur can help with No. 1.
I just checked: the translations are good
How did you do that? Ask it?
Are you really this fucking dim?
I checked with other, different AI translation devices. eg Google and iTranslate and the like
Now, maybe they are all conspiring to give us fake translations, even tho they are rival companies with absolutely no cause to do this (quite the opposite), or the translations are good
No: just checking. And a pretty good reply, thank you.
(I've been sceptical about machine translation for decades, but that was probably because of reading The Man in the High Castle as a teenager.)
Do you ever check the results from your calculator on your phone? Do you think "oooh, that might be wrong" and then go away and do the long division sums by hand?
QED
I would absolutely check the answer from an LLM on any subject. It is extremely likely to be factually incorrect.
He's a greedy, pompous, lying, charmless, grifting, humourless, entitled, dismal, Woketastic anti-charisma machine, with weird little eyes and a stupid pursed mouth of disapproval, and he can't think of a Christmas movie he likes. He's Loathsome
I don't think he can turn this around, TBH
He's OK; but he is no good at hopey changey; maybe no-one can turn it around for now. If anyone has decent and doable ideas they are keeping quiet. There is only one other party of government and IIRC they weren't very effective in various ways right up to about July this year.
What he should do (perhaps now is too late) is basically from 5th July: "Your glass was half empty and getting emptier; it is now half full and getting fuller. And this is what 'full' looks like, and this is how we are going to get there". And he should still, every day, be explaining the enterprise and pointing out the signposts and mile stones and how marvellous we all are.....
They do not understand how bad the boats thing is. They don't get it, on the necessary visceral level. For them the sight of an asylum seeker in a Marriott Hotel with private healthcare is probably a warming moment, a Britain that cares! They surely strive to see it from the perspective of a Briton stuck in an NHS queue in a dying town, but they cannot manage it: they do not have the empathy
This shit is going to kill them, they lack Theory of Mind. It will quite possibly put Farage in Downing Street
Maybe. By the way, has anyone stopped to consider what a Farage government will actually, in fact, really, in truth, DO about the boats?
You leave the ECHR. So what, exactly, follows? You implement a bit of Rwanda. And numbers continue to rise, and disappearances into the UK ether massively increase. What next?
I have never seen a discussion of the possibilities here. It is worth analysis. Do Reform want to talk about these concrete and precise things?
I imagine it would involve pushing the boats back to France, and if people drown HMG would cope
Then the boats would stop immediately - and they would
I am not - let us be clear - advocating this, let alone praising it. But in the end the influx cannot be sustained, let alone afforded. And boat-people drown all the time in the Channel (as they drown many times more in the Med)
OR they go for a Rwanda scheme but they really mean it and really do it, as Oz did. But that is harder for the UK thah Oz (but not impossible)
In a deep irony, if we do elect a Reform government in 2028 (with the Tories as junior partners?) they will likely be more in tune with a much more rightwing EU, from France to Italy to Austria and Denmark, and might end up doing this in concert with Europe
It doesn't matter what a Farage government would "actually, in fact, really, in truth, DO".
This is the absolute key lesson of Trump 2.0 win.
What matters is to appear to understand the pain and to promise that they are listening and will do something.
An astute point
Aso, a point which seems to evade all three "main parties" - Labour, Tories, LDs (and the Nats in Scotland). They pretend to "get it", but they don't act like they mean it. Their metropolitan social staus is too precious to them, cf Boris on migration
Reform look, at times, like they mean it. As Trump does. Trump doesn't give a fuck what the liberal elite thinks of him, what they say about him in the New York Times or on CNN, that is his exact appeal. He plays up to it, very cleverly. That's one reason why he is so deliberately offensive, to show how little he cares about elite liberal opinion
It's taken longer than many (including me) predicted, but the prediction IS now coming true
When have I ever said "they would never happen"? Indeed, I hoped (and hope) they will happen, as it would be rather neat for me.
But these geofenced robotaxis are rather limited compared to what you were claiming.
Well over ten years have passed, and lorry drivers still exist. In fact, there's no indication they're going away.
You were wrong. Own it.
I wasn't wrong, but nor were you. We were both half right. Self driving came later than I predicted and earlier than you did.
However, where I was entirely right is in machine translation, which -IIRC - you said was basically impossible for machines to truly master. lol
We now have translators which are literal Babel fish except arguably better
IIRC, you stated that in ten years, there would be no lorry drivers. You compounded that by saying that it was pointless training to be a lorry driver, as the jobs would go. Those 'predictions' were well over ten years ago.
And again, show where I said translation was 'basically impossible for machines to truly master'. Go on. Because I'm pretty sure I did not.
Yeah you did you stupid twat
Welsh: "Ie, wnest ti, ti'n dwp twp." Armenian: "Այո, արեցիր, հիմար ապուշ." (Ayo, arecir, himar apush.) Georgian: "ჰო, გააკეთე, შენ სულელი დებილი." (Ho, gaakete, shen suleli debili.) Mandarin: "是的，你做了，你这个蠢蛋。" (Shì de, nǐ zuò le, nǐ zhège chǔn dàn.) Hebrew: "כן, עשית את זה, טיפש מטומטם." (Ken, asita et ze, tipesh metumtam.)
How do you know that those are accurate? Though Ydoethur can help with No. 1.
I just checked: the translations are good
How did you do that? Ask it?
Are you really this fucking dim?
I checked with other, different AI translation devices. eg Google and iTranslate and the like
Now, maybe they are all conspiring to give us fake translations, even tho they are rival companies with absolutely no cause to do this (quite the opposite), or the translations are good
No: just checking. And a pretty good reply, thank you.
(I've been sceptical about machine translation for decades, but that was probably because of reading The Man in the High Castle as a teenager.)
Do you ever check the results from your calculator on your phone? Do you think "oooh, that might be wrong" and then go away and do the long division sums by hand?
QED
I would absolutely check the answer from an LLM on any subject. It is extremely likely to be factually incorrect.
He's a greedy, pompous, lying, charmless, grifting, humourless, entitled, dismal, Woketastic anti-charisma machine, with weird little eyes and a stupid pursed mouth of disapproval, and he can't think of a Christmas movie he likes. He's Loathsome
I don't think he can turn this around, TBH
He's OK; but he is no good at hopey changey; maybe no-one can turn it around for now. If anyone has decent and doable ideas they are keeping quiet. There is only one other party of government and IIRC they weren't very effective in various ways right up to about July this year.
What he should do (perhaps now is too late) is basically from 5th July: "Your glass was half empty and getting emptier; it is now half full and getting fuller. And this is what 'full' looks like, and this is how we are going to get there". And he should still, every day, be explaining the enterprise and pointing out the signposts and mile stones and how marvellous we all are.....
They do not understand how bad the boats thing is. They don't get it, on a visceral level. For them the sight of an asylum seeker in a Marriot Hotel with private healthcare is probably a warming moment, a Britain that care!. They surely strive to see it from the perspective of a Briton stuck in an NHS queue in a dying town, but they cannot manage it, they do not have the empathy
This shit is going to kill them, they lack Theory of Mind. It will quite possibly put Farage in Downing Street
No one cares about the boats apart from you and the Daily Mail.
Why do you think Farage is the least unpopular leader in the country, and Reform have a chance of overtaking the Tories or Labour? Hint: it's not their transport agenda
Because Reform are the largest party in the country who have never yet had to participate in running anything anywhere ever.
Yeah, but that sounds quite appealing to the average voter who has noted the country going to shit, and pay levels stagnating since... 2008... an entire generation! For many many Brits, it is a case of "tried Labour, tried the Tories, tried Labour again, they're all shit, let's try Reform, something new, let's try the populist right"
And who are you to say the "people" are wrong?
Your point is quite sound, but my explanation is still true. As to 'the people', of which I am one, as are you, being wrong, it depends what you mean.
Let us say that 'the people' as a whole vote in a government on a programme of very low tax and very high social democrat style public services and expenditure.
This is conceptually similar to voting in a government which proposes that triangles are circles.
That there is a wrongness is clear. I think your implication is correct: the wrongness is in the proposal, not the voter; as there is no reason why the voter should know better, but there is a reason why the proposer should.
The speed limit in Birmingham could be cut to 20mph under plans which would make it easier for any local authority across the country to impose lower limits in built-up areas.
A proposal to turn the whole city, with a population of 1.1 million, into a 20mph zone will be considered by Birmingham city council on Tuesday.
Just the usual displacement activity. The main cause behind road deaths is crap driving, but no government has the balls to actually do something about that.
Nah, it is cars getting heavier (that's even before mahoosive EV batteries) and the shape of vehicles changing.
Don't let facts get in the way with rants, casualties are falling annually, not increasing.
However, despite having lower approvals than Badenoch, Starmer is still seen as making the best Prime Minister compared to Kemi Badenoch. He has a 5% lead.
The most-picked option is “none of these”, at 39%.
Badenoch has a gravitas problem which will make it hard for her to hold the line against Reform. It's as if it doesn't matter very much what she thinks about anything.
I think it's more about policies - Jenrick's plan was to outflank Reform (ECHR, deportations that Farage had declared impossible). Badenoch decided to be very vague, and as a consequence she's now playing catch up. She needs to find a very good set of policies that are very eye-catching, quite distinct from Reform (perhaps too technical for Reform to be trusted to deliver?? - though I don't think the Tories have a massive edge on perceived professionalism over Reform any more), but credibly right wing.
Some areas to consider - go lower on tax than Reform. Go bigger on cuts than Reform. Adopt a more radical, clever and technically fleshed out approach to NHS reform than, um Reform. Rural - go for policies popular in the Shires. Tories will have to be the party of nimbyism. Pick some eye-catching infrastructure projects to back and get behind - potentially identify enough savings to complete HS2 as far as Crewe and Euston (though Euston will probably happen anyway). I don't actually agree with all these policies, but I think they might give the Tories a little breathing space from Reform.
No. Reform's job is to present palpably untrue falsely costed nonsense as policy. The Tories tried that, especially under Truss. It didn't work and it can't. Toryism is a party of potential government not populist protest.
Badenoch's job is to spend time being serious, and work on political philosophy, political principle and policy so that, for a change, they start having something interesting to say, and clarity of direction.
None of Reform's manifesto was 'palpably untrue', because economies are dynamic organisms based on hundreds of thousands of small decisions. The attacks on the manifesto included repeated claims that their cuts to corporation tax would 'cost more' than the £18bn they claimed, yet cuts to CT have always resulted in MORE CT being raised, and the recent increase has resulted in businesses and investment leaving the country. By the same token, Reeves' attacks on the UK's fiscal position and her misery budget have already resulted in our borrowing costs rising and her budget eroding.
Thankfully I don't think Badenoch will be particularly interested in your asinine 'advice' - if she is, she can look forward to great clarity of direction - toward 20 MPs.
It's taken longer than many (including me) predicted, but the prediction IS now coming true
When have I ever said "they would never happen"? Indeed, I hoped (and hope) they will happen, as it would be rather neat for me.
But these geofenced robotaxis are rather limited compared to what you were claiming.
Well over ten years have passed, and lorry drivers still exist. In fact, there's no indication they're going away.
You were wrong. Own it.
I wasn't wrong, but nor were you. We were both half right. Self driving came later than I predicted and earlier than you did.
However, where I was entirely right is in machine translation, which -IIRC - you said was basically impossible for machines to truly master. lol
We now have translators which are literal Babel fish except arguably better
IIRC, you stated that in ten years, there would be no lorry drivers. You compounded that by saying that it was pointless training to be a lorry driver, as the jobs would go. Those 'predictions' were well over ten years ago.
And again, show where I said translation was 'basically impossible for machines to truly master'. Go on. Because I'm pretty sure I did not.
Yeah you did you stupid twat
Welsh: "Ie, wnest ti, ti'n dwp twp." Armenian: "Այո, արեցիր, հիմար ապուշ." (Ayo, arecir, himar apush.) Georgian: "ჰო, გააკეთე, შენ სულელი დებილი." (Ho, gaakete, shen suleli debili.) Mandarin: "是的，你做了，你这个蠢蛋。" (Shì de, nǐ zuò le, nǐ zhège chǔn dàn.) Hebrew: "כן, עשית את זה, טיפש מטומטם." (Ken, asita et ze, tipesh metumtam.)
How do you know that those are accurate? Though Ydoethur can help with No. 1.
I just checked: the translations are good
How did you do that? Ask it?
Are you really this fucking dim?
I checked with other, different AI translation devices. eg Google and iTranslate and the like
Now, maybe they are all conspiring to give us fake translations, even tho they are rival companies with absolutely no cause to do this (quite the opposite), or the translations are good
No: just checking. And a pretty good reply, thank you.
(I've been sceptical about machine translation for decades, but that was probably because of reading The Man in the High Castle as a teenager.)
Do you ever check the results from your calculator on your phone? Do you think "oooh, that might be wrong" and then go away and do the long division sums by hand?
QED
I would absolutely check the answer from an LLM on any subject. It is extremely likely to be factually incorrect.
Ooof. Pete Hegseth - Trump's pick for Secretary of Defence has been denounced by his mum as an abuser of women in an email she sent him in 2018.
The guy presents as a right-wing nationalist Evangelical.
(Aside: Trump has refused to have the FBI background check his candidates.)
Son,
I have tried to keep quiet about your character and behavior, but after listening to the way you made Samantha feel today, I cannot stay silent. And as a woman and your mother I feel I must speak out..
You are an abuser of women — that is the ugly truth and I have no respect for any man that belittles, lies, cheats, sleeps around, and uses women for his own power and ego. You are that man (and have been for years) and as your mother, it pains me and embarrasses me to say that, but it is the sad, sad truth.
I am not a saint, far from it.. so don’t throw that in my face,. but your abuse over the years to women (dishonesty, sleeping around, betrayal, debasing, belittling) needs to be called out...
He's a greedy, pompous, lying, charmless, grifting, humourless, entitled, dismal, Woketastic anti-charisma machine, with weird little eyes and a stupid pursed mouth of disapproval, and he can't think of a Christmas movie he likes. He's Loathsome
The speed limit in Birmingham could be cut to 20mph under plans which would make it easier for any local authority across the country to impose lower limits in built-up areas.
A proposal to turn the whole city, with a population of 1.1 million, into a 20mph zone will be considered by Birmingham city council on Tuesday.
Just the usual displacement activity. The main cause behind road deaths is crap driving, but no government has the balls to actually do something about that.
Nah, it is cars getting heavier (that's even before mahoosive EV batteries) and the shape of vehicles changing.
Heavier cars just mean the results of crap driving are worse, more injuries and deaths from the same number of accidents. The current licencing regime requires too little skill to get behind the wheel and has no requirement at all to maintain that skill.
20mph limits just make those crashes a bit less likely to kill someone. It's far better to have fewer crashes in the first place, but no government is going to take any substantive steps on that because there are a lot of drivers and most of them have a vote.
In the UK it is more difficult to get a licence for a 125cc moped than a 3-ton SUV...
The main effect of 20mph is to reduce the number of collisions via much longer reaction times/distances. That's what we found in Edinburgh - in fact, the biggest fall in injuries was slight injuries for car occupants.
Reaction time/distances are already falling at 30mph due to improved technologies, which is part of the reason behind continuously falling casualty data.
If we're to be objective about casualties, the speed limit should be increasing not decreasing to keep balance with our improved technologies.
The problem isn't casualties, risks, or changing car designs - the problem is zealots with zero tolerance for risk.
He's a greedy, pompous, lying, charmless, grifting, humourless, entitled, dismal, Woketastic anti-charisma machine, with weird little eyes and a stupid pursed mouth of disapproval, and he can't think of a Christmas movie he likes. He's Loathsome
I don't think he can turn this around, TBH
He's OK; but he is no good at hopey changey; maybe no-one can turn it around for now. If anyone has decent and doable ideas they are keeping quiet. There is only one other party of government and IIRC they weren't very effective in various ways right up to about July this year.
What he should do (perhaps now is too late) is basically from 5th July: "Your glass was half empty and getting emptier; it is now half full and getting fuller. And this is what 'full' looks like, and this is how we are going to get there". And he should still, every day, be explaining the enterprise and pointing out the signposts and mile stones and how marvellous we all are.....
I'm looking forward to his speech.
My sources tell me he's going to acknowledge that the Government has made a few steaks, but claim that they are the party best placed to liver the changes the UK needs. These changes will include new initiatives to strengthen the justice system by demanding all criminals are prosciutto to the full extent of the law, and that for crimes like burger, tripe will now mean tripe. He will announce new funding for the airforce, the navy, and the salami. The bulk of his speech will be taken up by our much cherished NHS, where he will claim that Labour's new approach of properly funding the service will result in plunging rates of mortadella, and a service fit for the future, biltong strong foundations. Building up to his crescendo, he will say that through the impenetrable overcast gloom of Britain in 2024, Labour are going to split the clouds like a blinding lard, ushering in a country all our kidneys will be proud to call their bone.
Britain was warned of Russian attempts to encourage Mauritian claims to the Chagos Islands, The Telegraph can reveal.
Government officials and ministers were told President Vladimir Putin’s officials attempted to stir up support among Mauritian politicians for a claim over the Chagos Islands as a way of undermining British interests, according to a source familiar with the discussions.
“Russia is doing more than supporting Mauritius – they are actively promoting the case for Mauritian sovereignty over the Chagos Islands”, a former Whitehall source said.
Wasn't a British/French lawyer (Philippe Sands) involved?
He's a greedy, pompous, lying, charmless, grifting, humourless, entitled, dismal, Woketastic anti-charisma machine, with weird little eyes and a stupid pursed mouth of disapproval, and he can't think of a Christmas movie he likes. He's Loathsome
I don't think he can turn this around, TBH
He's OK; but he is no good at hopey changey; maybe no-one can turn it around for now. If anyone has decent and doable ideas they are keeping quiet. There is only one other party of government and IIRC they weren't very effective in various ways right up to about July this year.
What he should do (perhaps now is too late) is basically from 5th July: "Your glass was half empty and getting emptier; it is now half full and getting fuller. And this is what 'full' looks like, and this is how we are going to get there". And he should still, every day, be explaining the enterprise and pointing out the signposts and mile stones and how marvellous we all are.....
They do not understand how bad the boats thing is. They don't get it, on the necessary visceral level. For them the sight of an asylum seeker in a Marriott Hotel with private healthcare is probably a warming moment, a Britain that cares! They surely strive to see it from the perspective of a Briton stuck in an NHS queue in a dying town, but they cannot manage it: they do not have the empathy
This shit is going to kill them, they lack Theory of Mind. It will quite possibly put Farage in Downing Street
Maybe. By the way, has anyone stopped to consider what a Farage government will actually, in fact, really, in truth, DO about the boats?
You leave the ECHR. So what, exactly, follows? You implement a bit of Rwanda. And numbers continue to rise, and disappearances into the UK ether massively increase. What next?
I have never seen a discussion of the possibilities here. It is worth analysis. Do Reform want to talk about these concrete and precise things?
I imagine it would involve pushing the boats back to France, and if people drown HMG would cope
Then the boats would stop immediately - and they would
I am not - let us be clear - advocating this, let alone praising it. But in the end the influx cannot be sustained, let alone afforded. And boat-people drown all the time in the Channel (as they drown many times more in the Med)
OR they go for a Rwanda scheme but they really mean it and really do it, as Oz did. But that is harder for the UK thah Oz (but not impossible)
In a deep irony, if we do elect a Reform government in 2028 (with the Tories as junior partners?) they will likely be more in tune with a much more rightwing EU, from France to Italy to Austria and Denmark, and might end up doing this in concert with Europe
It doesn't matter what a Farage government would "actually, in fact, really, in truth, DO".
This is the absolute key lesson of Trump 2.0 win.
What matters is to appear to understand the pain and to promise that they are listening and will do something.
An astute point
Aso, a point which seems to evade all three "main parties" - Labour, Tories, LDs (and the Nats in Scotland). They pretend to "get it", but they don't act like they mean it. Their metropolitan social staus is too precious to them, cf Boris on migration
Reform look, at times, like they mean it. As Trump does. Trump doesn't give a fuck what the liberal elite thinks of him, what they say about him in the New York Times or on CNN, that is his exact appeal. He plays up to it, very cleverly. That's one reason why he is so deliberately offensive, to show how little he cares about elite liberal opinion
And it has worked, emphatically
This is all true, on the subject of how to achieve power. Others will notice it and adapt. It has a curious way of making so many other people, civilised, decent, thoughtful, look absolutely Yesterday's men and women, small, trivial, unimportant.
Like how the unprincipled, wonderfuly written drivel of the Speccie is so much more fun, and readable than the principled dullness of the New Statesman.
But waiting in the corner is the unanswered question: What would Reform, or what will Trump, actually DO.
The speed limit in Birmingham could be cut to 20mph under plans which would make it easier for any local authority across the country to impose lower limits in built-up areas.
A proposal to turn the whole city, with a population of 1.1 million, into a 20mph zone will be considered by Birmingham city council on Tuesday.
Crucially, the Labour-controlled council has asked the Department for Transport (DfT) for permission to erect signs at the city boundary, rather than spend millions of pounds on endless signs showing the 20mph limit on every single street.
In many cities, the 20mph limit is only in place where there is a sign. On some roads in London, there can be several signs in the space of just 100 metres, which is expensive for the council and an eyesore for residents.
Since 1935, Britain has had a 30mph speed limit in built-up areas, imposed in response to a death toll of 7,343 in the previous year on the roads, at a time when there was only a tenth as much traffic as today. By comparison, there were 1,645 road deaths last year, according to the DfT.
The assumption that drivers in Birmingham will follow the limits is bold.
They do have a reputation as distinctly terrible. Large proportions are uninsured. Still, it's good to see the malign influence of the devolved administrations bear down on the English.
If my experience of Birmingham is anything to go by I should say it will make little difference because traffic conditions generally make it impossible to go above 20mph anyway.
He's a greedy, pompous, lying, charmless, grifting, humourless, entitled, dismal, Woketastic anti-charisma machine, with weird little eyes and a stupid pursed mouth of disapproval, and he can't think of a Christmas movie he likes. He's Loathsome
I don't think he can turn this around, TBH
He's OK; but he is no good at hopey changey; maybe no-one can turn it around for now. If anyone has decent and doable ideas they are keeping quiet. There is only one other party of government and IIRC they weren't very effective in various ways right up to about July this year.
What he should do (perhaps now is too late) is basically from 5th July: "Your glass was half empty and getting emptier; it is now half full and getting fuller. And this is what 'full' looks like, and this is how we are going to get there". And he should still, every day, be explaining the enterprise and pointing out the signposts and mile stones and how marvellous we all are.....
I'm looking forward to his speech.
My sources tell me he's going to acknowledge that the Government has made a few steaks, but claim that they are the party best placed to liver the changes the UK needs. These changes will include new initiatives to strengthen the justice system by demanding all criminals are prosciutto to the full extent of the law, and that for crimes like burger, tripe will now mean tripe. He will announce new funding for the airforce, the navy, and the salami. The bulk of his speech will be taken up by our much cherished NHS, where he will claim that Labour's new approach of properly funding the service will result in plunging rates of mortadella, and a service fit for the future, biltong strong foundations. Building up to his crescendo, he will say that through the impenetrable overcast gloom of Britain in 2024, Labour are going to split the clouds like a blinding lard, ushering in a country all our kidneys will be proud to call their bone.
There won't be a dry eye in the house.
That's an offal lot to stuffing to one speech.
And that's without the extended sit down pork with members of the press afterwards.
He's a greedy, pompous, lying, charmless, grifting, humourless, entitled, dismal, Woketastic anti-charisma machine, with weird little eyes and a stupid pursed mouth of disapproval, and he can't think of a Christmas movie he likes. He's Loathsome
Might be worth starting to count the number of reboots this Starmer Government launches before they start merging into their only political strategy in the coming years....
He's a greedy, pompous, lying, charmless, grifting, humourless, entitled, dismal, Woketastic anti-charisma machine, with weird little eyes and a stupid pursed mouth of disapproval, and he can't think of a Christmas movie he likes. He's Loathsome
I don't think he can turn this around, TBH
He's OK; but he is no good at hopey changey; maybe no-one can turn it around for now. If anyone has decent and doable ideas they are keeping quiet. There is only one other party of government and IIRC they weren't very effective in various ways right up to about July this year.
What he should do (perhaps now is too late) is basically from 5th July: "Your glass was half empty and getting emptier; it is now half full and getting fuller. And this is what 'full' looks like, and this is how we are going to get there". And he should still, every day, be explaining the enterprise and pointing out the signposts and mile stones and how marvellous we all are.....
They do not understand how bad the boats thing is. They don't get it, on the necessary visceral level. For them the sight of an asylum seeker in a Marriott Hotel with private healthcare is probably a warming moment, a Britain that cares! They surely strive to see it from the perspective of a Briton stuck in an NHS queue in a dying town, but they cannot manage it: they do not have the empathy
This shit is going to kill them, they lack Theory of Mind. It will quite possibly put Farage in Downing Street
Maybe. By the way, has anyone stopped to consider what a Farage government will actually, in fact, really, in truth, DO about the boats?
You leave the ECHR. So what, exactly, follows? You implement a bit of Rwanda. And numbers continue to rise, and disappearances into the UK ether massively increase. What next?
I have never seen a discussion of the possibilities here. It is worth analysis. Do Reform want to talk about these concrete and precise things?
I imagine it would involve pushing the boats back to France, and if people drown HMG would cope
Then the boats would stop immediately - and they would
I am not - let us be clear - advocating this, let alone praising it. But in the end the influx cannot be sustained, let alone afforded. And boat-people drown all the time in the Channel (as they drown many times more in the Med)
OR they go for a Rwanda scheme but they really mean it and really do it, as Oz did. But that is harder for the UK thah Oz (but not impossible)
In a deep irony, if we do elect a Reform government in 2028 (with the Tories as junior partners?) they will likely be more in tune with a much more rightwing EU, from France to Italy to Austria and Denmark, and might end up doing this in concert with Europe
It doesn't matter what a Farage government would "actually, in fact, really, in truth, DO".
This is the absolute key lesson of Trump 2.0 win.
What matters is to appear to understand the pain and to promise that they are listening and will do something.
An astute point
Aso, a point which seems to evade all three "main parties" - Labour, Tories, LDs (and the Nats in Scotland). They pretend to "get it", but they don't act like they mean it. Their metropolitan social staus is too precious to them, cf Boris on migration
Reform look, at times, like they mean it. As Trump does. Trump doesn't give a fuck what the liberal elite thinks of him, what they say about him in the New York Times or on CNN, that is his exact appeal. He plays up to it, very cleverly. That's one reason why he is so deliberately offensive, to show how little he cares about elite liberal opinion
And it has worked, emphatically
This is all true, on the subject of how to achieve power. Others will notice it and adapt. It has a curious way of making so many other people, civilised, decent, thoughtful, look absolutely Yesterday's men and women, small, trivial, unimportant.
Like how the unprincipled, wonderfuly written drivel of the Speccie is so much more fun, and readable than the principled dullness of the New Statesman.
But waiting in the corner is the unanswered question: What would Reform, or what will Trump, actually DO.
"principled dullness" has led to net migration of almost a million a year, which is - to my mind - borderline treasonous, and I would literally put people in jail for it (including Boris). It has also led to the mass mutilation of kids via trans activism, which has become "received cenrist opinion", suich is the shifting of the Overton window
So I wildly disagree that modern Woke centrism is principled dullness. It is obscenely wrong on many levels, and it needs to be purged, with great vigour, from the western body politic
Ooof. Pete Hegseth - Trump's pick for Secretary of Defence has been denounced by his mum as an abuser of women in an email she sent him in 2018.
The guy presents as a right-wing nationalist Evangelical.
(Aside: Trump has refused to have the FBI background check his candidates.)
Son,
I have tried to keep quiet about your character and behavior, but after listening to the way you made Samantha feel today, I cannot stay silent. And as a woman and your mother I feel I must speak out..
You are an abuser of women — that is the ugly truth and I have no respect for any man that belittles, lies, cheats, sleeps around, and uses women for his own power and ego. You are that man (and have been for years) and as your mother, it pains me and embarrasses me to say that, but it is the sad, sad truth.
I am not a saint, far from it.. so don’t throw that in my face,. but your abuse over the years to women (dishonesty, sleeping around, betrayal, debasing, belittling) needs to be called out...
It's taken longer than many (including me) predicted, but the prediction IS now coming true
When have I ever said "they would never happen"? Indeed, I hoped (and hope) they will happen, as it would be rather neat for me.
But these geofenced robotaxis are rather limited compared to what you were claiming.
Well over ten years have passed, and lorry drivers still exist. In fact, there's no indication they're going away.
You were wrong. Own it.
I wasn't wrong, but nor were you. We were both half right. Self driving came later than I predicted and earlier than you did.
However, where I was entirely right is in machine translation, which -IIRC - you said was basically impossible for machines to truly master. lol
We now have translators which are literal Babel fish except arguably better
IIRC, you stated that in ten years, there would be no lorry drivers. You compounded that by saying that it was pointless training to be a lorry driver, as the jobs would go. Those 'predictions' were well over ten years ago.
And again, show where I said translation was 'basically impossible for machines to truly master'. Go on. Because I'm pretty sure I did not.
Yeah you did you stupid twat
Welsh: "Ie, wnest ti, ti'n dwp twp." Armenian: "Այո, արեցիր, հիմար ապուշ." (Ayo, arecir, himar apush.) Georgian: "ჰო, გააკეთე, შენ სულელი დებილი." (Ho, gaakete, shen suleli debili.) Mandarin: "是的，你做了，你这个蠢蛋。" (Shì de, nǐ zuò le, nǐ zhège chǔn dàn.) Hebrew: "כן, עשית את זה, טיפש מטומטם." (Ken, asita et ze, tipesh metumtam.)
How do you know that those are accurate? Though Ydoethur can help with No. 1.
I just checked: the translations are good
How did you do that? Ask it?
Are you really this fucking dim?
I checked with other, different AI translation devices. eg Google and iTranslate and the like
Now, maybe they are all conspiring to give us fake translations, even tho they are rival companies with absolutely no cause to do this (quite the opposite), or the translations are good
No: just checking. And a pretty good reply, thank you.
(I've been sceptical about machine translation for decades, but that was probably because of reading The Man in the High Castle as a teenager.)
Do you ever check the results from your calculator on your phone? Do you think "oooh, that might be wrong" and then go away and do the long division sums by hand?
QED
I would absolutely check the answer from an LLM on any subject. It is extremely likely to be factually incorrect.
Translation is likely to be the thing they're best at, what with LLM standing for "Large Language Model".
However, despite having lower approvals than Badenoch, Starmer is still seen as making the best Prime Minister compared to Kemi Badenoch. He has a 5% lead.
The most-picked option is “none of these”, at 39%.
Badenoch has a gravitas problem which will make it hard for her to hold the line against Reform. It's as if it doesn't matter very much what she thinks about anything.
I think it's more about policies - Jenrick's plan was to outflank Reform (ECHR, deportations that Farage had declared impossible). Badenoch decided to be very vague, and as a consequence she's now playing catch up. She needs to find a very good set of policies that are very eye-catching, quite distinct from Reform (perhaps too technical for Reform to be trusted to deliver?? - though I don't think the Tories have a massive edge on perceived professionalism over Reform any more), but credibly right wing.
Some areas to consider - go lower on tax than Reform. Go bigger on cuts than Reform. Adopt a more radical, clever and technically fleshed out approach to NHS reform than, um Reform. Rural - go for policies popular in the Shires. Tories will have to be the party of nimbyism. Pick some eye-catching infrastructure projects to back and get behind - potentially identify enough savings to complete HS2 as far as Crewe and Euston (though Euston will probably happen anyway). I don't actually agree with all these policies, but I think they might give the Tories a little breathing space from Reform.
No. Reform's job is to present palpably untrue falsely costed nonsense as policy. The Tories tried that, especially under Truss. It didn't work and it can't. Toryism is a party of potential government not populist protest.
Badenoch's job is to spend time being serious, and work on political philosophy, political principle and policy so that, for a change, they start having something interesting to say, and clarity of direction.
None of Reform's manifesto was 'palpably untrue', because economies are dynamic organisms based on hundreds of thousands of small decisions. The attacks on the manifesto included repeated claims that their cuts to corporation tax would 'cost more' than the £18bn they claimed, yet cuts to CT have always resulted in MORE CT being raised, and the recent increase has resulted in businesses and investment leaving the country. By the same token, Reeves' attacks on the UK's fiscal position and her misery budget have already resulted in our borrowing costs rising and her budget eroding.
Thankfully I don't think Badenoch will be particularly interested in your asinine 'advice' - if she is, she can look forward to great clarity of direction - toward 20 MPs.
Thanks. I don't think we are in for a dull political time. BTW is the systematic use of tax cuts to increase tax take was a general truth it would be the most popular and well tried policy on the planet as it has all winners and no losers.
The tax it could work for is IHT, which needs abolishing and replacing.
Britain was warned of Russian attempts to encourage Mauritian claims to the Chagos Islands, The Telegraph can reveal.
Government officials and ministers were told President Vladimir Putin’s officials attempted to stir up support among Mauritian politicians for a claim over the Chagos Islands as a way of undermining British interests, according to a source familiar with the discussions.
“Russia is doing more than supporting Mauritius – they are actively promoting the case for Mauritian sovereignty over the Chagos Islands”, a former Whitehall source said.
Wasn't a British/French lawyer (Philippe Sands) involved?
This is so fucking obvious. The Labour party, and the Tories before them, have been party to treason, in betraying UK and wider western interests, in the Indian Ocean, and all in favour of a tiny Chinese-influenced island nation which has literally zero historical connection to this strategic archipelago. It is bewilderingly stupid and wrong. AND it is not favoured by the Chagossians themselves
Let us pray that the combo of Trump and the new revelations puts paid to this insane "deal"
However, despite having lower approvals than Badenoch, Starmer is still seen as making the best Prime Minister compared to Kemi Badenoch. He has a 5% lead.
The most-picked option is “none of these”, at 39%.
Badenoch has a gravitas problem which will make it hard for her to hold the line against Reform. It's as if it doesn't matter very much what she thinks about anything.
I think it's more about policies - Jenrick's plan was to outflank Reform (ECHR, deportations that Farage had declared impossible). Badenoch decided to be very vague, and as a consequence she's now playing catch up. She needs to find a very good set of policies that are very eye-catching, quite distinct from Reform (perhaps too technical for Reform to be trusted to deliver?? - though I don't think the Tories have a massive edge on perceived professionalism over Reform any more), but credibly right wing.
Some areas to consider - go lower on tax than Reform. Go bigger on cuts than Reform. Adopt a more radical, clever and technically fleshed out approach to NHS reform than, um Reform. Rural - go for policies popular in the Shires. Tories will have to be the party of nimbyism. Pick some eye-catching infrastructure projects to back and get behind - potentially identify enough savings to complete HS2 as far as Crewe and Euston (though Euston will probably happen anyway). I don't actually agree with all these policies, but I think they might give the Tories a little breathing space from Reform.
No. Reform's job is to present palpably untrue falsely costed nonsense as policy. The Tories tried that, especially under Truss. It didn't work and it can't. Toryism is a party of potential government not populist protest.
Badenoch's job is to spend time being serious, and work on political philosophy, political principle and policy so that, for a change, they start having something interesting to say, and clarity of direction.
None of Reform's manifesto was 'palpably untrue', because economies are dynamic organisms based on hundreds of thousands of small decisions. The attacks on the manifesto included repeated claims that their cuts to corporation tax would 'cost more' than the £18bn they claimed, yet cuts to CT have always resulted in MORE CT being raised, and the recent increase has resulted in businesses and investment leaving the country. By the same token, Reeves' attacks on the UK's fiscal position and her misery budget have already resulted in our borrowing costs rising and her budget eroding.
Thankfully I don't think Badenoch will be particularly interested in your asinine 'advice' - if she is, she can look forward to great clarity of direction - toward 20 MPs.
Thanks. I don't think we are in for a dull political time. BTW is the systematic use of tax cuts to increase tax take was a general truth it would be the most popular and well tried policy on the planet as it has all winners and no losers.
The tax it could work for is IHT, which needs abolishing and replacing.
We tax things more that we want people to do less of, like smoking. We tax things less, on balance people will do more of them. How much does Ireland's policy of 15% CT 'cost' them in 'lost revenue' each year?
He's a greedy, pompous, lying, charmless, grifting, humourless, entitled, dismal, Woketastic anti-charisma machine, with weird little eyes and a stupid pursed mouth of disapproval, and he can't think of a Christmas movie he likes. He's Loathsome
I don't think he can turn this around, TBH
He's OK; but he is no good at hopey changey; maybe no-one can turn it around for now. If anyone has decent and doable ideas they are keeping quiet. There is only one other party of government and IIRC they weren't very effective in various ways right up to about July this year.
What he should do (perhaps now is too late) is basically from 5th July: "Your glass was half empty and getting emptier; it is now half full and getting fuller. And this is what 'full' looks like, and this is how we are going to get there". And he should still, every day, be explaining the enterprise and pointing out the signposts and mile stones and how marvellous we all are.....
I'm looking forward to his speech.
My sources tell me he's going to acknowledge that the Government has made a few steaks, but claim that they are the party best placed to liver the changes the UK needs. These changes will include new initiatives to strengthen the justice system by demanding all criminals are prosciutto to the full extent of the law, and that for crimes like burger, tripe will now mean tripe. He will announce new funding for the airforce, the navy, and the salami. The bulk of his speech will be taken up by our much cherished NHS, where he will claim that Labour's new approach of properly funding the service will result in plunging rates of mortadella, and a service fit for the future, biltong strong foundations. Building up to his crescendo, he will say that through the impenetrable overcast gloom of Britain in 2024, Labour are going to split the clouds like a blinding lard, ushering in a country all our kidneys will be proud to call their bone.
It's taken longer than many (including me) predicted, but the prediction IS now coming true
When have I ever said "they would never happen"? Indeed, I hoped (and hope) they will happen, as it would be rather neat for me.
But these geofenced robotaxis are rather limited compared to what you were claiming.
Well over ten years have passed, and lorry drivers still exist. In fact, there's no indication they're going away.
You were wrong. Own it.
I wasn't wrong, but nor were you. We were both half right. Self driving came later than I predicted and earlier than you did.
However, where I was entirely right is in machine translation, which -IIRC - you said was basically impossible for machines to truly master. lol
We now have translators which are literal Babel fish except arguably better
IIRC, you stated that in ten years, there would be no lorry drivers. You compounded that by saying that it was pointless training to be a lorry driver, as the jobs would go. Those 'predictions' were well over ten years ago.
And again, show where I said translation was 'basically impossible for machines to truly master'. Go on. Because I'm pretty sure I did not.
Yeah you did you stupid twat
Welsh: "Ie, wnest ti, ti'n dwp twp." Armenian: "Այո, արեցիր, հիմար ապուշ." (Ayo, arecir, himar apush.) Georgian: "ჰო, გააკეთე, შენ სულელი დებილი." (Ho, gaakete, shen suleli debili.) Mandarin: "是的，你做了，你这个蠢蛋。" (Shì de, nǐ zuò le, nǐ zhège chǔn dàn.) Hebrew: "כן, עשית את זה, טיפש מטומטם." (Ken, asita et ze, tipesh metumtam.)
How do you know that those are accurate? Though Ydoethur can help with No. 1.
I just checked: the translations are good
How did you do that? Ask it?
Are you really this fucking dim?
I checked with other, different AI translation devices. eg Google and iTranslate and the like
Now, maybe they are all conspiring to give us fake translations, even tho they are rival companies with absolutely no cause to do this (quite the opposite), or the translations are good
No: just checking. And a pretty good reply, thank you.
(I've been sceptical about machine translation for decades, but that was probably because of reading The Man in the High Castle as a teenager.)
Do you ever check the results from your calculator on your phone? Do you think "oooh, that might be wrong" and then go away and do the long division sums by hand?
QED
I would absolutely check the answer from an LLM on any subject. It is extremely likely to be factually incorrect.
This is arrant nonsense; sorry
Oh, you really don’t understand what an LLM is.
They hallucinate. As they develop, they hallucinate less. See, for instance, their increasing and precise skills at machine translation, now bordering on perfect
I absolutely understand what they do and what they will do
It's taken longer than many (including me) predicted, but the prediction IS now coming true
When have I ever said "they would never happen"? Indeed, I hoped (and hope) they will happen, as it would be rather neat for me.
But these geofenced robotaxis are rather limited compared to what you were claiming.
Well over ten years have passed, and lorry drivers still exist. In fact, there's no indication they're going away.
You were wrong. Own it.
I wasn't wrong, but nor were you. We were both half right. Self driving came later than I predicted and earlier than you did.
However, where I was entirely right is in machine translation, which -IIRC - you said was basically impossible for machines to truly master. lol
We now have translators which are literal Babel fish except arguably better
IIRC, you stated that in ten years, there would be no lorry drivers. You compounded that by saying that it was pointless training to be a lorry driver, as the jobs would go. Those 'predictions' were well over ten years ago.
And again, show where I said translation was 'basically impossible for machines to truly master'. Go on. Because I'm pretty sure I did not.
Yeah you did you stupid twat
Welsh: "Ie, wnest ti, ti'n dwp twp." Armenian: "Այո, արեցիր, հիմար ապուշ." (Ayo, arecir, himar apush.) Georgian: "ჰო, გააკეთე, შენ სულელი დებილი." (Ho, gaakete, shen suleli debili.) Mandarin: "是的，你做了，你这个蠢蛋。" (Shì de, nǐ zuò le, nǐ zhège chǔn dàn.) Hebrew: "כן, עשית את זה, טיפש מטומטם." (Ken, asita et ze, tipesh metumtam.)
How do you know that those are accurate? Though Ydoethur can help with No. 1.
I just checked: the translations are good
How did you do that? Ask it?
Are you really this fucking dim?
I checked with other, different AI translation devices. eg Google and iTranslate and the like
Now, maybe they are all conspiring to give us fake translations, even tho they are rival companies with absolutely no cause to do this (quite the opposite), or the translations are good
No: just checking. And a pretty good reply, thank you.
(I've been sceptical about machine translation for decades, but that was probably because of reading The Man in the High Castle as a teenager.)
Do you ever check the results from your calculator on your phone? Do you think "oooh, that might be wrong" and then go away and do the long division sums by hand?
QED
I would absolutely check the answer from an LLM on any subject. It is extremely likely to be factually incorrect.
Translation is likely to be the thing they're best at, what with LLM standing for "Large Language Model".
No. The standard warnings apply. You will get an answer that looks and feels right, and often it may be right. But the priority is the look and feel - there’s not concept of accuracy in there. See examples of LLMs and maths and code passim.
What if they really DO have a coup and no one believes it happened?
We can’t know until tomorrow. But the thing to watch is the reactions of countries with embassies/consulates in place and/or aid workers out there in numbers.
Can’t remember off hand if we or the rest of the west still have diplomatic relations.
If there really is a coup taking place by now we'd be seeing a flood of images and videos from locals in Damascus. We are not
My guess is there has perhaps been some sporadic gunfire from rebels in the city (because rebels clearly ARE on the march elsewhere in Syria) and they're trying to spook and roil the regime while Assad is away, by making it out to be much bigger
Assad does look imperilled, however
Weren't there reports he is in Moscow currently?
Apparently landed in Damascus several hours ago...
Ah ok thanks, I'm just catching up. Have rather selfishly been focused on living my life today.
Call yourself a PBer? There is no such thing as "life"
I dunno. We once had a poster called @SeanT who had about twelve of them.
I think he retired, having made his millions as an early investor in What3Words.
I heard he retired because he correctly predicted the pandemic about a month before everyone else. But the past is shrouded in myth
No, that was someone called eadric, as I recall
Just for the record, so that I can claim this one over @Leon - the US outbreak of avian flu now spreading widely to milking cows and some pigs is gonna be a bastard human pandemic in a year or so's time.
Yes. That virus is busy mutating and edging closer to fully making the transition to a human flu.
We are pretty good at flu vaccination. Prior to 2020 there was no corona virus vaccines in existence. I wouldnt worry. I’d wait until Feigel dingbat starts shrieking.
Yes. My understanding is that there's already an H5 vaccine. But there's likely to be a bit of a gap between it definitively making the species jump and a vaccine being widely available. A shorter time compared to Covid, but some time nevertheless.
Flu tends not to be infectious without symptoms. That was the real kicker for covid. It made isolation and track and trace very, very hard. We are all scarred by covid (some very much so, as X will show) but we need to remember that covid was a 1 in a century event. We’d be bloody unlucky to get two of those in five years.
I think you're being complacent here. The annual risk of a pandemic is probably growing (increased encroachment on animals harbouring nasty viruses, more people and global travel).
The good news is we have better vaccines and antivirals now and more coming...
Britain was warned of Russian attempts to encourage Mauritian claims to the Chagos Islands, The Telegraph can reveal.
Government officials and ministers were told President Vladimir Putin’s officials attempted to stir up support among Mauritian politicians for a claim over the Chagos Islands as a way of undermining British interests, according to a source familiar with the discussions.
“Russia is doing more than supporting Mauritius – they are actively promoting the case for Mauritian sovereignty over the Chagos Islands”, a former Whitehall source said.
Wasn't a British/French lawyer (Philippe Sands) involved?
This is so fucking obvious. The Labour party, and the Tories before them, have been party to treason, in betraying UK and wider western interests, in the Indian Ocean, and all in favour of a tiny Chinese-influenced island nation which has literally zero historical connection to this strategic archipelago. It is bewilderingly stupid and wrong. AND it is not favoured by the Chagossians themselves
Let us pray that the combo of Trump and the new revelations puts paid to this insane "deal"
One thing that Chagos and assisted suicide have in common is the presence of a well-organised group of lawyers and NGOs with connections to Starmer who have been pushing the issue for years.
He's a greedy, pompous, lying, charmless, grifting, humourless, entitled, dismal, Woketastic anti-charisma machine, with weird little eyes and a stupid pursed mouth of disapproval, and he can't think of a Christmas movie he likes. He's Loathsome
I don't think he can turn this around, TBH
He's OK; but he is no good at hopey changey; maybe no-one can turn it around for now. If anyone has decent and doable ideas they are keeping quiet. There is only one other party of government and IIRC they weren't very effective in various ways right up to about July this year.
What he should do (perhaps now is too late) is basically from 5th July: "Your glass was half empty and getting emptier; it is now half full and getting fuller. And this is what 'full' looks like, and this is how we are going to get there". And he should still, every day, be explaining the enterprise and pointing out the signposts and mile stones and how marvellous we all are.....
They do not understand how bad the boats thing is. They don't get it, on the necessary visceral level. For them the sight of an asylum seeker in a Marriott Hotel with private healthcare is probably a warming moment, a Britain that cares! They surely strive to see it from the perspective of a Briton stuck in an NHS queue in a dying town, but they cannot manage it: they do not have the empathy
This shit is going to kill them, they lack Theory of Mind. It will quite possibly put Farage in Downing Street
Maybe. By the way, has anyone stopped to consider what a Farage government will actually, in fact, really, in truth, DO about the boats?
You leave the ECHR. So what, exactly, follows? You implement a bit of Rwanda. And numbers continue to rise, and disappearances into the UK ether massively increase. What next?
I have never seen a discussion of the possibilities here. It is worth analysis. Do Reform want to talk about these concrete and precise things?
I imagine it would involve pushing the boats back to France, and if people drown HMG would cope
Then the boats would stop immediately - and they would
I am not - let us be clear - advocating this, let alone praising it. But in the end the influx cannot be sustained, let alone afforded. And boat-people drown all the time in the Channel (as they drown many times more in the Med)
OR they go for a Rwanda scheme but they really mean it and really do it, as Oz did. But that is harder for the UK thah Oz (but not impossible)
In a deep irony, if we do elect a Reform government in 2028 (with the Tories as junior partners?) they will likely be more in tune with a much more rightwing EU, from France to Italy to Austria and Denmark, and might end up doing this in concert with Europe
It doesn't matter what a Farage government would "actually, in fact, really, in truth, DO".
This is the absolute key lesson of Trump 2.0 win.
What matters is to appear to understand the pain and to promise that they are listening and will do something.
An astute point
Aso, a point which seems to evade all three "main parties" - Labour, Tories, LDs (and the Nats in Scotland). They pretend to "get it", but they don't act like they mean it. Their metropolitan social staus is too precious to them, cf Boris on migration
Reform look, at times, like they mean it. As Trump does. Trump doesn't give a fuck what the liberal elite thinks of him, what they say about him in the New York Times or on CNN, that is his exact appeal. He plays up to it, very cleverly. That's one reason why he is so deliberately offensive, to show how little he cares about elite liberal opinion
And it has worked, emphatically
This is all true, on the subject of how to achieve power. Others will notice it and adapt. It has a curious way of making so many other people, civilised, decent, thoughtful, look absolutely Yesterday's men and women, small, trivial, unimportant.
Like how the unprincipled, wonderfuly written drivel of the Speccie is so much more fun, and readable than the principled dullness of the New Statesman.
But waiting in the corner is the unanswered question: What would Reform, or what will Trump, actually DO.
"principled dullness" has led to net migration of almost a million a year, which is - to my mind - borderline treasonous, and I would literally put people in jail for it (including Boris). It has also led to the mass mutilation of kids via trans activism, which has become "received cenrist opinion", suich is the shifting of the Overton window
So I wildly disagree that modern Woke centrism is principled dullness. It is obscenely wrong on many levels, and it needs to be purged, with great vigour, from the western body politic
The English language has about 800,000 words. In describing the Tory government in charge of migration until July as 'principled' you use the 800,000th I would apply, and 'dull' comes in at 799,999.
Apart from that, I still think the NS is principled and dull. Most of its principles are dull too. If Toryism currently has distinctive principles, I have no idea what they are and would like to know.
It's taken longer than many (including me) predicted, but the prediction IS now coming true
When have I ever said "they would never happen"? Indeed, I hoped (and hope) they will happen, as it would be rather neat for me.
But these geofenced robotaxis are rather limited compared to what you were claiming.
Well over ten years have passed, and lorry drivers still exist. In fact, there's no indication they're going away.
You were wrong. Own it.
I wasn't wrong, but nor were you. We were both half right. Self driving came later than I predicted and earlier than you did.
However, where I was entirely right is in machine translation, which -IIRC - you said was basically impossible for machines to truly master. lol
We now have translators which are literal Babel fish except arguably better
IIRC, you stated that in ten years, there would be no lorry drivers. You compounded that by saying that it was pointless training to be a lorry driver, as the jobs would go. Those 'predictions' were well over ten years ago.
And again, show where I said translation was 'basically impossible for machines to truly master'. Go on. Because I'm pretty sure I did not.
Yeah you did you stupid twat
Welsh: "Ie, wnest ti, ti'n dwp twp." Armenian: "Այո, արեցիր, հիմար ապուշ." (Ayo, arecir, himar apush.) Georgian: "ჰო, გააკეთე, შენ სულელი დებილი." (Ho, gaakete, shen suleli debili.) Mandarin: "是的，你做了，你这个蠢蛋。" (Shì de, nǐ zuò le, nǐ zhège chǔn dàn.) Hebrew: "כן, עשית את זה, טיפש מטומטם." (Ken, asita et ze, tipesh metumtam.)
How do you know that those are accurate? Though Ydoethur can help with No. 1.
I just checked: the translations are good
How did you do that? Ask it?
Are you really this fucking dim?
I checked with other, different AI translation devices. eg Google and iTranslate and the like
Now, maybe they are all conspiring to give us fake translations, even tho they are rival companies with absolutely no cause to do this (quite the opposite), or the translations are good
No: just checking. And a pretty good reply, thank you.
(I've been sceptical about machine translation for decades, but that was probably because of reading The Man in the High Castle as a teenager.)
Do you ever check the results from your calculator on your phone? Do you think "oooh, that might be wrong" and then go away and do the long division sums by hand?
QED
I would absolutely check the answer from an LLM on any subject. It is extremely likely to be factually incorrect.
Translation is likely to be the thing they're best at, what with LLM standing for "Large Language Model".
No. The standard warnings apply. You will get an answer that looks and feels right, and often it may be right. But the priority is the look and feel - there’s not concept of accuracy in there. See examples of LLMs and maths and code passim.
What if they really DO have a coup and no one believes it happened?
We can’t know until tomorrow. But the thing to watch is the reactions of countries with embassies/consulates in place and/or aid workers out there in numbers.
Can’t remember off hand if we or the rest of the west still have diplomatic relations.
If there really is a coup taking place by now we'd be seeing a flood of images and videos from locals in Damascus. We are not
My guess is there has perhaps been some sporadic gunfire from rebels in the city (because rebels clearly ARE on the march elsewhere in Syria) and they're trying to spook and roil the regime while Assad is away, by making it out to be much bigger
Assad does look imperilled, however
Weren't there reports he is in Moscow currently?
Apparently landed in Damascus several hours ago...
Ah ok thanks, I'm just catching up. Have rather selfishly been focused on living my life today.
Call yourself a PBer? There is no such thing as "life"
I dunno. We once had a poster called @SeanT who had about twelve of them.
I think he retired, having made his millions as an early investor in What3Words.
I heard he retired because he correctly predicted the pandemic about a month before everyone else. But the past is shrouded in myth
No, that was someone called eadric, as I recall
Just for the record, so that I can claim this one over @Leon - the US outbreak of avian flu now spreading widely to milking cows and some pigs is gonna be a bastard human pandemic in a year or so's time.
Yes. That virus is busy mutating and edging closer to fully making the transition to a human flu.
We are pretty good at flu vaccination. Prior to 2020 there was no corona virus vaccines in existence. I wouldnt worry. I’d wait until Feigel dingbat starts shrieking.
Yes. My understanding is that there's already an H5 vaccine. But there's likely to be a bit of a gap between it definitively making the species jump and a vaccine being widely available. A shorter time compared to Covid, but some time nevertheless.
Flu tends not to be infectious without symptoms. That was the real kicker for covid. It made isolation and track and trace very, very hard. We are all scarred by covid (some very much so, as X will show) but we need to remember that covid was a 1 in a century event. We’d be bloody unlucky to get two of those in five years.
I think you're being complacent here. The annual risk of a pandemic is probably growing (increased encroachment on animals harbouring nasty viruses, more people and global travel).
The good news is we have better vaccines and antivirals now and more coming...
The bad news is that anti-vaxers and anti-sciencers have never had such massive influence in the world.
We are beginning a new Dark Age of unreason and superstition.
He's a greedy, pompous, lying, charmless, grifting, humourless, entitled, dismal, Woketastic anti-charisma machine, with weird little eyes and a stupid pursed mouth of disapproval, and he can't think of a Christmas movie he likes. He's Loathsome
I don't think he can turn this around, TBH
He's OK; but he is no good at hopey changey; maybe no-one can turn it around for now. If anyone has decent and doable ideas they are keeping quiet. There is only one other party of government and IIRC they weren't very effective in various ways right up to about July this year.
What he should do (perhaps now is too late) is basically from 5th July: "Your glass was half empty and getting emptier; it is now half full and getting fuller. And this is what 'full' looks like, and this is how we are going to get there". And he should still, every day, be explaining the enterprise and pointing out the signposts and mile stones and how marvellous we all are.....
I'm looking forward to his speech.
My sources tell me he's going to acknowledge that the Government has made a few steaks, but claim that they are the party best placed to liver the changes the UK needs. These changes will include new initiatives to strengthen the justice system by demanding all criminals are prosciutto to the full extent of the law, and that for crimes like burger, tripe will now mean tripe. He will announce new funding for the airforce, the navy, and the salami. The bulk of his speech will be taken up by our much cherished NHS, where he will claim that Labour's new approach of properly funding the service will result in plunging rates of mortadella, and a service fit for the future, biltong strong foundations. Building up to his crescendo, he will say that through the impenetrable overcast gloom of Britain in 2024, Labour are going to split the clouds like a blinding lard, ushering in a country all our kidneys will be proud to call their bone.
After 13 hours and 15 minutes or so of counting, 24 hours and a quarter since voting stopped, the first constituency has finished counting. Take a bow Meath West (3 seats, 12 candidates).
It's taken longer than many (including me) predicted, but the prediction IS now coming true
When have I ever said "they would never happen"? Indeed, I hoped (and hope) they will happen, as it would be rather neat for me.
But these geofenced robotaxis are rather limited compared to what you were claiming.
Well over ten years have passed, and lorry drivers still exist. In fact, there's no indication they're going away.
You were wrong. Own it.
I wasn't wrong, but nor were you. We were both half right. Self driving came later than I predicted and earlier than you did.
However, where I was entirely right is in machine translation, which -IIRC - you said was basically impossible for machines to truly master. lol
We now have translators which are literal Babel fish except arguably better
IIRC, you stated that in ten years, there would be no lorry drivers. You compounded that by saying that it was pointless training to be a lorry driver, as the jobs would go. Those 'predictions' were well over ten years ago.
And again, show where I said translation was 'basically impossible for machines to truly master'. Go on. Because I'm pretty sure I did not.
Yeah you did you stupid twat
Welsh: "Ie, wnest ti, ti'n dwp twp." Armenian: "Այո, արեցիր, հիմար ապուշ." (Ayo, arecir, himar apush.) Georgian: "ჰო, გააკეთე, შენ სულელი დებილი." (Ho, gaakete, shen suleli debili.) Mandarin: "是的，你做了，你这个蠢蛋。" (Shì de, nǐ zuò le, nǐ zhège chǔn dàn.) Hebrew: "כן, עשית את זה, טיפש מטומטם." (Ken, asita et ze, tipesh metumtam.)
How do you know that those are accurate? Though Ydoethur can help with No. 1.
I just checked: the translations are good
How did you do that? Ask it?
Are you really this fucking dim?
I checked with other, different AI translation devices. eg Google and iTranslate and the like
Now, maybe they are all conspiring to give us fake translations, even tho they are rival companies with absolutely no cause to do this (quite the opposite), or the translations are good
No: just checking. And a pretty good reply, thank you.
(I've been sceptical about machine translation for decades, but that was probably because of reading The Man in the High Castle as a teenager.)
Do you ever check the results from your calculator on your phone? Do you think "oooh, that might be wrong" and then go away and do the long division sums by hand?
QED
I would absolutely check the answer from an LLM on any subject. It is extremely likely to be factually incorrect.
Translation is likely to be the thing they're best at, what with LLM standing for "Large Language Model".
No. The standard warnings apply. You will get an answer that looks and feels right, and often it may be right. But the priority is the look and feel - there’s not concept of accuracy in there. See examples of LLMs and maths and code passim.
And how does a human differ?
I suppose the difference is that a human feels shame and cares about its reputation.
It's taken longer than many (including me) predicted, but the prediction IS now coming true
When have I ever said "they would never happen"? Indeed, I hoped (and hope) they will happen, as it would be rather neat for me.
But these geofenced robotaxis are rather limited compared to what you were claiming.
Well over ten years have passed, and lorry drivers still exist. In fact, there's no indication they're going away.
You were wrong. Own it.
I wasn't wrong, but nor were you. We were both half right. Self driving came later than I predicted and earlier than you did.
However, where I was entirely right is in machine translation, which -IIRC - you said was basically impossible for machines to truly master. lol
We now have translators which are literal Babel fish except arguably better
IIRC, you stated that in ten years, there would be no lorry drivers. You compounded that by saying that it was pointless training to be a lorry driver, as the jobs would go. Those 'predictions' were well over ten years ago.
And again, show where I said translation was 'basically impossible for machines to truly master'. Go on. Because I'm pretty sure I did not.
Yeah you did you stupid twat
Welsh: "Ie, wnest ti, ti'n dwp twp." Armenian: "Այո, արեցիր, հիմար ապուշ." (Ayo, arecir, himar apush.) Georgian: "ჰო, გააკეთე, შენ სულელი დებილი." (Ho, gaakete, shen suleli debili.) Mandarin: "是的，你做了，你这个蠢蛋。" (Shì de, nǐ zuò le, nǐ zhège chǔn dàn.) Hebrew: "כן, עשית את זה, טיפש מטומטם." (Ken, asita et ze, tipesh metumtam.)
How do you know that those are accurate? Though Ydoethur can help with No. 1.
I just checked: the translations are good
How did you do that? Ask it?
Are you really this fucking dim?
I checked with other, different AI translation devices. eg Google and iTranslate and the like
Now, maybe they are all conspiring to give us fake translations, even tho they are rival companies with absolutely no cause to do this (quite the opposite), or the translations are good
No: just checking. And a pretty good reply, thank you.
(I've been sceptical about machine translation for decades, but that was probably because of reading The Man in the High Castle as a teenager.)
Do you ever check the results from your calculator on your phone? Do you think "oooh, that might be wrong" and then go away and do the long division sums by hand?
QED
I would absolutely check the answer from an LLM on any subject. It is extremely likely to be factually incorrect.
Translation is likely to be the thing they're best at, what with LLM standing for "Large Language Model".
No. The standard warnings apply. You will get an answer that looks and feels right, and often it may be right. But the priority is the look and feel - there’s not concept of accuracy in there. See examples of LLMs and maths and code passim.
And how does a human differ?
It is conscious and has actual intelligence allowing for the application of logic to new problems. It is not just making the new answer look very much like the old answer.
It's taken longer than many (including me) predicted, but the prediction IS now coming true
When have I ever said "they would never happen"? Indeed, I hoped (and hope) they will happen, as it would be rather neat for me.
But these geofenced robotaxis are rather limited compared to what you were claiming.
Well over ten years have passed, and lorry drivers still exist. In fact, there's no indication they're going away.
You were wrong. Own it.
I wasn't wrong, but nor were you. We were both half right. Self driving came later than I predicted and earlier than you did.
However, where I was entirely right is in machine translation, which -IIRC - you said was basically impossible for machines to truly master. lol
We now have translators which are literal Babel fish except arguably better
IIRC, you stated that in ten years, there would be no lorry drivers. You compounded that by saying that it was pointless training to be a lorry driver, as the jobs would go. Those 'predictions' were well over ten years ago.
And again, show where I said translation was 'basically impossible for machines to truly master'. Go on. Because I'm pretty sure I did not.
Yeah you did you stupid twat
Welsh: "Ie, wnest ti, ti'n dwp twp." Armenian: "Այո, արեցիր, հիմար ապուշ." (Ayo, arecir, himar apush.) Georgian: "ჰო, გააკეთე, შენ სულელი დებილი." (Ho, gaakete, shen suleli debili.) Mandarin: "是的，你做了，你这个蠢蛋。" (Shì de, nǐ zuò le, nǐ zhège chǔn dàn.) Hebrew: "כן, עשית את זה, טיפש מטומטם." (Ken, asita et ze, tipesh metumtam.)
How do you know that those are accurate? Though Ydoethur can help with No. 1.
I just checked: the translations are good
How did you do that? Ask it?
Are you really this fucking dim?
I checked with other, different AI translation devices. eg Google and iTranslate and the like
Now, maybe they are all conspiring to give us fake translations, even tho they are rival companies with absolutely no cause to do this (quite the opposite), or the translations are good
No: just checking. And a pretty good reply, thank you.
(I've been sceptical about machine translation for decades, but that was probably because of reading The Man in the High Castle as a teenager.)
Do you ever check the results from your calculator on your phone? Do you think "oooh, that might be wrong" and then go away and do the long division sums by hand?
QED
I would absolutely check the answer from an LLM on any subject. It is extremely likely to be factually incorrect.
Translation is likely to be the thing they're best at, what with LLM standing for "Large Language Model".
No. The standard warnings apply. You will get an answer that looks and feels right, and often it may be right. But the priority is the look and feel - there’s not concept of accuracy in there. See examples of LLMs and maths and code passim.
And how does a human differ?
I suppose the difference is that a human feels shame and cares about its reputation.
I present Prof Peston....the human version of ChatGPT v0.1....
Telegraph Pensioner who broke hip told by 999 she was ‘not a priority’ The 95-year-old waited five hours in the cold for an ambulance which left her husband with a chest infection ... Mr Soanes said he is now too unwell to visit his wife in hospital due to a chest infection he developed after the five-hour wait outside.
It's taken longer than many (including me) predicted, but the prediction IS now coming true
When have I ever said "they would never happen"? Indeed, I hoped (and hope) they will happen, as it would be rather neat for me.
But these geofenced robotaxis are rather limited compared to what you were claiming.
Well over ten years have passed, and lorry drivers still exist. In fact, there's no indication they're going away.
You were wrong. Own it.
I wasn't wrong, but nor were you. We were both half right. Self driving came later than I predicted and earlier than you did.
However, where I was entirely right is in machine translation, which -IIRC - you said was basically impossible for machines to truly master. lol
We now have translators which are literal Babel fish except arguably better
IIRC, you stated that in ten years, there would be no lorry drivers. You compounded that by saying that it was pointless training to be a lorry driver, as the jobs would go. Those 'predictions' were well over ten years ago.
And again, show where I said translation was 'basically impossible for machines to truly master'. Go on. Because I'm pretty sure I did not.
Yeah you did you stupid twat
Welsh: "Ie, wnest ti, ti'n dwp twp." Armenian: "Այո, արեցիր, հիմար ապուշ." (Ayo, arecir, himar apush.) Georgian: "ჰო, გააკეთე, შენ სულელი დებილი." (Ho, gaakete, shen suleli debili.) Mandarin: "是的，你做了，你这个蠢蛋。" (Shì de, nǐ zuò le, nǐ zhège chǔn dàn.) Hebrew: "כן, עשית את זה, טיפש מטומטם." (Ken, asita et ze, tipesh metumtam.)
How do you know that those are accurate? Though Ydoethur can help with No. 1.
I just checked: the translations are good
How did you do that? Ask it?
Are you really this fucking dim?
I checked with other, different AI translation devices. eg Google and iTranslate and the like
Now, maybe they are all conspiring to give us fake translations, even tho they are rival companies with absolutely no cause to do this (quite the opposite), or the translations are good
No: just checking. And a pretty good reply, thank you.
(I've been sceptical about machine translation for decades, but that was probably because of reading The Man in the High Castle as a teenager.)
Do you ever check the results from your calculator on your phone? Do you think "oooh, that might be wrong" and then go away and do the long division sums by hand?
QED
I would absolutely check the answer from an LLM on any subject. It is extremely likely to be factually incorrect.
Translation is likely to be the thing they're best at, what with LLM standing for "Large Language Model".
No. The standard warnings apply. You will get an answer that looks and feels right, and often it may be right. But the priority is the look and feel - there’s not concept of accuracy in there. See examples of LLMs and maths and code passim.
And how does a human differ?
It is conscious and has actual intelligence allowing for the application of logic to new problems. It is not just making the new answer look very much like the old answer.
Yeah, you have no idea what you're talking about. Next
It's taken longer than many (including me) predicted, but the prediction IS now coming true
When have I ever said "they would never happen"? Indeed, I hoped (and hope) they will happen, as it would be rather neat for me.
But these geofenced robotaxis are rather limited compared to what you were claiming.
Well over ten years have passed, and lorry drivers still exist. In fact, there's no indication they're going away.
You were wrong. Own it.
I wasn't wrong, but nor were you. We were both half right. Self driving came later than I predicted and earlier than you did.
However, where I was entirely right is in machine translation, which -IIRC - you said was basically impossible for machines to truly master. lol
We now have translators which are literal Babel fish except arguably better
IIRC, you stated that in ten years, there would be no lorry drivers. You compounded that by saying that it was pointless training to be a lorry driver, as the jobs would go. Those 'predictions' were well over ten years ago.
And again, show where I said translation was 'basically impossible for machines to truly master'. Go on. Because I'm pretty sure I did not.
Yeah you did you stupid twat
Welsh: "Ie, wnest ti, ti'n dwp twp." Armenian: "Այո, արեցիր, հիմար ապուշ." (Ayo, arecir, himar apush.) Georgian: "ჰო, გააკეთე, შენ სულელი დებილი." (Ho, gaakete, shen suleli debili.) Mandarin: "是的，你做了，你这个蠢蛋。" (Shì de, nǐ zuò le, nǐ zhège chǔn dàn.) Hebrew: "כן, עשית את זה, טיפש מטומטם." (Ken, asita et ze, tipesh metumtam.)
How do you know that those are accurate? Though Ydoethur can help with No. 1.
I just checked: the translations are good
How did you do that? Ask it?
Are you really this fucking dim?
I checked with other, different AI translation devices. eg Google and iTranslate and the like
Now, maybe they are all conspiring to give us fake translations, even tho they are rival companies with absolutely no cause to do this (quite the opposite), or the translations are good
No: just checking. And a pretty good reply, thank you.
(I've been sceptical about machine translation for decades, but that was probably because of reading The Man in the High Castle as a teenager.)
Do you ever check the results from your calculator on your phone? Do you think "oooh, that might be wrong" and then go away and do the long division sums by hand?
QED
I would absolutely check the answer from an LLM on any subject. It is extremely likely to be factually incorrect.
Translation is likely to be the thing they're best at, what with LLM standing for "Large Language Model".
No. The standard warnings apply. You will get an answer that looks and feels right, and often it may be right. But the priority is the look and feel - there’s not concept of accuracy in there. See examples of LLMs and maths and code passim.
And how does a human differ?
It is conscious and has actual intelligence ...
... some humans very much challenge that assumption.
Liz Sly @lizsly.bsky.social · 2h Events are moving fast in Syria: -The rebels have reached Hama, a day after taking Aleppo -Protests & attacks reported around Syria -Rumors of gunfights in Damascus -Assad surfaces to call Iraq’s PM. Asking for militia help? -Russia has fired the top general in Syria -Iran’s FM due in Damascus Sun
It's taken longer than many (including me) predicted, but the prediction IS now coming true
When have I ever said "they would never happen"? Indeed, I hoped (and hope) they will happen, as it would be rather neat for me.
But these geofenced robotaxis are rather limited compared to what you were claiming.
Well over ten years have passed, and lorry drivers still exist. In fact, there's no indication they're going away.
You were wrong. Own it.
I wasn't wrong, but nor were you. We were both half right. Self driving came later than I predicted and earlier than you did.
However, where I was entirely right is in machine translation, which -IIRC - you said was basically impossible for machines to truly master. lol
We now have translators which are literal Babel fish except arguably better
IIRC, you stated that in ten years, there would be no lorry drivers. You compounded that by saying that it was pointless training to be a lorry driver, as the jobs would go. Those 'predictions' were well over ten years ago.
And again, show where I said translation was 'basically impossible for machines to truly master'. Go on. Because I'm pretty sure I did not.
Yeah you did you stupid twat
Welsh: "Ie, wnest ti, ti'n dwp twp." Armenian: "Այո, արեցիր, հիմար ապուշ." (Ayo, arecir, himar apush.) Georgian: "ჰო, გააკეთე, შენ სულელი დებილი." (Ho, gaakete, shen suleli debili.) Mandarin: "是的，你做了，你这个蠢蛋。" (Shì de, nǐ zuò le, nǐ zhège chǔn dàn.) Hebrew: "כן, עשית את זה, טיפש מטומטם." (Ken, asita et ze, tipesh metumtam.)
How do you know that those are accurate? Though Ydoethur can help with No. 1.
I just checked: the translations are good
How did you do that? Ask it?
Are you really this fucking dim?
I checked with other, different AI translation devices. eg Google and iTranslate and the like
Now, maybe they are all conspiring to give us fake translations, even tho they are rival companies with absolutely no cause to do this (quite the opposite), or the translations are good
No: just checking. And a pretty good reply, thank you.
(I've been sceptical about machine translation for decades, but that was probably because of reading The Man in the High Castle as a teenager.)
Do you ever check the results from your calculator on your phone? Do you think "oooh, that might be wrong" and then go away and do the long division sums by hand?
QED
I certainly do a mental arithmetic check to make sure it seems about right. That's in case of keying errors, but there was one model of scientific calculator in the 1980s or so that gave wrong answers if the battery was a little low.
Comments
This shit is going to kill them, they lack Theory of Mind. It will quite possibly put Farage in Downing Street
The difference now is that that group of informed opinion is in turmoil. Read the New Statesman, the house journal of the social democrat centre left (someone has to). It is full of writers, mostly worthy and dull, who are utterly devoid of ideas and hope and have no great thoughts about where we are going let alone how we are going to get there.
For a moment I thought Leon had got you all reading Hackett's Third World War scenario.
https://www.specsavers.co.uk/
It might be named for a foreigner, but it's as Northerner (or, for me, North Southerner) as a SI unit can get. Named by two Brits and defined by the British Association for the Advancement of Science a century and a half ago. At a meeting in Manc no less, if the printed report is to be trusted.
Badenoch's job is to spend time being serious, and work on political philosophy, political principle and policy so that, for a change, they start having something interesting to say, and clarity of direction.
It's a shame Starmer has suddenly got fat, old and creepy, because about five years ago he was quite notably handsome
In a world where Britain has little to boast about, we could have had the most attractive "governing party and opposition leaders" in the world. I mean, yeah OK, Canada has Justin (who is very good looking), and France has Macron (pretty boy), but they don't face attractive opponents
Oh well. It's a bit like us missing out on the whole electric vehicle revolution. Close, but no Cohiba
maligninfluence of the devolved administrations bear down on the English.I checked with other, different AI translation devices. eg Google and iTranslate and the like
Now, maybe they are all conspiring to give us fake translations, even tho they are rival companies with absolutely no cause to do this (quite the opposite), or the translations are good
Night all.
(I've been sceptical about machine translation for decades, but that was probably because of reading The Man in the High Castle as a teenager.)
edit - Snap!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tog_(unit)?wprov=sfla1
I do think the tog rating of the earth's atmosphere should be a key global warming metric. The change is fractional, but then again the atmosphere is holding a temperature difference of about 300°.
QED
We are all scarred by covid (some very much so, as X will show) but we need to remember that covid was a 1 in a century event. We’d be bloody unlucky to get two of those in five years.
20mph limits just make those crashes a bit less likely to kill someone. It's far better to have fewer crashes in the first place, but no government is going to take any substantive steps on that because there are a lot of drivers and most of them have a vote.
In the UK it is more difficult to get a licence for a 125cc moped than a 3-ton SUV...
It was known back then to be a sign of lustiness.
The guy presents as a right-wing nationalist Evangelical.
(Aside: Trump has refused to have the FBI background check his candidates.)
Son,
I have tried to keep quiet about your character and behavior, but after listening to the way you made Samantha feel today, I cannot stay silent. And as a woman and your mother I feel I must speak out..
You are an abuser of women — that is the ugly truth and I have no respect for any man that belittles, lies, cheats, sleeps around, and uses women for his own power and ego. You are that man (and have been for years) and as your mother, it pains me and embarrasses me to say that, but it is the sad, sad truth.
I am not a saint, far from it.. so don’t throw that in my face,. but your abuse over the years to women (dishonesty, sleeping around, betrayal, debasing, belittling) needs to be called out...
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/29/us/politics/hegseth-email-text.html
You leave the ECHR. So what, exactly, follows?
You implement a bit of Rwanda. And numbers continue to rise, and disappearances into the UK ether massively increase. What next?
I have never seen a discussion of the possibilities here. It is worth analysis. Do Reform want to talk about these concrete and precise things?
It is a real thing. Not a fetish I obsessively share, but I don't mind it at all. Possibly my sexiest ever girlfriend had the gap
My sources tell me he's going to acknowledge that the Government has made a few steaks, but claim that they are the party best placed to liver the changes the UK needs. These changes will include new initiatives to strengthen the justice system by demanding all criminals are prosciutto to the full extent of the law, and that for crimes like burger, tripe will now mean tripe. He will announce new funding for the airforce, the navy, and the salami. The bulk of his speech will be taken up by our much cherished NHS, where he will claim that Labour's new approach of properly funding the service will result in plunging rates of mortadella, and a service fit for the future, biltong strong foundations. Building up to his crescendo, he will say that through the impenetrable overcast gloom of Britain in 2024, Labour are going to split the clouds like a blinding lard, ushering in a country all our kidneys will be proud to call their bone.
There won't be a dry eye in the house.
EDIT: They've decided to stop counting for the night in that constituency (Wicklow) and restart tomorrow morning at 9am (do none of the counters need to go to Mass?)
Then the boats would stop immediately - and they would
I am not - let us be clear - advocating this, let alone praising it. But in the end the influx cannot be sustained, let alone afforded. And boat-people drown all the time in the Channel (as they drown many times more in the Med)
OR they go for a Rwanda scheme but they really mean it and really do it, as Oz did. But that is harder for the UK thah Oz (but not impossible)
In a deep irony, if we do elect a Reform government in 2028 (with the Tories as junior partners?) they will likely be more in tune with a much more rightwing EU, from France to Italy to Austria and Denmark, and might end up doing this in concert with Europe
All sorts of life-endangering H&S violations.
This is the absolute key lesson of Trump 2.0 win.
What matters is to appear to understand the pain and to promise that they are listening and will do something.
And who are you to say the "people" are wrong?
In the space of time it took me to have a beer and some pizza, PB has swung from 'OMG, this is it - there's a massive coup against Assad and Syria and possibly Putin will fall' to 'are gap teeth hot or not?'
Never change.
And while the blame for Labour slipping into second place in some recent polls can be squarely laid at Starmer and Reeves doors, if that polling trend continues it will certainly be helpful to Badenoch's leadership in the longer term too, especially if the Conservatives continue to make weekly gains over Labour in local by-elections.
Aso, a point which seems to evade all three "main parties" - Labour, Tories, LDs (and the Nats in Scotland). They pretend to "get it", but they don't act like they mean it. Their metropolitan social staus is too precious to them, cf Boris on migration
Reform look, at times, like they mean it. As Trump does. Trump doesn't give a fuck what the liberal elite thinks of him, what they say about him in the New York Times or on CNN, that is his exact appeal. He plays up to it, very cleverly. That's one reason why he is so deliberately offensive, to show how little he cares about elite liberal opinion
And it has worked, emphatically
Let us say that 'the people' as a whole vote in a government on a programme of very low tax and very high social democrat style public services and expenditure.
This is conceptually similar to voting in a government which proposes that triangles are circles.
That there is a wrongness is clear. I think your implication is correct: the wrongness is in the proposal, not the voter; as there is no reason why the voter should know better, but there is a reason why the proposer should.
Does that deal with the point?
"Smooth Mars bar wins Aylesbury man £2 compensation – and internet fame
Harry Seager's unique sweet treat provoked interest from thousands of members of the Dull Men’s Facebook page"
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/nov/30/smooth-mars-bar-wins-aylesbury-man-2-compensation-and-internet-fame
Have been every year in this country.
Thankfully I don't think Badenoch will be particularly interested in your asinine 'advice' - if she is, she can look forward to great clarity of direction - toward 20 MPs.
I know it his mother, but his CV ticks all the right boxes.
https://www.thetimes.com/uk/politics/article/keir-starmer-labour-relaunch-mission-impossible-ccq9bfksw
If we're to be objective about casualties, the speed limit should be increasing not decreasing to keep balance with our improved technologies.
The problem isn't casualties, risks, or changing car designs - the problem is zealots with zero tolerance for risk.
Government officials and ministers were told President Vladimir Putin’s officials attempted to stir up support among Mauritian politicians for a claim over the Chagos Islands as a way of undermining British interests, according to a source familiar with the discussions.
“Russia is doing more than supporting Mauritius – they are actively promoting the case for Mauritian sovereignty over the Chagos Islands”, a former Whitehall source said.
Wasn't a British/French lawyer (Philippe Sands) involved?
Like how the unprincipled, wonderfuly written drivel of the Speccie is so much more fun, and readable than the principled dullness of the New Statesman.
But waiting in the corner is the unanswered question: What would Reform, or what will Trump, actually DO.
So I wildly disagree that modern Woke centrism is principled dullness. It is obscenely wrong on many levels, and it needs to be purged, with great vigour, from the western body politic
Possibly intimidated by the likely backlash.
The tax it could work for is IHT, which needs abolishing and replacing.
Let us pray that the combo of Trump and the new revelations puts paid to this insane "deal"
Lights out for Starmer.
I absolutely understand what they do and what they will do
The good news is we have better vaccines and antivirals now and more coming...
Apart from that, I still think the NS is principled and dull. Most of its principles are dull too. If Toryism currently has distinctive principles, I have no idea what they are and would like to know.
As for the rest, you are right
We are beginning a new Dark Age of unreason and superstition.
Elected: Sinn Fein, Aontu and Fianna Fail TDs
https://cf.eip.telegraph.co.uk/store/vid-media/dc0fab29/hls-adaptive-stream/dc0fab29.m3u8
Pensioner who broke hip told by 999 she was ‘not a priority’
The 95-year-old waited five hours in the cold for an ambulance which left her husband with a chest infection
... Mr Soanes said he is now too unwell to visit his wife in hospital due to a chest infection he developed after the five-hour wait outside.
Liz Sly @lizsly.bsky.social
·
2h
Events are moving fast in Syria:
-The rebels have reached Hama, a day after taking Aleppo
-Protests & attacks reported around Syria
-Rumors of gunfights in Damascus
-Assad surfaces to call Iraq’s PM. Asking for militia help?
-Russia has fired the top general in Syria
-Iran’s FM due in Damascus Sun
https://bsky.app/profile/lizsly.bsky.social/post/3lc6v3xh55k2s