Slab seem to have realised that cancelling the Edinburgh supercomputer on arrival in No 10, and then reinstating it elsewhere, doesn't look great to the locals as well as to the UK as a whole. Though Mr Murray may be speaking more for LondonHQ/UKG, being a Cabinet Minister.
'Asked if Edinburgh was then still under consideration for building the supercomputer, Murray added: “Edinburgh is the AI capital of the world and has been since 1964, so I think Edinburgh is well placed.”'
Not to disparage the technical and intellectual capital of Scotland's capital, but ??
Ian Murray: "Is Edinburgh the capital of the world?" Scotsman "Aye" Ian Murray: "What, AI? Well it's a bit of a stretch but I'll take it"
Though most likely would be a Labour minority government if they could get confidence and supply from the LDs, SNP and Greens
If this polling level settles in, an interesting question is the extent to which tory & reform voters can be co-ordinated to an informal coalition when up against the 230 seats currently set to stay red.
Remember this - the Whitehall machine is broken. Whatever ideas Labour had have been crushed by the Treasury. Though the “Rachael from Accounts” jibe is outrageously misogynistic, she has been captured and broken by economic orthodoxy. Reform offering up people who basically say “this is stupidity, here’s what we should do” is not the negative you may think.
Which brings us back to Danny Fink's column
Voters think the Government is not working for them
They will vote for people promising to smash it
Unfortunately that's mob mentality. The same people who vote for trashing the system are the ones who try and burn down a hotel housing migrants
Of course in the aftermath they also want the fire brigade, ambulances and hospitals...
This is not quite right. People are not moving to Reform in order to smash stuff (though of course it might). The mass of voters have no interest in revolution. People like a quiet life. They neither know nor care how Whitehall works. Nor should they, it isn't their job. They want social democracy delivered with boring competence, and for many years now that has not been achieved. Reform's promise in fact is to do just that.
Note with care Farage distancing himself from trouble makers. Though he needs to go further.
And this is exactly where Labour had the opportunity and are fluffing it.
People are not stupid. They know things aren’t working the way they want or need them to. Some of this is deeply structural and relates to the way we have been governed at least since the 1980s and in some cases far earlier. Attlee, Thatcher and Blair, who are probably the biggest architects of our current system, did much right but a lot of their ideas are now outdated in the circumstances we find ourselves in, 25 years into the 21st Century.
Unfortunately our political classes continue to maintain that a lot of these structures and models are sacred cows and untouchable. The problem is that by delaying reform the eventual solutions to “fix” the problems will become much more extreme.
The current situation is very much like that in 1945 or 1979, in that the country is in a hole and things need to radically change to improve the situation.
Sh!t, I just realised that 1945 to 1979 is 34 years, and 1979 to 2025 is 46 years.
We're closer to the 22nd century than the end of WWII.
Anyway, I'm off. Have a nice day, everyone.
Madonna's "(Get) Into The Groove" is 40 years old...
The chap from confused.com on R4 Today at around 06:25 noting that 20mph limits are making a contribution to reductions in car insurance premiums because they make our roads safer.
We'll get real data from places like Wales in the next year or two.
Though where should already be data in the record, from places like Portsmouth, Cambridge, Nottingham, and possibly Hull.
London and Birmingham may be supplying data in 2-5 years.
Aren't the countervailing trends raising our premiums (electric cars being less repairable and so on) much larger?
Picking this up from earlier.
Yes different factors affect insurance prices, but multivariable analysis and different data sets allow the impacts to be teased out.
The data is that there were major increases (31%) 2 years ago on average, and a fall back (~17%) last year. That is part frequency of claims, and part the cost of repair.
The speed limiter technology that has come in is interesting - we may get premiums related to agreeing to obey speed limits one level more than the 'black box monitoing' done previously.
If the data finds that those dogmatically driving at the speed limit are higher risk should they be charged more? I suspect they are higher risk than those who take a perhaps more flexible scenario dependent approach but obviously less risk than the boy racers at the extreme.
Perhaps rcs has insight?
I doubt whether the UK is comparable with the USA for a whole plethora of reasons.
True, a lot of our cars have steering wheels.
Rising cost of repair is a large factor, and it is not just electric cars. A headlight that might have cost a few tenners to replace is £800 of LED trickery on a recent car, for instance. Reversing cameras, blind spot monitors, half an ipad replacing physical buttons are just some of the things driving up repair costs.
Then there is the increased width of modern cars, partly for safety reasons. Look at how thick a car door is now. We read in yesterday's news that Colchester is repainting its car parks for this reason, but it means less clearance when passing, and more low speed dings.
And while 20mph zones mean less collisions, paradoxically lower speeds mean journeys take longer so there is more traffic at any one time which gives more scope for collisions.
Right to Repair should push the car side of things harder. Even Apple have moved on electronics, in that area.
Repair what though? Repairing a reversing camera will be beyond the expertise of most backstreet garages. Repairing a car by *replacing* the camera with one bought off Ebay (out of a scrapped car) can perhaps be made easier.
“Right to repair” means that the manufacturer is compelled to sell the tools required to fix their products, in the case of cars that means letting independent garages buy the computers as well as the main dealers.
There have been suggestions that independent repairs are being made deliberately difficult to protect revenue models. In the US certainly, there has been a lot of lobbying against “Right to repair” legislation.
Slab seem to have realised that cancelling the Edinburgh supercomputer on arrival in No 10, and then reinstating it elsewhere, doesn't look great to the locals as well as to the UK as a whole. Though Mr Murray may be speaking more for LondonHQ/UKG, being a Cabinet Minister.
'Asked if Edinburgh was then still under consideration for building the supercomputer, Murray added: “Edinburgh is the AI capital of the world and has been since 1964, so I think Edinburgh is well placed.”'
Not to disparage the technical and intellectual capital of Scotland's capital, but ??
Neural networks date way, way back.
The modern "AI" thing is about using GPU computing technology to implement many, many more "neurons" than previous attempts.
"The Department of Artificial Intelligence can trace its origins to a small research group established in a flat at 4 Hope Park Square in 1963 by Donald Michie, then Reader in Surgical Science. During the Second World War, through his membership of Max Newman's code-breaking group at Bletchley Park, Michie had been introduced to computing and had come to believe in the possibility of building machines that could think and learn. By the early 1960s, the time appeared to be ripe to embark on this endeavour. Looking back, there are four discernible periods in the development of AI at Edinburgh, each of roughly ten years' duration. The first covers the period from 1963 to the publication of the Lighthill Report by the Science Research Council in l973....."
Remember this - the Whitehall machine is broken. Whatever ideas Labour had have been crushed by the Treasury. Though the “Rachael from Accounts” jibe is outrageously misogynistic, she has been captured and broken by economic orthodoxy. Reform offering up people who basically say “this is stupidity, here’s what we should do” is not the negative you may think.
Which brings us back to Danny Fink's column
Voters think the Government is not working for them
They will vote for people promising to smash it
Unfortunately that's mob mentality. The same people who vote for trashing the system are the ones who try and burn down a hotel housing migrants
Of course in the aftermath they also want the fire brigade, ambulances and hospitals...
This is not quite right. People are not moving to Reform in order to smash stuff (though of course it might). The mass of voters have no interest in revolution. People like a quiet life. They neither know nor care how Whitehall works. Nor should they, it isn't their job. They want social democracy delivered with boring competence, and for many years now that has not been achieved. Reform's promise in fact is to do just that.
Note with care Farage distancing himself from trouble makers. Though he needs to go further.
And this is exactly where Labour had the opportunity and are fluffing it.
People are not stupid. They know things aren’t working the way they want or need them to. Some of this is deeply structural and relates to the way we have been governed at least since the 1980s and in some cases far earlier. Attlee, Thatcher and Blair, who are probably the biggest architects of our current system, did much right but a lot of their ideas are now outdated in the circumstances we find ourselves in, 25 years into the 21st Century.
Unfortunately our political classes continue to maintain that a lot of these structures and models are sacred cows and untouchable. The problem is that by delaying reform the eventual solutions to “fix” the problems will become much more extreme.
The current situation is very much like that in 1945 or 1979, in that the country is in a hole and things need to radically change to improve the situation.
Sh!t, I just realised that 1945 to 1979 is 34 years, and 1979 to 2025 is 46 years.
We're closer to the 22nd century than the end of WWII.
Anyway, I'm off. Have a nice day, everyone.
Madonna's "(Get) Into The Groove" is 40 years old...
Though most likely would be a Labour minority government if they could get confidence and supply from the LDs, SNP and Greens
If this polling level settles in, an interesting question is the extent to which tory & reform voters can be co-ordinated to an informal coalition when up against the 230 seats currently set to stay red.
Given the current hash the Socialists are making of basic tasks, I suspect it won't be too difficult to arrange....
The chap from confused.com on R4 Today at around 06:25 noting that 20mph limits are making a contribution to reductions in car insurance premiums because they make our roads safer.
We'll get real data from places like Wales in the next year or two.
Though where should already be data in the record, from places like Portsmouth, Cambridge, Nottingham, and possibly Hull.
London and Birmingham may be supplying data in 2-5 years.
Aren't the countervailing trends raising our premiums (electric cars being less repairable and so on) much larger?
Picking this up from earlier.
Yes different factors affect insurance prices, but multivariable analysis and different data sets allow the impacts to be teased out.
The data is that there were major increases (31%) 2 years ago on average, and a fall back (~17%) last year. That is part frequency of claims, and part the cost of repair.
The speed limiter technology that has come in is interesting - we may get premiums related to agreeing to obey speed limits one level more than the 'black box monitoing' done previously.
If the data finds that those dogmatically driving at the speed limit are higher risk should they be charged more? I suspect they are higher risk than those who take a perhaps more flexible scenario dependent approach but obviously less risk than the boy racers at the extreme.
Perhaps rcs has insight?
I doubt whether the UK is comparable with the USA for a whole plethora of reasons.
True, a lot of our cars have steering wheels.
Rising cost of repair is a large factor, and it is not just electric cars. A headlight that might have cost a few tenners to replace is £800 of LED trickery on a recent car, for instance. Reversing cameras, blind spot monitors, half an ipad replacing physical buttons are just some of the things driving up repair costs.
Then there is the increased width of modern cars, partly for safety reasons. Look at how thick a car door is now. We read in yesterday's news that Colchester is repainting its car parks for this reason, but it means less clearance when passing, and more low speed dings.
And while 20mph zones mean less collisions, paradoxically lower speeds mean journeys take longer so there is more traffic at any one time which gives more scope for collisions.
Right to Repair should push the car side of things harder. Even Apple have moved on electronics, in that area.
Repair what though? Repairing a reversing camera will be beyond the expertise of most backstreet garages. Repairing a car by *replacing* the camera with one bought off Ebay (out of a scrapped car) can perhaps be made easier.
In the case of right to repair, they are about the availability of discrete componenents and their ease of installation. Three figure "light modules" that require a garage to dismantle a portion of the car to fit them go against that.
A reversing camera, itself, is a few pounds. The problem is the extreme difficultly of removing the old one and putting the new one in.
Slab seem to have realised that cancelling the Edinburgh supercomputer on arrival in No 10, and then reinstating it elsewhere, doesn't look great to the locals as well as to the UK as a whole. Though Mr Murray may be speaking more for LondonHQ/UKG, being a Cabinet Minister.
'Asked if Edinburgh was then still under consideration for building the supercomputer, Murray added: “Edinburgh is the AI capital of the world and has been since 1964, so I think Edinburgh is well placed.”'
Not to disparage the technical and intellectual capital of Scotland's capital, but ??
Ian Murray: "Is Edinburgh the capital of the world?" Scotsman "Aye" Ian Murray: "What, AI? Well it's a bit of a stretch but I'll take it"
Edinburgh has been associated with British AI since the days of Donald Michie in, well, let's take the minister's 1964. AI did not just start five years ago even if it has grown exponentially since then.
Pointless and irrelevant anecdata: Mrs Thatcher offered to pay for my MSc in AI back in the 1980s but I chose Unix and C instead. Not Mrs T personally but a government scheme to upgrade unemployed graduates.
ETA Scooped by Malmesbury's no doubt AI-assisted reading and typing.
Slab seem to have realised that cancelling the Edinburgh supercomputer on arrival in No 10, and then reinstating it elsewhere, doesn't look great to the locals as well as to the UK as a whole. Though Mr Murray may be speaking more for LondonHQ/UKG, being a Cabinet Minister.
'Asked if Edinburgh was then still under consideration for building the supercomputer, Murray added: “Edinburgh is the AI capital of the world and has been since 1964, so I think Edinburgh is well placed.”'
Not to disparage the technical and intellectual capital of Scotland's capital, but ??
As @DecrepiterJohnL said. But I was more thinking of the potential hole that Mr Murray is digging. It's not quite Craigleith Quarry yet, but it's getting there. He's basically saying up front that Labour are potentially destroying world class research. Edit: what *he* is calling w.c.r.
The chap from confused.com on R4 Today at around 06:25 noting that 20mph limits are making a contribution to reductions in car insurance premiums because they make our roads safer.
We'll get real data from places like Wales in the next year or two.
Though where should already be data in the record, from places like Portsmouth, Cambridge, Nottingham, and possibly Hull.
London and Birmingham may be supplying data in 2-5 years.
Aren't the countervailing trends raising our premiums (electric cars being less repairable and so on) much larger?
Picking this up from earlier.
Yes different factors affect insurance prices, but multivariable analysis and different data sets allow the impacts to be teased out.
The data is that there were major increases (31%) 2 years ago on average, and a fall back (~17%) last year. That is part frequency of claims, and part the cost of repair.
The speed limiter technology that has come in is interesting - we may get premiums related to agreeing to obey speed limits one level more than the 'black box monitoing' done previously.
If the data finds that those dogmatically driving at the speed limit are higher risk should they be charged more? I suspect they are higher risk than those who take a perhaps more flexible scenario dependent approach but obviously less risk than the boy racers at the extreme.
Perhaps rcs has insight?
I doubt whether the UK is comparable with the USA for a whole plethora of reasons.
True, a lot of our cars have steering wheels.
Rising cost of repair is a large factor, and it is not just electric cars. A headlight that might have cost a few tenners to replace is £800 of LED trickery on a recent car, for instance. Reversing cameras, blind spot monitors, half an ipad replacing physical buttons are just some of the things driving up repair costs.
Then there is the increased width of modern cars, partly for safety reasons. Look at how thick a car door is now. We read in yesterday's news that Colchester is repainting its car parks for this reason, but it means less clearance when passing, and more low speed dings.
And while 20mph zones mean less collisions, paradoxically lower speeds mean journeys take longer so there is more traffic at any one time which gives more scope for collisions.
I don't follow the logic on that last bit - the number of cars, the distance they travel, the number of junctions they negotiate etc etc remains the same.
The evidence from Scotland and Wales so far is that 20mph has a marked effect on precisely those expensive (but not catastrophic) dings. I guess because people have more time to react, avoiding a collision all together.
Think in terms of time, not distance. Slower travel means a journey of 20 minutes now takes, say, half an hour, so you have 50 per cent more time to have a collision. And because this increased journey time affects all vehicles, there are more cars on the road at any given moment to collide with each other and to throw more pollutants into the air.
Now, these collisions are less likely to be fatal and saving lives is a good thing but more dings means more repairs means more insurance claims means higher premiums.
It's not going to be anywhere near half an hour because the proportion of a journey you actually spend at the speed limit (particularly in a 30/20mph urban setting) is small given junctions and congestion. Even up to a third of my cycle commute at 15mph is stationary, and I'm unaffected by congestion except at junctions.
I still don't follow the maths of more cars on the road. Isn't it the just the same number of cars, for a (slightly) longer period? In Edinburgh we had a 22% reduction in collisions as a result of 20mph.
Watching PMQs for the first time in ages (since I'm not swimming this lunchtime...)
The other day I criticised SKS over the way he speaks. He's a bit better at this PMQs (though that's a very low hurdle to cross), but Badenoch is awful in a different way. Her voice is more appealing, but she makes too many wordslips, and the content of what she says is absolutely meh. Worse, she cannot think on her feet.
It really is two drunken amateurs slugging it out at the bar.
Remember this - the Whitehall machine is broken. Whatever ideas Labour had have been crushed by the Treasury. Though the “Rachael from Accounts” jibe is outrageously misogynistic, she has been captured and broken by economic orthodoxy. Reform offering up people who basically say “this is stupidity, here’s what we should do” is not the negative you may think.
Which brings us back to Danny Fink's column
Voters think the Government is not working for them
They will vote for people promising to smash it
Unfortunately that's mob mentality. The same people who vote for trashing the system are the ones who try and burn down a hotel housing migrants
Of course in the aftermath they also want the fire brigade, ambulances and hospitals...
This is not quite right. People are not moving to Reform in order to smash stuff (though of course it might). The mass of voters have no interest in revolution. People like a quiet life. They neither know nor care how Whitehall works. Nor should they, it isn't their job. They want social democracy delivered with boring competence, and for many years now that has not been achieved. Reform's promise in fact is to do just that.
Note with care Farage distancing himself from trouble makers. Though he needs to go further.
And this is exactly where Labour had the opportunity and are fluffing it.
People are not stupid. They know things aren’t working the way they want or need them to. Some of this is deeply structural and relates to the way we have been governed at least since the 1980s and in some cases far earlier. Attlee, Thatcher and Blair, who are probably the biggest architects of our current system, did much right but a lot of their ideas are now outdated in the circumstances we find ourselves in, 25 years into the 21st Century.
Unfortunately our political classes continue to maintain that a lot of these structures and models are sacred cows and untouchable. The problem is that by delaying reform the eventual solutions to “fix” the problems will become much more extreme.
The current situation is very much like that in 1945 or 1979, in that the country is in a hole and things need to radically change to improve the situation.
Sh!t, I just realised that 1945 to 1979 is 34 years, and 1979 to 2025 is 46 years.
We're closer to the 22nd century than the end of WWII.
Anyway, I'm off. Have a nice day, everyone.
Madonna's "(Get) Into The Groove" is 40 years old...
We are further from Get Into The Groove than Get Into The Groove was from Perry Como's "Some Enchanted Evening".
Slab seem to have realised that cancelling the Edinburgh supercomputer on arrival in No 10, and then reinstating it elsewhere, doesn't look great to the locals as well as to the UK as a whole. Though Mr Murray may be speaking more for LondonHQ/UKG, being a Cabinet Minister.
'Asked if Edinburgh was then still under consideration for building the supercomputer, Murray added: “Edinburgh is the AI capital of the world and has been since 1964, so I think Edinburgh is well placed.”'
Not to disparage the technical and intellectual capital of Scotland's capital, but ??
Ian Murray: "Is Edinburgh the capital of the world?" Scotsman "Aye" Ian Murray: "What, AI? Well it's a bit of a stretch but I'll take it"
Edinburgh has been associated with British AI since the days of Donald Michie in, well, let's take the minister's 1964. AI did not just start five years ago even if it has grown exponentially since then.
Pointless and irrelevant anecdata: Mrs Thatcher offered to pay for my MSc in AI back in the 1980s but I chose Unix and C instead. Not Mrs T personally but a government scheme to upgrade unemployed graduates.
ETA Scooped by Malmesbury's no doubt AI-assisted reading and typing.
Knew about Edinburgh and AI - just googled to get the potted history from the Uni website.
Edit: Calling Edinburgh the AI capital of the world is farcical. Nowhere is that.
Remember this - the Whitehall machine is broken. Whatever ideas Labour had have been crushed by the Treasury. Though the “Rachael from Accounts” jibe is outrageously misogynistic, she has been captured and broken by economic orthodoxy. Reform offering up people who basically say “this is stupidity, here’s what we should do” is not the negative you may think.
Which brings us back to Danny Fink's column
Voters think the Government is not working for them
They will vote for people promising to smash it
Unfortunately that's mob mentality. The same people who vote for trashing the system are the ones who try and burn down a hotel housing migrants
Of course in the aftermath they also want the fire brigade, ambulances and hospitals...
This is not quite right. People are not moving to Reform in order to smash stuff (though of course it might). The mass of voters have no interest in revolution. People like a quiet life. They neither know nor care how Whitehall works. Nor should they, it isn't their job. They want social democracy delivered with boring competence, and for many years now that has not been achieved. Reform's promise in fact is to do just that.
Note with care Farage distancing himself from trouble makers. Though he needs to go further.
And this is exactly where Labour had the opportunity and are fluffing it.
People are not stupid. They know things aren’t working the way they want or need them to. Some of this is deeply structural and relates to the way we have been governed at least since the 1980s and in some cases far earlier. Attlee, Thatcher and Blair, who are probably the biggest architects of our current system, did much right but a lot of their ideas are now outdated in the circumstances we find ourselves in, 25 years into the 21st Century.
Unfortunately our political classes continue to maintain that a lot of these structures and models are sacred cows and untouchable. The problem is that by delaying reform the eventual solutions to “fix” the problems will become much more extreme.
The current situation is very much like that in 1945 or 1979, in that the country is in a hole and things need to radically change to improve the situation.
Sh!t, I just realised that 1945 to 1979 is 34 years, and 1979 to 2025 is 46 years.
We're closer to the 22nd century than the end of WWII.
Anyway, I'm off. Have a nice day, everyone.
Madonna's "(Get) Into The Groove" is 40 years old...
We are further from Get Into The Groove than Get Into The Groove was from Perry Como's "Some Enchanted Evening".
“Into The Groove” is now equidistant between today and “We’ll Meet Again” by Vera Lynn!
The chap from confused.com on R4 Today at around 06:25 noting that 20mph limits are making a contribution to reductions in car insurance premiums because they make our roads safer.
We'll get real data from places like Wales in the next year or two.
Though where should already be data in the record, from places like Portsmouth, Cambridge, Nottingham, and possibly Hull.
London and Birmingham may be supplying data in 2-5 years.
Aren't the countervailing trends raising our premiums (electric cars being less repairable and so on) much larger?
Picking this up from earlier.
Yes different factors affect insurance prices, but multivariable analysis and different data sets allow the impacts to be teased out.
The data is that there were major increases (31%) 2 years ago on average, and a fall back (~17%) last year. That is part frequency of claims, and part the cost of repair.
The speed limiter technology that has come in is interesting - we may get premiums related to agreeing to obey speed limits one level more than the 'black box monitoing' done previously.
If the data finds that those dogmatically driving at the speed limit are higher risk should they be charged more? I suspect they are higher risk than those who take a perhaps more flexible scenario dependent approach but obviously less risk than the boy racers at the extreme.
Perhaps rcs has insight?
I doubt whether the UK is comparable with the USA for a whole plethora of reasons.
True, a lot of our cars have steering wheels.
Rising cost of repair is a large factor, and it is not just electric cars. A headlight that might have cost a few tenners to replace is £800 of LED trickery on a recent car, for instance. Reversing cameras, blind spot monitors, half an ipad replacing physical buttons are just some of the things driving up repair costs.
Then there is the increased width of modern cars, partly for safety reasons. Look at how thick a car door is now. We read in yesterday's news that Colchester is repainting its car parks for this reason, but it means less clearance when passing, and more low speed dings.
And while 20mph zones mean less collisions, paradoxically lower speeds mean journeys take longer so there is more traffic at any one time which gives more scope for collisions.
I don't follow the logic on that last bit - the number of cars, the distance they travel, the number of junctions they negotiate etc etc remains the same.
The evidence from Scotland and Wales so far is that 20mph has a marked effect on precisely those expensive (but not catastrophic) dings. I guess because people have more time to react, avoiding a collision all together.
Think in terms of time, not distance. Slower travel means a journey of 20 minutes now takes, say, half an hour, so you have 50 per cent more time to have a collision. And because this increased journey time affects all vehicles, there are more cars on the road at any given moment to collide with each other and to throw more pollutants into the air.
Now, these collisions are less likely to be fatal and saving lives is a good thing but more dings means more repairs means more insurance claims means higher premiums.
It's not going to be anywhere near half an hour because the proportion of a journey you actually spend at the speed limit (particularly in a 30/20mph urban setting) is small given junctions and congestion. Even up to a third of my cycle commute at 15mph is stationary, and I'm unaffected by congestion except at junctions.
I still don't follow the maths of more cars on the road. Isn't it the just the same number of cars, for a (slightly) longer period? In Edinburgh we had a 22% reduction in collisions as a result of 20mph.
The same number of cars driving for a longer period (caused by reduced speed) means that at any given instant, there will be more cars on the road.
This is one of biotech's success stories - but it gives an idea of just how hard drug development is. And nine out of ten drugs never make it to approval.
What a journey for Intracellular Therapies Inc ($ITCI) - acquired yesterday at the ripe age of 23 yrs old.
Series A of $2.9M in 2002. Moshe Alafi, called one of the founders of biotech (whose VC firm backed Cetus, Amgen, ABI, others) was the lead of the A-round. Over next decade, the startup raised less than $40M in private capital across at least four rounds - a model of capital efficiency.
As the markets opened in 2013, ITCI reverse merged with a public shell company (mining company Oneida Resources Corp) and began trading late that year.
It already had its gem in hand: in 2013, lumateperone (Caplyta) was in Phase 2 for schizophrenia.
They raised $60M in the PIPE (led by Deerfield), and $120M in a secondary in 2014. This was enough to keep things going for another 8 years. They didn’t raise again until 2022… Wow…
As late stage development costs mounted, on the back of exciting data they raised $460M in 2022... and then again in 2024, $500M…
All-in, ITCI raised $1.2B from investors, private and public. Sold to J&J for nearly $15B...
What is the Labour Government's vision for the UK economy? Going for Growth, but how?
It appears to be all over the place and without a consistent approach.
Ben Ansell has published on his substack https://benansell.substack.com/p/grasping-for-growth a very good article which looks at various economic strategies Neoclassical Growth (Osbornism), Neokeynesian Growth (Brownish), Developmentalism (Labour Leftism), Schumpeterian Growth (Cummingism) and Supply-Side Growth (Trussism) and compares them with the current Labour approach.
My view (which is worth very little as I am not an economist, but that might be a benefit) is that there is not a single approach which is correct at all stages of the economic cycle and status of the UK economy. I am favourable towards an institutionalist theory of growth (good and stable legal, government and education system, anti oligopoly) but that is just getting the fundamentals right.
Yes, there are lots of competing theories and opinions on what a UK government should do to encourage growth in the UK economy. I have no view other than the obvious stuff of avoiding unnecessary barriers to productive work, investing in positive ROI infrastructure, not taxing beyond the point of diminishing return, providing a good and free education and health service.
However the electoral calculus depends only on how the economy performs over the shorter term (eg a parliament) which is overwhelmingly correlated to global factors, how the world economy performs, and only marginally correlated to what the UK government does (barring extreme negative actions). The government can stimulate short term growth but this will be of the frothy unsustainable variety.
Therefore it's unfortunate imo that Labour have made "growth" their big banana, the thing on which we are invited to judge them. They clearly felt they needed to in order to secure the GE victory but I wish they hadn't. It's effectively a punt on something they have next to no control over, the global economy. If this does ok, we'll do ok too and Labour will claim the credit. If it doesn't (which looks the more likely to me) we won't either and Labour will get the blame. It's irrational either way and leaves their political fortunes in the lap of the gods.
Of course I don't mean economic growth shouldn't be a priority for the government. It should. They should be encouraging it as much as they can, to the extent consistent with other priorities (of which there are, or should be, many), I just mean it's a mistake to have it up in lights as the defining mission. I'd rather see "End Poverty" or something like that, if we do feel a Just One Thing type of messaging is necessary.
@RossKempsell Labour's Chagos sellout is collapsing - Mauritius refuses to sign after Cabinet meeting this morning, sending negotiators back to London, presumably to bid up the price to UK taxpayers even more
Remember this - the Whitehall machine is broken. Whatever ideas Labour had have been crushed by the Treasury. Though the “Rachael from Accounts” jibe is outrageously misogynistic, she has been captured and broken by economic orthodoxy. Reform offering up people who basically say “this is stupidity, here’s what we should do” is not the negative you may think.
Which brings us back to Danny Fink's column
Voters think the Government is not working for them
They will vote for people promising to smash it
Unfortunately that's mob mentality. The same people who vote for trashing the system are the ones who try and burn down a hotel housing migrants
Of course in the aftermath they also want the fire brigade, ambulances and hospitals...
This is not quite right. People are not moving to Reform in order to smash stuff (though of course it might). The mass of voters have no interest in revolution. People like a quiet life. They neither know nor care how Whitehall works. Nor should they, it isn't their job. They want social democracy delivered with boring competence, and for many years now that has not been achieved. Reform's promise in fact is to do just that.
Note with care Farage distancing himself from trouble makers. Though he needs to go further.
And this is exactly where Labour had the opportunity and are fluffing it.
People are not stupid. They know things aren’t working the way they want or need them to. Some of this is deeply structural and relates to the way we have been governed at least since the 1980s and in some cases far earlier. Attlee, Thatcher and Blair, who are probably the biggest architects of our current system, did much right but a lot of their ideas are now outdated in the circumstances we find ourselves in, 25 years into the 21st Century.
Unfortunately our political classes continue to maintain that a lot of these structures and models are sacred cows and untouchable. The problem is that by delaying reform the eventual solutions to “fix” the problems will become much more extreme.
The current situation is very much like that in 1945 or 1979, in that the country is in a hole and things need to radically change to improve the situation.
Sh!t, I just realised that 1945 to 1979 is 34 years, and 1979 to 2025 is 46 years.
We're closer to the 22nd century than the end of WWII.
Anyway, I'm off. Have a nice day, everyone.
Madonna's "(Get) Into The Groove" is 40 years old...
We are further from Get Into The Groove than Get Into The Groove was from Perry Como's "Some Enchanted Evening".
“Into The Groove” is now equidistant between today and “We’ll Meet Again” by Vera Lynn!
Okay this gets scary quickly.
The Wrath of Khan is closer to the start of the WWII than today.
Star Wars: A New Hope is closer to the Wall Street crash than today.
@RossKempsell Labour's Chagos sellout is collapsing - Mauritius refuses to sign after Cabinet meeting this morning, sending negotiators back to London, presumably to bid up the price to UK taxpayers even more
Slab seem to have realised that cancelling the Edinburgh supercomputer on arrival in No 10, and then reinstating it elsewhere, doesn't look great to the locals as well as to the UK as a whole. Though Mr Murray may be speaking more for LondonHQ/UKG, being a Cabinet Minister.
'Asked if Edinburgh was then still under consideration for building the supercomputer, Murray added: “Edinburgh is the AI capital of the world and has been since 1964, so I think Edinburgh is well placed.”'
Not to disparage the technical and intellectual capital of Scotland's capital, but ??
Neural networks date way, way back.
The modern "AI" thing is about using GPU computing technology to implement many, many more "neurons" than previous attempts.
"The Department of Artificial Intelligence can trace its origins to a small research group established in a flat at 4 Hope Park Square in 1963 by Donald Michie, then Reader in Surgical Science. During the Second World War, through his membership of Max Newman's code-breaking group at Bletchley Park, Michie had been introduced to computing and had come to believe in the possibility of building machines that could think and learn. By the early 1960s, the time appeared to be ripe to embark on this endeavour. Looking back, there are four discernible periods in the development of AI at Edinburgh, each of roughly ten years' duration. The first covers the period from 1963 to the publication of the Lighthill Report by the Science Research Council in l973....."
Silicon Valley has a rather more convincing claim, though. Both historically, with John McCarthy at Stanford, and practically, with the companies now headquartered there.
Slab seem to have realised that cancelling the Edinburgh supercomputer on arrival in No 10, and then reinstating it elsewhere, doesn't look great to the locals as well as to the UK as a whole. Though Mr Murray may be speaking more for LondonHQ/UKG, being a Cabinet Minister.
'Asked if Edinburgh was then still under consideration for building the supercomputer, Murray added: “Edinburgh is the AI capital of the world and has been since 1964, so I think Edinburgh is well placed.”'
Not to disparage the technical and intellectual capital of Scotland's capital, but ??
Ian Murray: "Is Edinburgh the capital of the world?" Scotsman "Aye" Ian Murray: "What, AI? Well it's a bit of a stretch but I'll take it"
Edinburgh has been associated with British AI since the days of Donald Michie in, well, let's take the minister's 1964. AI did not just start five years ago even if it has grown exponentially since then.
Pointless and irrelevant anecdata: Mrs Thatcher offered to pay for my MSc in AI back in the 1980s but I chose Unix and C instead. Not Mrs T personally but a government scheme to upgrade unemployed graduates.
ETA Scooped by Malmesbury's no doubt AI-assisted reading and typing.
Knew about Edinburgh and AI - just googled to get the potted history from the Uni website.
Edit: Calling Edinburgh the AI capital of the world is farcical. Nowhere is that.
Quite. But saying that and then pulling the plug (or rather leaving out the plug one pulled a few months back) ...
@RossKempsell Labour's Chagos sellout is collapsing - Mauritius refuses to sign after Cabinet meeting this morning, sending negotiators back to London, presumably to bid up the price to UK taxpayers even more
The attitude of the Mauritius government is simply weird. They won't get a better deal from Trump. Sometimes, people just overplay their hand totally,
Remember this - the Whitehall machine is broken. Whatever ideas Labour had have been crushed by the Treasury. Though the “Rachael from Accounts” jibe is outrageously misogynistic, she has been captured and broken by economic orthodoxy. Reform offering up people who basically say “this is stupidity, here’s what we should do” is not the negative you may think.
Which brings us back to Danny Fink's column
Voters think the Government is not working for them
They will vote for people promising to smash it
Unfortunately that's mob mentality. The same people who vote for trashing the system are the ones who try and burn down a hotel housing migrants
Of course in the aftermath they also want the fire brigade, ambulances and hospitals...
This is not quite right. People are not moving to Reform in order to smash stuff (though of course it might). The mass of voters have no interest in revolution. People like a quiet life. They neither know nor care how Whitehall works. Nor should they, it isn't their job. They want social democracy delivered with boring competence, and for many years now that has not been achieved. Reform's promise in fact is to do just that.
Note with care Farage distancing himself from trouble makers. Though he needs to go further.
And this is exactly where Labour had the opportunity and are fluffing it.
People are not stupid. They know things aren’t working the way they want or need them to. Some of this is deeply structural and relates to the way we have been governed at least since the 1980s and in some cases far earlier. Attlee, Thatcher and Blair, who are probably the biggest architects of our current system, did much right but a lot of their ideas are now outdated in the circumstances we find ourselves in, 25 years into the 21st Century.
Unfortunately our political classes continue to maintain that a lot of these structures and models are sacred cows and untouchable. The problem is that by delaying reform the eventual solutions to “fix” the problems will become much more extreme.
The current situation is very much like that in 1945 or 1979, in that the country is in a hole and things need to radically change to improve the situation.
Sh!t, I just realised that 1945 to 1979 is 34 years, and 1979 to 2025 is 46 years.
We're closer to the 22nd century than the end of WWII.
Anyway, I'm off. Have a nice day, everyone.
Madonna's "(Get) Into The Groove" is 40 years old...
We are further from Get Into The Groove than Get Into The Groove was from Perry Como's "Some Enchanted Evening".
“Into The Groove” is now equidistant between today and “We’ll Meet Again” by Vera Lynn!
Okay this gets scary quickly.
The Wrath of Khan is closer to the start of the WWII than today.
Star Wars: A New Hope is closer to the Wall Street crash than today.
Remember this - the Whitehall machine is broken. Whatever ideas Labour had have been crushed by the Treasury. Though the “Rachael from Accounts” jibe is outrageously misogynistic, she has been captured and broken by economic orthodoxy. Reform offering up people who basically say “this is stupidity, here’s what we should do” is not the negative you may think.
Which brings us back to Danny Fink's column
Voters think the Government is not working for them
They will vote for people promising to smash it
Unfortunately that's mob mentality. The same people who vote for trashing the system are the ones who try and burn down a hotel housing migrants
Of course in the aftermath they also want the fire brigade, ambulances and hospitals...
This is not quite right. People are not moving to Reform in order to smash stuff (though of course it might). The mass of voters have no interest in revolution. People like a quiet life. They neither know nor care how Whitehall works. Nor should they, it isn't their job. They want social democracy delivered with boring competence, and for many years now that has not been achieved. Reform's promise in fact is to do just that.
Note with care Farage distancing himself from trouble makers. Though he needs to go further.
And this is exactly where Labour had the opportunity and are fluffing it.
People are not stupid. They know things aren’t working the way they want or need them to. Some of this is deeply structural and relates to the way we have been governed at least since the 1980s and in some cases far earlier. Attlee, Thatcher and Blair, who are probably the biggest architects of our current system, did much right but a lot of their ideas are now outdated in the circumstances we find ourselves in, 25 years into the 21st Century.
Unfortunately our political classes continue to maintain that a lot of these structures and models are sacred cows and untouchable. The problem is that by delaying reform the eventual solutions to “fix” the problems will become much more extreme.
The current situation is very much like that in 1945 or 1979, in that the country is in a hole and things need to radically change to improve the situation.
Sh!t, I just realised that 1945 to 1979 is 34 years, and 1979 to 2025 is 46 years.
We're closer to the 22nd century than the end of WWII.
Anyway, I'm off. Have a nice day, everyone.
Madonna's "(Get) Into The Groove" is 40 years old...
We are further from Get Into The Groove than Get Into The Groove was from Perry Como's "Some Enchanted Evening".
“Into The Groove” is now equidistant between today and “We’ll Meet Again” by Vera Lynn!
Okay this gets scary quickly.
The Wrath of Khan is closer to the start of the WWII than today.
Star Wars: A New Hope is closer to the Wall Street crash than today.
It’s no fun being a sci-fi geek from the 80s.
The film Forbidden Planet is closer to the death of Queen Victoria, than it is to us.
Slab seem to have realised that cancelling the Edinburgh supercomputer on arrival in No 10, and then reinstating it elsewhere, doesn't look great to the locals as well as to the UK as a whole. Though Mr Murray may be speaking more for LondonHQ/UKG, being a Cabinet Minister.
'Asked if Edinburgh was then still under consideration for building the supercomputer, Murray added: “Edinburgh is the AI capital of the world and has been since 1964, so I think Edinburgh is well placed.”'
Not to disparage the technical and intellectual capital of Scotland's capital, but ??
Ian Murray: "Is Edinburgh the capital of the world?" Scotsman "Aye" Ian Murray: "What, AI? Well it's a bit of a stretch but I'll take it"
Edinburgh has been associated with British AI since the days of Donald Michie in, well, let's take the minister's 1964. AI did not just start five years ago even if it has grown exponentially since then.
Pointless and irrelevant anecdata: Mrs Thatcher offered to pay for my MSc in AI back in the 1980s but I chose Unix and C instead. Not Mrs T personally but a government scheme to upgrade unemployed graduates.
ETA Scooped by Malmesbury's no doubt AI-assisted reading and typing.
Knew about Edinburgh and AI - just googled to get the potted history from the Uni website.
Edit: Calling Edinburgh the AI capital of the world is farcical. Nowhere is that.
Quite. But saying that and then pulling the plug (or rather leaving out the plug one pulled a few months back) ...
If the infrastructure isn't here, and when the big money is in the US, there's less to keep our best talent here.
Remember this - the Whitehall machine is broken. Whatever ideas Labour had have been crushed by the Treasury. Though the “Rachael from Accounts” jibe is outrageously misogynistic, she has been captured and broken by economic orthodoxy. Reform offering up people who basically say “this is stupidity, here’s what we should do” is not the negative you may think.
Which brings us back to Danny Fink's column
Voters think the Government is not working for them
They will vote for people promising to smash it
Unfortunately that's mob mentality. The same people who vote for trashing the system are the ones who try and burn down a hotel housing migrants
Of course in the aftermath they also want the fire brigade, ambulances and hospitals...
This is not quite right. People are not moving to Reform in order to smash stuff (though of course it might). The mass of voters have no interest in revolution. People like a quiet life. They neither know nor care how Whitehall works. Nor should they, it isn't their job. They want social democracy delivered with boring competence, and for many years now that has not been achieved. Reform's promise in fact is to do just that.
Note with care Farage distancing himself from trouble makers. Though he needs to go further.
And this is exactly where Labour had the opportunity and are fluffing it.
People are not stupid. They know things aren’t working the way they want or need them to. Some of this is deeply structural and relates to the way we have been governed at least since the 1980s and in some cases far earlier. Attlee, Thatcher and Blair, who are probably the biggest architects of our current system, did much right but a lot of their ideas are now outdated in the circumstances we find ourselves in, 25 years into the 21st Century.
Unfortunately our political classes continue to maintain that a lot of these structures and models are sacred cows and untouchable. The problem is that by delaying reform the eventual solutions to “fix” the problems will become much more extreme.
The current situation is very much like that in 1945 or 1979, in that the country is in a hole and things need to radically change to improve the situation.
Sh!t, I just realised that 1945 to 1979 is 34 years, and 1979 to 2025 is 46 years.
We're closer to the 22nd century than the end of WWII.
Anyway, I'm off. Have a nice day, everyone.
Madonna's "(Get) Into The Groove" is 40 years old...
We are further from Get Into The Groove than Get Into The Groove was from Perry Como's "Some Enchanted Evening".
“Into The Groove” is now equidistant between today and “We’ll Meet Again” by Vera Lynn!
Okay this gets scary quickly.
That's a better example. I have an argument I wheel out now and again about how culture hasn't really moved on much in the last 40 years. Today doesn't really look much different to the early 90s. It's a bit different, but not as different as 1985 was to the early 50s. I still consume the cultural outputs of the 1980s. Hell, my daughter does. She has Smiths records. I certainly didn't have Perry Como records at her age. I still listen to very little from before the 1970s and nothing at all from before the 1960s.
@RossKempsell Labour's Chagos sellout is collapsing - Mauritius refuses to sign after Cabinet meeting this morning, sending negotiators back to London, presumably to bid up the price to UK taxpayers even more
What is the Labour Government's vision for the UK economy? Going for Growth, but how?
It appears to be all over the place and without a consistent approach.
Ben Ansell has published on his substack https://benansell.substack.com/p/grasping-for-growth a very good article which looks at various economic strategies Neoclassical Growth (Osbornism), Neokeynesian Growth (Brownish), Developmentalism (Labour Leftism), Schumpeterian Growth (Cummingism) and Supply-Side Growth (Trussism) and compares them with the current Labour approach.
My view (which is worth very little as I am not an economist, but that might be a benefit) is that there is not a single approach which is correct at all stages of the economic cycle and status of the UK economy. I am favourable towards an institutionalist theory of growth (good and stable legal, government and education system, anti oligopoly) but that is just getting the fundamentals right.
Yes, there are lots of competing theories and opinions on what a UK government should do to encourage growth in the UK economy. I have no view other than the obvious stuff of avoiding unnecessary barriers to productive work, investing in positive ROI infrastructure, not taxing beyond the point of diminishing return, providing a good and free education and health service.
However the electoral calculus depends only on how the economy performs over the shorter term (eg a parliament) which is overwhelmingly correlated to global factors, how the world economy performs, and only marginally correlated to what the UK government does (barring extreme negative actions). The government can stimulate short term growth but this will be of the frothy unsustainable variety.
Therefore it's unfortunate imo that Labour have made "growth" their big banana, the thing on which we are invited to judge them. They clearly felt they needed to in order to secure the GE victory but I wish they hadn't. It's effectively a punt on something they have next to no control over, the global economy. If this does ok, we'll do ok too and Labour will claim the credit. If it doesn't (which looks the more likely to me) we won't either and Labour will get the blame. It's irrational either way and leaves their political fortunes in the lap of the gods.
Of course I don't mean economic growth shouldn't be a priority for the government. It should. They should be encouraging it as much as they can, to the extent consistent with other priorities (of which there are, or should be, many), I just mean it's a mistake to have it up in lights as the defining mission. I'd rather see "End Poverty" or something like that, if we do feel a Just One Thing type of messaging is necessary.
Government has particular jobs to do. Each of them they have taken on over time and not relinquished. In total state managed expenditure heads towards half of all expenditure. This is gigantic.
It is a complete political fraud for governments to set up issues X, Y and Z to judge themselves on. Their job is to run and do everything they have taken to themselves to run and do competently and well.
We don't judge Tesco just on bananas, baked beans and double cream. Nor do they ask us to. We judge them in totality. Same with government. They should grow up.
Lots of excitable people on here. None of the leaders are going anywhere for some years. Don't tie up your money, Badenoch is not going any time soon, no reason for it. Far from it.
This is probably about where I suspect things are:
Election Maps UK @ElectionMapsUK · 48m Westminster Voting Intention:
Slab seem to have realised that cancelling the Edinburgh supercomputer on arrival in No 10, and then reinstating it elsewhere, doesn't look great to the locals as well as to the UK as a whole. Though Mr Murray may be speaking more for LondonHQ/UKG, being a Cabinet Minister.
'Asked if Edinburgh was then still under consideration for building the supercomputer, Murray added: “Edinburgh is the AI capital of the world and has been since 1964, so I think Edinburgh is well placed.”'
Not to disparage the technical and intellectual capital of Scotland's capital, but ??
Neural networks date way, way back.
The modern "AI" thing is about using GPU computing technology to implement many, many more "neurons" than previous attempts.
"The Department of Artificial Intelligence can trace its origins to a small research group established in a flat at 4 Hope Park Square in 1963 by Donald Michie, then Reader in Surgical Science. During the Second World War, through his membership of Max Newman's code-breaking group at Bletchley Park, Michie had been introduced to computing and had come to believe in the possibility of building machines that could think and learn. By the early 1960s, the time appeared to be ripe to embark on this endeavour. Looking back, there are four discernible periods in the development of AI at Edinburgh, each of roughly ten years' duration. The first covers the period from 1963 to the publication of the Lighthill Report by the Science Research Council in l973....."
Silicon Valley has a rather more convincing claim, though. Both historically, with John McCarthy at Stanford, and practically, with the companies now headquartered there.
Industrially, TSMC enters the chat.
MIT, Minsky?
There is so much history and it's well distributed.
It's also notable that there is no "Capital of AI" now.
Nor will there be. The actual hardware doesn't need to be on the same continent as the researchers and users.
@RossKempsell Labour's Chagos sellout is collapsing - Mauritius refuses to sign after Cabinet meeting this morning, sending negotiators back to London, presumably to bid up the price to UK taxpayers even more
@RossKempsell Labour's Chagos sellout is collapsing - Mauritius refuses to sign after Cabinet meeting this morning, sending negotiators back to London, presumably to bid up the price to UK taxpayers even more
The attitude of the Mauritius government is simply weird. They won't get a better deal from Trump. Sometimes, people just overplay their hand totally,
Presumably they think the UK government is desperate to offload the Chagos before Trump gets in and can be pressured into an even worse deal. Who knows, maybe they're right.
Afternoon! I’ve just been to a talk on Proliferation Financing by some Compliance lawyers to keep the regulator happy.
The one interesting thing they said was that all the white goods that snaked their way back from Ukraine to Russia in the early months of the invasion were being taken to strip out microchips and various parts that could be repurposed for weaponry.
I’m trying to work out if this is BS - I didn’t think the Russians had planned Ukraine well so this would be even more unlikely as a good idea.
Then it does actually make sense to ensure you get every possible component just in case the war drags on and sanctions bite.
Would be nice to know if there is an authoritative source on this if anyone knows.
@RossKempsell Labour's Chagos sellout is collapsing - Mauritius refuses to sign after Cabinet meeting this morning, sending negotiators back to London, presumably to bid up the price to UK taxpayers even more
The mad rush, especially in the US, to sign inviolable contracts and treaties before Monday lunchtime in Washington is scary to watch.
Has there ever before been so many US regulations and Executive Orders issued in the last week or two of a Presidency before? It’s doubly concerning when we know that the big man isn’t entirely all with it at the moment, so who’s actually writing all this stuff, and hoping to ram it all through before the change of administration?
Meanwhile, Defence Secretary nominee Pate Hesgeth was running rings around the Senate Defence Committee yesterday, a bunch of old people who had very little military experience between them.
This is the problem with university free speech. How do universities guarantee it against this sort of mass protest?
Is that a free speech problem or a public order problem? The RAF were going about their lawful business having obtained the necessary consents and should be allowed to do so unimpeded.
Surely the protestors were the ones exercising free speech.
Free speech is the absence of a negative - i.e. it means you are not persecuted for making your point - not that you have the right to do it when and where wherever you like and disrupt others doing the same or going about their lawful business.
It's a time of considerable turmoil and it seems to me that, after such a long time in government, the Conservatives should be focussing on what they truly believe. Sorting themselves out, as @Alanbrooke says.
And what would that be ? You'd get very different answers from (say) TSE, HYUFD, Casino and PtP.
The last decade has fragmented their coalition - and some of those fragments may permanently be lost to them.
Suella was on LBC yesterday doubling down on going full frontal Reform with a view to either a coalition or tacit mutual benefit arrangements. Personally, I would have thought that peels off the left flank to the LDs.
Where do people like Cameron, Osborne or May go on that scenario. A new “Coalition” party would become their natural home.
This is classic 'centrist' establishment thinking.
People want immigration brought under control. End of.
But it's not end of, is it? They also want functioning public services, more housing, people to look after their elderly relatives and so on. So what does immigration control actually look like in those circumstances?
You just don't get it.
You never will.
I get that you do not want to engage with difficult conversations and would prefer everything to be black and white. I also get that black and white is a very compelling political argument. But it does not solve deep-seated economic challenges.
I engage in difficult conversations on here all the time, but you won't brook anything that goes against your world view - which is that you only want immigration to be about economic benefits.
No, I want immigration to be discussed honestly.
A substantial reduction to immigration levels will have an adverse effect on our economy in multiple ways. I don't think we can afford for that to happen given where our economy is currently.
A substantial reduction from a 10 year average or 2 year average as those are very different?
Well, exactly. Immigration numbers are going to come down significantly over the next year. Is that enough? If not, why not and what will give?
Putting your two comments together, should the government be trying to increase immigration to boost the economy or should they be happy that immigration will come down?
A healthy economy delivering sustainable growth and improvements to living standards is what I want. Given our ageing workforce, I do not see how that is delivered without a significant level of immigration. My lifestyle would be largely unaffected by a reduction of immigration to zero. But I think it would have a very quick, adverse effect on millions of others.
It's all a bit chicken and egg, but I think it's fair to say that immigration is adding to our aging population.
It's certainly helping our ageing population.
All I'm saying is that it's dishonest to pretend there are not significant downsides to major reductions in immigration. I would like to see politicians who want to do it anyway recognise this and justify it. They don't and they won't.
And I want people to acknowledge that there are significant downsides to not having major reductions in immigration.
It has been badly managed, mostly by a party that promised to bring it down to tens of thousands. And the rate of the last two years does have significant downsides however much we build.
It should be around 250-500k per year and housebuilding should be 400-500k per year rather than the 235k run rate or the govts 300k targets.
More importantly, the approval of the existing inhabitants in the lower class areas that bear the brunt of immigration should be obtained. Actually, the government should have done that in the 1940s and 1950s before the flow really started.
Instead they were marginalised, ignored, despised, insulted and treated with complete contempt, by all three major parties.
@RossKempsell Labour's Chagos sellout is collapsing - Mauritius refuses to sign after Cabinet meeting this morning, sending negotiators back to London, presumably to bid up the price to UK taxpayers even more
The chap from confused.com on R4 Today at around 06:25 noting that 20mph limits are making a contribution to reductions in car insurance premiums because they make our roads safer.
We'll get real data from places like Wales in the next year or two.
Though where should already be data in the record, from places like Portsmouth, Cambridge, Nottingham, and possibly Hull.
London and Birmingham may be supplying data in 2-5 years.
Aren't the countervailing trends raising our premiums (electric cars being less repairable and so on) much larger?
Picking this up from earlier.
Yes different factors affect insurance prices, but multivariable analysis and different data sets allow the impacts to be teased out.
The data is that there were major increases (31%) 2 years ago on average, and a fall back (~17%) last year. That is part frequency of claims, and part the cost of repair.
The speed limiter technology that has come in is interesting - we may get premiums related to agreeing to obey speed limits one level more than the 'black box monitoing' done previously.
If the data finds that those dogmatically driving at the speed limit are higher risk should they be charged more? I suspect they are higher risk than those who take a perhaps more flexible scenario dependent approach but obviously less risk than the boy racers at the extreme.
Perhaps rcs has insight?
I doubt whether the UK is comparable with the USA for a whole plethora of reasons.
True, a lot of our cars have steering wheels.
Rising cost of repair is a large factor, and it is not just electric cars. A headlight that might have cost a few tenners to replace is £800 of LED trickery on a recent car, for instance. Reversing cameras, blind spot monitors, half an ipad replacing physical buttons are just some of the things driving up repair costs.
Then there is the increased width of modern cars, partly for safety reasons. Look at how thick a car door is now. We read in yesterday's news that Colchester is repainting its car parks for this reason, but it means less clearance when passing, and more low speed dings.
And while 20mph zones mean less collisions, paradoxically lower speeds mean journeys take longer so there is more traffic at any one time which gives more scope for collisions.
I don't follow the logic on that last bit - the number of cars, the distance they travel, the number of junctions they negotiate etc etc remains the same.
The evidence from Scotland and Wales so far is that 20mph has a marked effect on precisely those expensive (but not catastrophic) dings. I guess because people have more time to react, avoiding a collision all together.
Think in terms of time, not distance. Slower travel means a journey of 20 minutes now takes, say, half an hour, so you have 50 per cent more time to have a collision. And because this increased journey time affects all vehicles, there are more cars on the road at any given moment to collide with each other and to throw more pollutants into the air.
Now, these collisions are less likely to be fatal and saving lives is a good thing but more dings means more repairs means more insurance claims means higher premiums.
That's not supported by the several decades of data we have afaics.
The Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents has a paper summarising teh evidence we have, and a nuanced policy position:
@RossKempsell Labour's Chagos sellout is collapsing - Mauritius refuses to sign after Cabinet meeting this morning, sending negotiators back to London, presumably to bid up the price to UK taxpayers even more
Serious question: why don't we just sell the Chagos Islands to the highest bidder? "For Sale: one US air base with attached island and inhabitants" We should be able to get a couple of billion, surely?
@RossKempsell Labour's Chagos sellout is collapsing - Mauritius refuses to sign after Cabinet meeting this morning, sending negotiators back to London, presumably to bid up the price to UK taxpayers even more
The mad rush, especially in the US, to sign inviolable contracts and treaties before Monday lunchtime in Washington is scary to watch.
Has there ever before been so many US regulations and Executive Orders issued in the last week or two of a Presidency before? It’s doubly concerning when we know that the big man isn’t entirely all with it at the moment, so who’s actually writing all this stuff, and hoping to ram it all through before the change of administration?
Meanwhile, Defence Secretary nominee Pate Hesgeth was running rings around the Senate Defence Committee yesterday, a bunch of old people who had very little military experience between them.
It happens every 4/8 years don't act like it's novel.
It's not as if the big man has done something really extreme, like sending a bunch of thugs to lynch Congress and the Veep.
Serious question: why don't we just sell the Chagos Islands to the highest bidder? "For Sale: one US air base with attached island and inhabitants" We should be able to get a couple of billion, surely?
Small thinking
I would start the bidding a $20 billion. With a reserve price.
Afternoon! I’ve just been to a talk on Proliferation Financing by some Compliance lawyers to keep the regulator happy.
The one interesting thing they said was that all the white goods that snaked their way back from Ukraine to Russia in the early months of the invasion were being taken to strip out microchips and various parts that could be repurposed for weaponry.
I’m trying to work out if this is BS - I didn’t think the Russians had planned Ukraine well so this would be even more unlikely as a good idea.
Then it does actually make sense to ensure you get every possible component just in case the war drags on and sanctions bite.
Would be nice to know if there is an authoritative source on this if anyone knows.
It may or may not have been a deliberate thing at the time, but it’s definitely true that the Russians have now, three years later, resorted to stripping microchips from consumer electronics to be repurposed for military use.
Their plan was to have Russian flags flying in Kiev after three or four days, so the original idea is unlikely.
Of more concern is the tens of thousands of Ukranian children now in Russia.
This is the problem with university free speech. How do universities guarantee it against this sort of mass protest?
Is that a free speech problem or a public order problem? The RAF were going about their lawful business having obtained the necessary consents and should be allowed to do so unimpeded.
Surely the protestors were the ones exercising free speech.
Free speech is the absence of a negative - i.e. it means you are not persecuted for making your point - not that you have the right to do it when and where wherever you like and disrupt others doing the same or going about their lawful business.
It's a time of considerable turmoil and it seems to me that, after such a long time in government, the Conservatives should be focussing on what they truly believe. Sorting themselves out, as @Alanbrooke says.
And what would that be ? You'd get very different answers from (say) TSE, HYUFD, Casino and PtP.
The last decade has fragmented their coalition - and some of those fragments may permanently be lost to them.
Suella was on LBC yesterday doubling down on going full frontal Reform with a view to either a coalition or tacit mutual benefit arrangements. Personally, I would have thought that peels off the left flank to the LDs.
Where do people like Cameron, Osborne or May go on that scenario. A new “Coalition” party would become their natural home.
This is classic 'centrist' establishment thinking.
People want immigration brought under control. End of.
But it's not end of, is it? They also want functioning public services, more housing, people to look after their elderly relatives and so on. So what does immigration control actually look like in those circumstances?
You just don't get it.
You never will.
I get that you do not want to engage with difficult conversations and would prefer everything to be black and white. I also get that black and white is a very compelling political argument. But it does not solve deep-seated economic challenges.
I engage in difficult conversations on here all the time, but you won't brook anything that goes against your world view - which is that you only want immigration to be about economic benefits.
No, I want immigration to be discussed honestly.
A substantial reduction to immigration levels will have an adverse effect on our economy in multiple ways. I don't think we can afford for that to happen given where our economy is currently.
A substantial reduction from a 10 year average or 2 year average as those are very different?
Well, exactly. Immigration numbers are going to come down significantly over the next year. Is that enough? If not, why not and what will give?
Putting your two comments together, should the government be trying to increase immigration to boost the economy or should they be happy that immigration will come down?
I wonder how the people who would currently support broadly a 'No Immigration' policy would be impacted by it, if it was actually implemented?
How many would benefit by wages rising to a decent level for all the minimum wage jobs that currently rely on immigrants to fill vacancies? A net positive for working people in the lower-paid end of the job market.
And how many would be squealing at the tax rises needed to pay for social care and health costs, or (alternatively) growth in NHS waiting lists and the inability to see a GP? Or services in general because wages have risen? I expect a lot of the 55+ cohort supporting Reform would be far from happy.
I expect the comfortably off middle classes could manage to find their way to the local takeaway once more instead of using Deliveroo...
Conclusion - Labour should adopt zero immigration as it will benefit their natural support and punish the Reform vote most. They won't though,
If Reform got in, it would kill them stone dead. If elected, they won't do it either.
I think the drop in the 2025 immigration figures is going to shame the last Tory government by comparison. Reform will still shout that they are too high
I suspect any immigration figure will be too high for Reform. That's partly why I was trying to imagine the impact of zero immigration. Curiously it is most against the interests of the people who bankroll Reform, and about half their support base. Which is why I think any commitments would be hastily forgotten if they ever did get to power.
OTOH it fits quite well with a left wing Workers First philosophy, if the left can get past zero immigration being racist (which technically it isn't).
The key to creating a successful, popular immigration policy that doesn’t destroy the economy is by finally admitting that we prefer some migrants over others. Japanese over Somalians, Norwegians over Bangladeshis. Not because one kind is morally or intrinsically superior to the other, but because some cultures easily assimilate into the UK - or at least do no harm - and some do not. And some bring economic benefits, on average, and some do not (see the data now coming out of Denmark and Holland, who are far more open about all this stuff)
TBF it looks like the right wing parties are belatedly coming round to this, with the Badenoch/Jenrick discourse on “not all cultures are equal”
Most Brits would be pretty happy with quite high immigration if the cultural impact of differing migrant types was acknowledged, and our immigration policy framed to reflect that
This is one of biotech's success stories - but it gives an idea of just how hard drug development is. And nine out of ten drugs never make it to approval.
What a journey for Intracellular Therapies Inc ($ITCI) - acquired yesterday at the ripe age of 23 yrs old.
Series A of $2.9M in 2002. Moshe Alafi, called one of the founders of biotech (whose VC firm backed Cetus, Amgen, ABI, others) was the lead of the A-round. Over next decade, the startup raised less than $40M in private capital across at least four rounds - a model of capital efficiency.
As the markets opened in 2013, ITCI reverse merged with a public shell company (mining company Oneida Resources Corp) and began trading late that year.
It already had its gem in hand: in 2013, lumateperone (Caplyta) was in Phase 2 for schizophrenia.
They raised $60M in the PIPE (led by Deerfield), and $120M in a secondary in 2014. This was enough to keep things going for another 8 years. They didn’t raise again until 2022… Wow…
As late stage development costs mounted, on the back of exciting data they raised $460M in 2022... and then again in 2024, $500M…
All-in, ITCI raised $1.2B from investors, private and public. Sold to J&J for nearly $15B...
Industrial policy again enters the chat. Government is by a very long way pharma's biggest customer in the UK. But it could do a lot more to encourage the domestic industry (which is still globally competitive even though it's experienced relative decline in global terms).
The GLP1 drugs for obesity are a good example. We have the prospect of spending multiple billions every year on the NHS prescribing them - and our domestic industry have nothing of significance even in early development. A 50/50 government/industry deal to acquire a couple of the more promising overseas biotechs developing them might make extremely good financial sense.
@RossKempsell Labour's Chagos sellout is collapsing - Mauritius refuses to sign after Cabinet meeting this morning, sending negotiators back to London, presumably to bid up the price to UK taxpayers even more
Good. Fuck these Labour traitors. I hope Trump utterly humiliates Starmer and tells him to nix any deal. Wankers
Remember this - the Whitehall machine is broken. Whatever ideas Labour had have been crushed by the Treasury. Though the “Rachael from Accounts” jibe is outrageously misogynistic, she has been captured and broken by economic orthodoxy. Reform offering up people who basically say “this is stupidity, here’s what we should do” is not the negative you may think.
Which brings us back to Danny Fink's column
Voters think the Government is not working for them
They will vote for people promising to smash it
Unfortunately that's mob mentality. The same people who vote for trashing the system are the ones who try and burn down a hotel housing migrants
Of course in the aftermath they also want the fire brigade, ambulances and hospitals...
This is not quite right. People are not moving to Reform in order to smash stuff (though of course it might). The mass of voters have no interest in revolution. People like a quiet life. They neither know nor care how Whitehall works. Nor should they, it isn't their job. They want social democracy delivered with boring competence, and for many years now that has not been achieved. Reform's promise in fact is to do just that.
Note with care Farage distancing himself from trouble makers. Though he needs to go further.
And this is exactly where Labour had the opportunity and are fluffing it.
People are not stupid. They know things aren’t working the way they want or need them to. Some of this is deeply structural and relates to the way we have been governed at least since the 1980s and in some cases far earlier. Attlee, Thatcher and Blair, who are probably the biggest architects of our current system, did much right but a lot of their ideas are now outdated in the circumstances we find ourselves in, 25 years into the 21st Century.
Unfortunately our political classes continue to maintain that a lot of these structures and models are sacred cows and untouchable. The problem is that by delaying reform the eventual solutions to “fix” the problems will become much more extreme.
The current situation is very much like that in 1945 or 1979, in that the country is in a hole and things need to radically change to improve the situation.
Sh!t, I just realised that 1945 to 1979 is 34 years, and 1979 to 2025 is 46 years.
We're closer to the 22nd century than the end of WWII.
Anyway, I'm off. Have a nice day, everyone.
Madonna's "(Get) Into The Groove" is 40 years old...
We are further from Get Into The Groove than Get Into The Groove was from Perry Como's "Some Enchanted Evening".
“Into The Groove” is now equidistant between today and “We’ll Meet Again” by Vera Lynn!
Okay this gets scary quickly.
The Wrath of Khan is closer to the start of the WWII than today.
Star Wars: A New Hope is closer to the Wall Street crash than today.
It’s no fun being a sci-fi geek from the 80s.
The film Forbidden Planet is closer to the death of Queen Victoria, than it is to us.
Afternoon! I’ve just been to a talk on Proliferation Financing by some Compliance lawyers to keep the regulator happy.
The one interesting thing they said was that all the white goods that snaked their way back from Ukraine to Russia in the early months of the invasion were being taken to strip out microchips and various parts that could be repurposed for weaponry.
I’m trying to work out if this is BS - I didn’t think the Russians had planned Ukraine well so this would be even more unlikely as a good idea.
Then it does actually make sense to ensure you get every possible component just in case the war drags on and sanctions bite.
Would be nice to know if there is an authoritative source on this if anyone knows.
The reaction in the Russia industrial system was typical, historically.
Even under Communism, a parallel, criminal source for equipment and parts existed. factory managers would make a deal, "On The Left" with all kinds of shady brokers.
This style has persisted. Since the original invasion/attack in 2014, stuff from the Ukraine was getting harder to access. So the smugglers/brokers were already in business. They just stepped up a notch.
See a plethora of companies that buy stuff in India. Then move it to Russia, via various routes.
Remember this - the Whitehall machine is broken. Whatever ideas Labour had have been crushed by the Treasury. Though the “Rachael from Accounts” jibe is outrageously misogynistic, she has been captured and broken by economic orthodoxy. Reform offering up people who basically say “this is stupidity, here’s what we should do” is not the negative you may think.
Which brings us back to Danny Fink's column
Voters think the Government is not working for them
They will vote for people promising to smash it
Unfortunately that's mob mentality. The same people who vote for trashing the system are the ones who try and burn down a hotel housing migrants
Of course in the aftermath they also want the fire brigade, ambulances and hospitals...
This is not quite right. People are not moving to Reform in order to smash stuff (though of course it might). The mass of voters have no interest in revolution. People like a quiet life. They neither know nor care how Whitehall works. Nor should they, it isn't their job. They want social democracy delivered with boring competence, and for many years now that has not been achieved. Reform's promise in fact is to do just that.
Note with care Farage distancing himself from trouble makers. Though he needs to go further.
And this is exactly where Labour had the opportunity and are fluffing it.
People are not stupid. They know things aren’t working the way they want or need them to. Some of this is deeply structural and relates to the way we have been governed at least since the 1980s and in some cases far earlier. Attlee, Thatcher and Blair, who are probably the biggest architects of our current system, did much right but a lot of their ideas are now outdated in the circumstances we find ourselves in, 25 years into the 21st Century.
Unfortunately our political classes continue to maintain that a lot of these structures and models are sacred cows and untouchable. The problem is that by delaying reform the eventual solutions to “fix” the problems will become much more extreme.
The current situation is very much like that in 1945 or 1979, in that the country is in a hole and things need to radically change to improve the situation.
Sh!t, I just realised that 1945 to 1979 is 34 years, and 1979 to 2025 is 46 years.
We're closer to the 22nd century than the end of WWII.
Anyway, I'm off. Have a nice day, everyone.
Madonna's "(Get) Into The Groove" is 40 years old...
We are further from Get Into The Groove than Get Into The Groove was from Perry Como's "Some Enchanted Evening".
“Into The Groove” is now equidistant between today and “We’ll Meet Again” by Vera Lynn!
Okay this gets scary quickly.
The Wrath of Khan is closer to the start of the WWII than today.
Star Wars: A New Hope is closer to the Wall Street crash than today.
It’s no fun being a sci-fi geek from the 80s.
The film Forbidden Planet is closer to the death of Queen Victoria, than it is to us.
Well it is essentially a Shakespeare adaptation.
The Timeless Dr Who Classic, Planet of Evil, borrowed heavily from The Forbidden Planet.
Quite funny really because only just now at PMQs Starmer bragged about the triple lock saying the Tories want to scrap it [ which by the way is the correct policy]
Slab seem to have realised that cancelling the Edinburgh supercomputer on arrival in No 10, and then reinstating it elsewhere, doesn't look great to the locals as well as to the UK as a whole. Though Mr Murray may be speaking more for LondonHQ/UKG, being a Cabinet Minister.
'Asked if Edinburgh was then still under consideration for building the supercomputer, Murray added: “Edinburgh is the AI capital of the world and has been since 1964, so I think Edinburgh is well placed.”'
Not to disparage the technical and intellectual capital of Scotland's capital, but ??
Ian Murray: "Is Edinburgh the capital of the world?" Scotsman "Aye" Ian Murray: "What, AI? Well it's a bit of a stretch but I'll take it"
Edinburgh has been associated with British AI since the days of Donald Michie in, well, let's take the minister's 1964. AI did not just start five years ago even if it has grown exponentially since then.
Pointless and irrelevant anecdata: Mrs Thatcher offered to pay for my MSc in AI back in the 1980s but I chose Unix and C instead. Not Mrs T personally but a government scheme to upgrade unemployed graduates.
ETA Scooped by Malmesbury's no doubt AI-assisted reading and typing.
Knew about Edinburgh and AI - just googled to get the potted history from the Uni website.
Edit: Calling Edinburgh the AI capital of the world is farcical. Nowhere is that.
Quite. But saying that and then pulling the plug (or rather leaving out the plug one pulled a few months back) ...
Weedy boasting is SLab’s speciality. Cf McConnell’s ‘best wee country in the world’.
This is the problem with university free speech. How do universities guarantee it against this sort of mass protest?
Is that a free speech problem or a public order problem? The RAF were going about their lawful business having obtained the necessary consents and should be allowed to do so unimpeded.
Surely the protestors were the ones exercising free speech.
Free speech is the absence of a negative - i.e. it means you are not persecuted for making your point - not that you have the right to do it when and where wherever you like and disrupt others doing the same or going about their lawful business.
It's a time of considerable turmoil and it seems to me that, after such a long time in government, the Conservatives should be focussing on what they truly believe. Sorting themselves out, as @Alanbrooke says.
And what would that be ? You'd get very different answers from (say) TSE, HYUFD, Casino and PtP.
The last decade has fragmented their coalition - and some of those fragments may permanently be lost to them.
Suella was on LBC yesterday doubling down on going full frontal Reform with a view to either a coalition or tacit mutual benefit arrangements. Personally, I would have thought that peels off the left flank to the LDs.
Where do people like Cameron, Osborne or May go on that scenario. A new “Coalition” party would become their natural home.
This is classic 'centrist' establishment thinking.
People want immigration brought under control. End of.
But it's not end of, is it? They also want functioning public services, more housing, people to look after their elderly relatives and so on. So what does immigration control actually look like in those circumstances?
You just don't get it.
You never will.
I get that you do not want to engage with difficult conversations and would prefer everything to be black and white. I also get that black and white is a very compelling political argument. But it does not solve deep-seated economic challenges.
I engage in difficult conversations on here all the time, but you won't brook anything that goes against your world view - which is that you only want immigration to be about economic benefits.
No, I want immigration to be discussed honestly.
A substantial reduction to immigration levels will have an adverse effect on our economy in multiple ways. I don't think we can afford for that to happen given where our economy is currently.
A substantial reduction from a 10 year average or 2 year average as those are very different?
Well, exactly. Immigration numbers are going to come down significantly over the next year. Is that enough? If not, why not and what will give?
Putting your two comments together, should the government be trying to increase immigration to boost the economy or should they be happy that immigration will come down?
I wonder how the people who would currently support broadly a 'No Immigration' policy would be impacted by it, if it was actually implemented?
How many would benefit by wages rising to a decent level for all the minimum wage jobs that currently rely on immigrants to fill vacancies? A net positive for working people in the lower-paid end of the job market.
And how many would be squealing at the tax rises needed to pay for social care and health costs, or (alternatively) growth in NHS waiting lists and the inability to see a GP? Or services in general because wages have risen? I expect a lot of the 55+ cohort supporting Reform would be far from happy.
I expect the comfortably off middle classes could manage to find their way to the local takeaway once more instead of using Deliveroo...
Conclusion - Labour should adopt zero immigration as it will benefit their natural support and punish the Reform vote most. They won't though,
If Reform got in, it would kill them stone dead. If elected, they won't do it either.
When you refer to a no immigration policy, is that in absolute or net terms as those are two completely different things?
Eg you could have a policy of net no migration, which I believe was Reform's policy last time, which would still entail over a hundred thousand people per year immigrating to net against those who emigrate.
Or you could have a policy of no immigration which if you don't prevent emigration would mean net emigration over 100k per annum.
Slab seem to have realised that cancelling the Edinburgh supercomputer on arrival in No 10, and then reinstating it elsewhere, doesn't look great to the locals as well as to the UK as a whole. Though Mr Murray may be speaking more for LondonHQ/UKG, being a Cabinet Minister.
'Asked if Edinburgh was then still under consideration for building the supercomputer, Murray added: “Edinburgh is the AI capital of the world and has been since 1964, so I think Edinburgh is well placed.”'
Not to disparage the technical and intellectual capital of Scotland's capital, but ??
Neural networks date way, way back.
The modern "AI" thing is about using GPU computing technology to implement many, many more "neurons" than previous attempts.
"The Department of Artificial Intelligence can trace its origins to a small research group established in a flat at 4 Hope Park Square in 1963 by Donald Michie, then Reader in Surgical Science. During the Second World War, through his membership of Max Newman's code-breaking group at Bletchley Park, Michie had been introduced to computing and had come to believe in the possibility of building machines that could think and learn. By the early 1960s, the time appeared to be ripe to embark on this endeavour. Looking back, there are four discernible periods in the development of AI at Edinburgh, each of roughly ten years' duration. The first covers the period from 1963 to the publication of the Lighthill Report by the Science Research Council in l973....."
Silicon Valley has a rather more convincing claim, though. Both historically, with John McCarthy at Stanford, and practically, with the companies now headquartered there.
Industrially, TSMC enters the chat.
MIT, Minsky?
There is so much history and it's well distributed.
It's also notable that there is no "Capital of AI" now.
Nor will there be. The actual hardware doesn't need to be on the same continent as the researchers and users.
Indeed not, but there are geographical centres of gravity. The various US tech restrictions which I noted upthread place some geographic limits on where big compute is going to be, and indeed who can access it. Capital and talent are mobile, but again aggregate in particular locations.
There will be geographical have and have nots. And also have mosts.
Afternoon! I’ve just been to a talk on Proliferation Financing by some Compliance lawyers to keep the regulator happy.
The one interesting thing they said was that all the white goods that snaked their way back from Ukraine to Russia in the early months of the invasion were being taken to strip out microchips and various parts that could be repurposed for weaponry.
I’m trying to work out if this is BS - I didn’t think the Russians had planned Ukraine well so this would be even more unlikely as a good idea.
Then it does actually make sense to ensure you get every possible component just in case the war drags on and sanctions bite.
Would be nice to know if there is an authoritative source on this if anyone knows.
Opinion AFAIK has changed on that since the early days.
It has been discussed on Ukraine the Latest a couple of times.
Here's a modest questioning from Forbes in early 2023:
I think the thing that has changed is that we have found out more about how effective the smuggling operations via intermediate nations, eg Georgia and others, have been.
So - possibly, but it was a nice media story to be waffled on about which fits easy assumption.
Completed online application for my son for his new passport on evening of 7th Jan. Received text back confirming receipt. Sent old passport back on 8th Jan. Received text back confirming receipt. Received new passport in the post yesterday (14th).
It can be done - efficient, using technology. Impressed. Looking at their stats, average waiting time has been under 10 days for over a year now.
Quite funny really because only just now at PMQs Starmer bragged about the triple lock saying the Tories want to scrap it [ which by the way is the correct policy]
It is the correct policy but no party seems, currently, to want to scrap it.
They will have to eventually to make it sustainable.
Quite funny really because only just now at PMQs Starmer bragged about the triple lock saying the Tories want to scrap it [ which by the way is the correct policy]
It is the correct policy but no party seems, currently, to want to scrap it.
They will have to eventually to make it sustainable.
Make it the quadruple lock - no less and no more than the Personal Allowance for income tax.
Remember this - the Whitehall machine is broken. Whatever ideas Labour had have been crushed by the Treasury. Though the “Rachael from Accounts” jibe is outrageously misogynistic, she has been captured and broken by economic orthodoxy. Reform offering up people who basically say “this is stupidity, here’s what we should do” is not the negative you may think.
Which brings us back to Danny Fink's column
Voters think the Government is not working for them
They will vote for people promising to smash it
Unfortunately that's mob mentality. The same people who vote for trashing the system are the ones who try and burn down a hotel housing migrants
Of course in the aftermath they also want the fire brigade, ambulances and hospitals...
This is not quite right. People are not moving to Reform in order to smash stuff (though of course it might). The mass of voters have no interest in revolution. People like a quiet life. They neither know nor care how Whitehall works. Nor should they, it isn't their job. They want social democracy delivered with boring competence, and for many years now that has not been achieved. Reform's promise in fact is to do just that.
Note with care Farage distancing himself from trouble makers. Though he needs to go further.
And this is exactly where Labour had the opportunity and are fluffing it.
People are not stupid. They know things aren’t working the way they want or need them to. Some of this is deeply structural and relates to the way we have been governed at least since the 1980s and in some cases far earlier. Attlee, Thatcher and Blair, who are probably the biggest architects of our current system, did much right but a lot of their ideas are now outdated in the circumstances we find ourselves in, 25 years into the 21st Century.
Unfortunately our political classes continue to maintain that a lot of these structures and models are sacred cows and untouchable. The problem is that by delaying reform the eventual solutions to “fix” the problems will become much more extreme.
The current situation is very much like that in 1945 or 1979, in that the country is in a hole and things need to radically change to improve the situation.
Sh!t, I just realised that 1945 to 1979 is 34 years, and 1979 to 2025 is 46 years.
We're closer to the 22nd century than the end of WWII.
Anyway, I'm off. Have a nice day, everyone.
Madonna's "(Get) Into The Groove" is 40 years old...
We are further from Get Into The Groove than Get Into The Groove was from Perry Como's "Some Enchanted Evening".
“Into The Groove” is now equidistant between today and “We’ll Meet Again” by Vera Lynn!
Okay this gets scary quickly.
The Wrath of Khan is closer to the start of the WWII than today.
Star Wars: A New Hope is closer to the Wall Street crash than today.
It’s no fun being a sci-fi geek from the 80s.
The film Forbidden Planet is closer to the death of Queen Victoria, than it is to us.
Well it is essentially a Shakespeare adaptation.
The Timeless Dr Who Classic, Planet of Evil, borrowed heavily from The Forbidden Planet.
What is the Labour Government's vision for the UK economy? Going for Growth, but how?
It appears to be all over the place and without a consistent approach.
Ben Ansell has published on his substack https://benansell.substack.com/p/grasping-for-growth a very good article which looks at various economic strategies Neoclassical Growth (Osbornism), Neokeynesian Growth (Brownish), Developmentalism (Labour Leftism), Schumpeterian Growth (Cummingism) and Supply-Side Growth (Trussism) and compares them with the current Labour approach.
My view (which is worth very little as I am not an economist, but that might be a benefit) is that there is not a single approach which is correct at all stages of the economic cycle and status of the UK economy. I am favourable towards an institutionalist theory of growth (good and stable legal, government and education system, anti oligopoly) but that is just getting the fundamentals right.
Yes, there are lots of competing theories and opinions on what a UK government should do to encourage growth in the UK economy. I have no view other than the obvious stuff of avoiding unnecessary barriers to productive work, investing in positive ROI infrastructure, not taxing beyond the point of diminishing return, providing a good and free education and health service.
However the electoral calculus depends only on how the economy performs over the shorter term (eg a parliament) which is overwhelmingly correlated to global factors, how the world economy performs, and only marginally correlated to what the UK government does (barring extreme negative actions). The government can stimulate short term growth but this will be of the frothy unsustainable variety.
Therefore it's unfortunate imo that Labour have made "growth" their big banana, the thing on which we are invited to judge them. They clearly felt they needed to in order to secure the GE victory but I wish they hadn't. It's effectively a punt on something they have next to no control over, the global economy. If this does ok, we'll do ok too and Labour will claim the credit. If it doesn't (which looks the more likely to me) we won't either and Labour will get the blame. It's irrational either way and leaves their political fortunes in the lap of the gods.
Of course I don't mean economic growth shouldn't be a priority for the government. It should. They should be encouraging it as much as they can, to the extent consistent with other priorities (of which there are, or should be, many), I just mean it's a mistake to have it up in lights as the defining mission. I'd rather see "End Poverty" or something like that, if we do feel a Just One Thing type of messaging is necessary.
Government has particular jobs to do. Each of them they have taken on over time and not relinquished. In total state managed expenditure heads towards half of all expenditure. This is gigantic.
It is a complete political fraud for governments to set up issues X, Y and Z to judge themselves on. Their job is to run and do everything they have taken to themselves to run and do competently and well.
We don't judge Tesco just on bananas, baked beans and double cream. Nor do they ask us to. We judge them in totality. Same with government. They should grow up.
Yep. But so should we. It's a chicken and egg, I think.
Completed online application for my son for his new passport on evening of 7th Jan. Received text back confirming receipt. Sent old passport back on 8th Jan. Received text back confirming receipt. Received new passport in the post yesterday (14th).
It can be done - efficient, using technology. Impressed. Looking at their stats, average waiting time has been under 10 days for over a year now.
Compare with HMRC, who are now taking 18 months to send back a single stamped document, which should take days (or hours, frankly)
Completed online application for my son for his new passport on evening of 7th Jan. Received text back confirming receipt. Sent old passport back on 8th Jan. Received text back confirming receipt. Received new passport in the post yesterday (14th).
It can be done - efficient, using technology. Impressed. Looking at their stats, average waiting time has been under 10 days for over a year now.
The passport office has always been great in my experience.
Remember this - the Whitehall machine is broken. Whatever ideas Labour had have been crushed by the Treasury. Though the “Rachael from Accounts” jibe is outrageously misogynistic, she has been captured and broken by economic orthodoxy. Reform offering up people who basically say “this is stupidity, here’s what we should do” is not the negative you may think.
Which brings us back to Danny Fink's column
Voters think the Government is not working for them
They will vote for people promising to smash it
Unfortunately that's mob mentality. The same people who vote for trashing the system are the ones who try and burn down a hotel housing migrants
Of course in the aftermath they also want the fire brigade, ambulances and hospitals...
This is not quite right. People are not moving to Reform in order to smash stuff (though of course it might). The mass of voters have no interest in revolution. People like a quiet life. They neither know nor care how Whitehall works. Nor should they, it isn't their job. They want social democracy delivered with boring competence, and for many years now that has not been achieved. Reform's promise in fact is to do just that.
Note with care Farage distancing himself from trouble makers. Though he needs to go further.
And this is exactly where Labour had the opportunity and are fluffing it.
People are not stupid. They know things aren’t working the way they want or need them to. Some of this is deeply structural and relates to the way we have been governed at least since the 1980s and in some cases far earlier. Attlee, Thatcher and Blair, who are probably the biggest architects of our current system, did much right but a lot of their ideas are now outdated in the circumstances we find ourselves in, 25 years into the 21st Century.
Unfortunately our political classes continue to maintain that a lot of these structures and models are sacred cows and untouchable. The problem is that by delaying reform the eventual solutions to “fix” the problems will become much more extreme.
The current situation is very much like that in 1945 or 1979, in that the country is in a hole and things need to radically change to improve the situation.
Sh!t, I just realised that 1945 to 1979 is 34 years, and 1979 to 2025 is 46 years.
We're closer to the 22nd century than the end of WWII.
Anyway, I'm off. Have a nice day, everyone.
Madonna's "(Get) Into The Groove" is 40 years old...
We are further from Get Into The Groove than Get Into The Groove was from Perry Como's "Some Enchanted Evening".
“Into The Groove” is now equidistant between today and “We’ll Meet Again” by Vera Lynn!
Okay this gets scary quickly.
The Wrath of Khan is closer to the start of the WWII than today.
Star Wars: A New Hope is closer to the Wall Street crash than today.
It’s no fun being a sci-fi geek from the 80s.
The film Forbidden Planet is closer to the death of Queen Victoria, than it is to us.
Well it is essentially a Shakespeare adaptation.
The Timeless Dr Who Classic, Planet of Evil, borrowed heavily from The Forbidden Planet.
...Speaking of overlooked classic episodes, I saw "Stones of Blood" the other day, and (if you can overlook the naff FX) it holds up well.
(I'm trying to spread the rumour that the 2025 Xmas throwback classic will be "The Claws Of Axos in Black and White")
Quite funny really because only just now at PMQs Starmer bragged about the triple lock saying the Tories want to scrap it [ which by the way is the correct policy]
It is the correct policy but no party seems, currently, to want to scrap it.
They will have to eventually to make it sustainable.
Mel Stride has already said it is unsustainable hence Starmer's comments at PMQs
@RossKempsell Labour's Chagos sellout is collapsing - Mauritius refuses to sign after Cabinet meeting this morning, sending negotiators back to London, presumably to bid up the price to UK taxpayers even more
The mad rush, especially in the US, to sign inviolable contracts and treaties before Monday lunchtime in Washington is scary to watch.
Has there ever before been so many US regulations and Executive Orders issued in the last week or two of a Presidency before? It’s doubly concerning when we know that the big man isn’t entirely all with it at the moment, so who’s actually writing all this stuff, and hoping to ram it all through before the change of administration?
Meanwhile, Defence Secretary nominee Pate Hesgeth was running rings around the Senate Defence Committee yesterday, a bunch of old people who had very little military experience between them.
He was on a different plane to most of his serious questioners, I'll grant you that.
Completed online application for my son for his new passport on evening of 7th Jan. Received text back confirming receipt. Sent old passport back on 8th Jan. Received text back confirming receipt. Received new passport in the post yesterday (14th).
It can be done - efficient, using technology. Impressed. Looking at their stats, average waiting time has been under 10 days for over a year now.
The passport office has always been great in my experience.
Handing out passports has been a government priority for a while.
This is the problem with university free speech. How do universities guarantee it against this sort of mass protest?
Is that a free speech problem or a public order problem? The RAF were going about their lawful business having obtained the necessary consents and should be allowed to do so unimpeded.
Surely the protestors were the ones exercising free speech.
Free speech is the absence of a negative - i.e. it means you are not persecuted for making your point - not that you have the right to do it when and where wherever you like and disrupt others doing the same or going about their lawful business.
It's a time of considerable turmoil and it seems to me that, after such a long time in government, the Conservatives should be focussing on what they truly believe. Sorting themselves out, as @Alanbrooke says.
And what would that be ? You'd get very different answers from (say) TSE, HYUFD, Casino and PtP.
The last decade has fragmented their coalition - and some of those fragments may permanently be lost to them.
Suella was on LBC yesterday doubling down on going full frontal Reform with a view to either a coalition or tacit mutual benefit arrangements. Personally, I would have thought that peels off the left flank to the LDs.
Where do people like Cameron, Osborne or May go on that scenario. A new “Coalition” party would become their natural home.
This is classic 'centrist' establishment thinking.
People want immigration brought under control. End of.
But it's not end of, is it? They also want functioning public services, more housing, people to look after their elderly relatives and so on. So what does immigration control actually look like in those circumstances?
You just don't get it.
You never will.
I get that you do not want to engage with difficult conversations and would prefer everything to be black and white. I also get that black and white is a very compelling political argument. But it does not solve deep-seated economic challenges.
I engage in difficult conversations on here all the time, but you won't brook anything that goes against your world view - which is that you only want immigration to be about economic benefits.
No, I want immigration to be discussed honestly.
A substantial reduction to immigration levels will have an adverse effect on our economy in multiple ways. I don't think we can afford for that to happen given where our economy is currently.
A substantial reduction from a 10 year average or 2 year average as those are very different?
Well, exactly. Immigration numbers are going to come down significantly over the next year. Is that enough? If not, why not and what will give?
Putting your two comments together, should the government be trying to increase immigration to boost the economy or should they be happy that immigration will come down?
I wonder how the people who would currently support broadly a 'No Immigration' policy would be impacted by it, if it was actually implemented?
How many would benefit by wages rising to a decent level for all the minimum wage jobs that currently rely on immigrants to fill vacancies? A net positive for working people in the lower-paid end of the job market.
And how many would be squealing at the tax rises needed to pay for social care and health costs, or (alternatively) growth in NHS waiting lists and the inability to see a GP? Or services in general because wages have risen? I expect a lot of the 55+ cohort supporting Reform would be far from happy.
I expect the comfortably off middle classes could manage to find their way to the local takeaway once more instead of using Deliveroo...
Conclusion - Labour should adopt zero immigration as it will benefit their natural support and punish the Reform vote most. They won't though,
If Reform got in, it would kill them stone dead. If elected, they won't do it either.
I think the drop in the 2025 immigration figures is going to shame the last Tory government by comparison. Reform will still shout that they are too high
I suspect any immigration figure will be too high for Reform. That's partly why I was trying to imagine the impact of zero immigration. Curiously it is most against the interests of the people who bankroll Reform, and about half their support base. Which is why I think any commitments would be hastily forgotten if they ever did get to power.
OTOH it fits quite well with a left wing Workers First philosophy, if the left can get past zero immigration being racist (which technically it isn't).
The key to creating a successful, popular immigration policy that doesn’t destroy the economy is by finally admitting that we prefer some migrants over others. Japanese over Somalians, Norwegians over Bangladeshis. Not because one kind is morally or intrinsically superior to the other, but because some cultures easily assimilate into the UK - or at least do no harm - and some do not. And some bring economic benefits, on average, and some do not (see the data now coming out of Denmark and Holland, who are far more open about all this stuff)
TBF it looks like the right wing parties are belatedly coming round to this, with the Badenoch/Jenrick discourse on “not all cultures are equal”
Most Brits would be pretty happy with quite high immigration if the cultural impact of differing migrant types was acknowledged, and our immigration policy framed to reflect that
It’s a complex issue, and cultural assimilation rather than multiculturalism is definitely one argument - but I’m a confirmed member of “Housing Theory of Everything” party at this point. If there wasn’t a massive housing shortage (c.8m properties compared to France, for example) then the people would have much less of an objection to immigration for anyone other than key workers.
The chap from confused.com on R4 Today at around 06:25 noting that 20mph limits are making a contribution to reductions in car insurance premiums because they make our roads safer.
We'll get real data from places like Wales in the next year or two.
Though where should already be data in the record, from places like Portsmouth, Cambridge, Nottingham, and possibly Hull.
London and Birmingham may be supplying data in 2-5 years.
Aren't the countervailing trends raising our premiums (electric cars being less repairable and so on) much larger?
Picking this up from earlier.
Yes different factors affect insurance prices, but multivariable analysis and different data sets allow the impacts to be teased out.
The data is that there were major increases (31%) 2 years ago on average, and a fall back (~17%) last year. That is part frequency of claims, and part the cost of repair.
The speed limiter technology that has come in is interesting - we may get premiums related to agreeing to obey speed limits one level more than the 'black box monitoing' done previously.
If the data finds that those dogmatically driving at the speed limit are higher risk should they be charged more? I suspect they are higher risk than those who take a perhaps more flexible scenario dependent approach but obviously less risk than the boy racers at the extreme.
Perhaps rcs has insight?
I doubt whether the UK is comparable with the USA for a whole plethora of reasons.
True, a lot of our cars have steering wheels.
Rising cost of repair is a large factor, and it is not just electric cars. A headlight that might have cost a few tenners to replace is £800 of LED trickery on a recent car, for instance. Reversing cameras, blind spot monitors, half an ipad replacing physical buttons are just some of the things driving up repair costs.
Then there is the increased width of modern cars, partly for safety reasons. Look at how thick a car door is now. We read in yesterday's news that Colchester is repainting its car parks for this reason, but it means less clearance when passing, and more low speed dings.
And while 20mph zones mean less collisions, paradoxically lower speeds mean journeys take longer so there is more traffic at any one time which gives more scope for collisions.
Right to Repair should push the car side of things harder. Even Apple have moved on electronics, in that area.
Repair what though? Repairing a reversing camera will be beyond the expertise of most backstreet garages. Repairing a car by *replacing* the camera with one bought off Ebay (out of a scrapped car) can perhaps be made easier.
In the case of right to repair, they are about the availability of discrete componenents and their ease of installation. Three figure "light modules" that require a garage to dismantle a portion of the car to fit them go against that.
A reversing camera, itself, is a few pounds. The problem is the extreme difficultly of removing the old one and putting the new one in.
That is the core of the Right To Repair movement.
Headlights are the worst, because they don't have to be made difficult.
Don't you have to prove to the French Gendarmerie that you can change a bulb if they ask you?
What do they do if you have to swap an entire LED unit designed to blind all other road users?
On reversing cameras and all the other gadgets, do they decrease or increase the overall cost of maintenance? If there are half the number of low speed accidents but each accident costs three times more, that's not a win...
@RossKempsell Labour's Chagos sellout is collapsing - Mauritius refuses to sign after Cabinet meeting this morning, sending negotiators back to London, presumably to bid up the price to UK taxpayers even more
The mad rush, especially in the US, to sign inviolable contracts and treaties before Monday lunchtime in Washington is scary to watch.
Has there ever before been so many US regulations and Executive Orders issued in the last week or two of a Presidency before? It’s doubly concerning when we know that the big man isn’t entirely all with it at the moment, so who’s actually writing all this stuff, and hoping to ram it all through before the change of administration?
Meanwhile, Defence Secretary nominee Pate Hesgeth was running rings around the Senate Defence Committee yesterday, a bunch of old people who had very little military experience between them.
It happens every 4/8 years don't act like it's novel.
It's not as if the big man has done something really extreme, like sending a bunch of thugs to lynch Congress and the Veep.
I take issue with his naming a carrier after Bill Clinton, though. This is the definitive position.
It's a time of considerable turmoil and it seems to me that, after such a long time in government, the Conservatives should be focussing on what they truly believe. Sorting themselves out, as @Alanbrooke says.
And what would that be ? You'd get very different answers from (say) TSE, HYUFD, Casino and PtP.
The last decade has fragmented their coalition - and some of those fragments may permanently be lost to them.
Suella was on LBC yesterday doubling down on going full frontal Reform with a view to either a coalition or tacit mutual benefit arrangements. Personally, I would have thought that peels off the left flank to the LDs.
Where do people like Cameron, Osborne or May go on that scenario. A new “Coalition” party would become their natural home.
This is classic 'centrist' establishment thinking.
People want immigration brought under control. End of.
But it's not end of, is it? They also want functioning public services, more housing, people to look after their elderly relatives and so on. So what does immigration control actually look like in those circumstances?
There are enough people not working in this country who could fill those posts.
Afternoon! I’ve just been to a talk on Proliferation Financing by some Compliance lawyers to keep the regulator happy.
The one interesting thing they said was that all the white goods that snaked their way back from Ukraine to Russia in the early months of the invasion were being taken to strip out microchips and various parts that could be repurposed for weaponry.
I’m trying to work out if this is BS - I didn’t think the Russians had planned Ukraine well so this would be even more unlikely as a good idea.
Then it does actually make sense to ensure you get every possible component just in case the war drags on and sanctions bite.
Would be nice to know if there is an authoritative source on this if anyone knows.
Nah. IIRC there’s footage of Russian soldiers taking /toilets/ from the early days of the attack on Ukraine. They were grabbing white goods to ship back to their families, not for the Russian war effort.
It’s completely plausible that Russia is importing white goods from abroad /now/ to strip them for parts, but that’s not what was happening on the ground during the invasion - people underestimate just how poor the arse end of Russia is even today. Dirt roads & houses without modern conveniences are common.
I don’t know if there‘s an “official” source for this though - it’s not as if the Russian state will have been keeping track of the stuff their army was looting from the field.
Serious question: why don't we just sell the Chagos Islands to the highest bidder? "For Sale: one US air base with attached island and inhabitants" We should be able to get a couple of billion, surely?
Great idea. Bidding war ensues between USA and China pushing up the price to the stratosphere.
Completed online application for my son for his new passport on evening of 7th Jan. Received text back confirming receipt. Sent old passport back on 8th Jan. Received text back confirming receipt. Received new passport in the post yesterday (14th).
It can be done - efficient, using technology. Impressed. Looking at their stats, average waiting time has been under 10 days for over a year now.
Compare with HMRC, who are now taking 18 months to send back a single stamped document, which should take days (or hours, frankly)
Oh I’m waiting for a tax refund from my self assessment which I did at 8am on April 6th.
Completed online application for my son for his new passport on evening of 7th Jan. Received text back confirming receipt. Sent old passport back on 8th Jan. Received text back confirming receipt. Received new passport in the post yesterday (14th).
It can be done - efficient, using technology. Impressed. Looking at their stats, average waiting time has been under 10 days for over a year now.
That’s been the case for a while now and demonstrates who to quickly improve productivity, automate the happy path and then slowly start to automate the exceptions
It's a time of considerable turmoil and it seems to me that, after such a long time in government, the Conservatives should be focussing on what they truly believe. Sorting themselves out, as @Alanbrooke says.
And what would that be ? You'd get very different answers from (say) TSE, HYUFD, Casino and PtP.
The last decade has fragmented their coalition - and some of those fragments may permanently be lost to them.
Suella was on LBC yesterday doubling down on going full frontal Reform with a view to either a coalition or tacit mutual benefit arrangements. Personally, I would have thought that peels off the left flank to the LDs.
Where do people like Cameron, Osborne or May go on that scenario. A new “Coalition” party would become their natural home.
This is classic 'centrist' establishment thinking.
People want immigration brought under control. End of.
But it's not end of, is it? They also want functioning public services, more housing, people to look after their elderly relatives and so on. So what does immigration control actually look like in those circumstances?
There are enough people not working in this country who could fill those posts.
We also have people working in jobs which don't provide as much benefit to society.
If people want to pay more to have their nails done than have someone get their mum dressed in the morning, how do we go about fixing that?
Quite funny really because only just now at PMQs Starmer bragged about the triple lock saying the Tories want to scrap it [ which by the way is the correct policy]
It is the correct policy but no party seems, currently, to want to scrap it.
They will have to eventually to make it sustainable.
Make it the quadruple lock - no less and no more than the Personal Allowance for income tax.
There's no sense in which that implies a "quadruple" lock. It would be a single lock, and would abandon the locks with earnings, inflation, and 2.5%.
Not saying it would necessarily be a bad thing, but it pretty obviously isn't a quadruple anything.
Serious question: why don't we just sell the Chagos Islands to the highest bidder? "For Sale: one US air base with attached island and inhabitants" We should be able to get a couple of billion, surely?
Great idea. Bidding war ensues between USA and China pushing up the price to the stratosphere.
No deal on Chagos islands. Mauritius attorney general set to return to London tonight for more talks. Chances of a deal before Trump takes power next week diminishing."
Completed online application for my son for his new passport on evening of 7th Jan. Received text back confirming receipt. Sent old passport back on 8th Jan. Received text back confirming receipt. Received new passport in the post yesterday (14th).
It can be done - efficient, using technology. Impressed. Looking at their stats, average waiting time has been under 10 days for over a year now.
Compare with HMRC, who are now taking 18 months to send back a single stamped document, which should take days (or hours, frankly)
Oh I’m waiting for a tax refund from my self assessment which I did at 8am on April 6th.
Can you send them a bill for usurious rates of interest and extra ‘fines’, the same as they would do to you for paying late?
Quite funny really because only just now at PMQs Starmer bragged about the triple lock saying the Tories want to scrap it [ which by the way is the correct policy]
It is the correct policy but no party seems, currently, to want to scrap it.
They will have to eventually to make it sustainable.
Make it the quadruple lock - no less and no more than the Personal Allowance for income tax.
There's no sense in which that implies a "quadruple" lock. It would be a single lock, and would abandon the locks with earnings, inflation, and 2.5%.
Not saying it would necessarily be a bad thing, but it pretty obviously isn't a quadruple anything.
Politics my friend. Politics.
"The Government announced the Quadruple lock today. An additional tie between income, taxation and pensions.
Kathleen Bullshit, the Minister for Lying - "Today's announcement is about the low paid & pensioners and making life better for them."
Serious question: why don't we just sell the Chagos Islands to the highest bidder? "For Sale: one US air base with attached island and inhabitants" We should be able to get a couple of billion, surely?
Great idea. Bidding war ensues between USA and China pushing up the price to the stratosphere.
Presumably because the guy (or girl, but it's definitely a guy) was speaking off the record. Which does totally negate his (or her, but again not) point.
It's a time of considerable turmoil and it seems to me that, after such a long time in government, the Conservatives should be focussing on what they truly believe. Sorting themselves out, as @Alanbrooke says.
And what would that be ? You'd get very different answers from (say) TSE, HYUFD, Casino and PtP.
The last decade has fragmented their coalition - and some of those fragments may permanently be lost to them.
Suella was on LBC yesterday doubling down on going full frontal Reform with a view to either a coalition or tacit mutual benefit arrangements. Personally, I would have thought that peels off the left flank to the LDs.
Where do people like Cameron, Osborne or May go on that scenario. A new “Coalition” party would become their natural home.
This is classic 'centrist' establishment thinking.
People want immigration brought under control. End of.
But it's not end of, is it? They also want functioning public services, more housing, people to look after their elderly relatives and so on. So what does immigration control actually look like in those circumstances?
There are enough people not working in this country who could fill those posts.
We also have people working in jobs which don't provide as much benefit to society.
If people want to pay more to have their nails done than have someone get their mum dressed in the morning, how do we go about fixing that?
Quite funny really because only just now at PMQs Starmer bragged about the triple lock saying the Tories want to scrap it [ which by the way is the correct policy]
It is the correct policy but no party seems, currently, to want to scrap it.
They will have to eventually to make it sustainable.
Make it the quadruple lock - no less and no more than the Personal Allowance for income tax.
There's no sense in which that implies a "quadruple" lock. It would be a single lock, and would abandon the locks with earnings, inflation, and 2.5%.
Not saying it would necessarily be a bad thing, but it pretty obviously isn't a quadruple anything.
The biggest problem is that the triple lock isn't actually a triple lock, it's a triple ratchet.
Take 3 years as follows for the purposes of the exercise.
Year 1, prices drop by 50%, earnings drop by 50%.
Year 2 prices rise by 100%, earnings stay flat.
year 3 prices stay flat, earnings rise by 100%.
Say the pension is £10,000.
After yr 1 it is worth £10,250 with the 2.5% "lock".
In yr 2 it is worth £20,500 with the prices "lock".
In yr 3 it is worth £41,000 with the earnings "lock".
£10,000 is worth the same as it was at the end of yr 3 as it was at the start - but
The pension has gone by 310% in real terms over the course of 3 years !
Obviously I've exaggerated what would happen in the real world but if you get a lot of hops between the higher of prices and earnings in individual years then the value goes up and up and up (In terms of real prices, real earnings and nominal). It mathematically MUST beat inflation in the long run !
Completed online application for my son for his new passport on evening of 7th Jan. Received text back confirming receipt. Sent old passport back on 8th Jan. Received text back confirming receipt. Received new passport in the post yesterday (14th).
It can be done - efficient, using technology. Impressed. Looking at their stats, average waiting time has been under 10 days for over a year now.
Compare with HMRC, who are now taking 18 months to send back a single stamped document, which should take days (or hours, frankly)
Oh I’m waiting for a tax refund from my self assessment which I did at 8am on April 6th.
Can you send them a bill for usurious rates of interest and extra ‘fines’, the same as they would do to you for paying late?
If you wait till near the end of the stat. window and submit a VAT return that's a reclaim (Which happens plenty when you're an exporter), HMRC will send an interest refund if they've paid outside the stat. period.
It's a time of considerable turmoil and it seems to me that, after such a long time in government, the Conservatives should be focussing on what they truly believe. Sorting themselves out, as @Alanbrooke says.
And what would that be ? You'd get very different answers from (say) TSE, HYUFD, Casino and PtP.
The last decade has fragmented their coalition - and some of those fragments may permanently be lost to them.
Suella was on LBC yesterday doubling down on going full frontal Reform with a view to either a coalition or tacit mutual benefit arrangements. Personally, I would have thought that peels off the left flank to the LDs.
Where do people like Cameron, Osborne or May go on that scenario. A new “Coalition” party would become their natural home.
This is classic 'centrist' establishment thinking.
People want immigration brought under control. End of.
But it's not end of, is it? They also want functioning public services, more housing, people to look after their elderly relatives and so on. So what does immigration control actually look like in those circumstances?
There are enough people not working in this country who could fill those posts.
We also have people working in jobs which don't provide as much benefit to society.
If people want to pay more to have their nails done than have someone get their mum dressed in the morning, how do we go about fixing that?
Move the nail bar into the care home ?
Well my parents (not in a care home) get great utility from the person who comes every fortnight to do their nails. It's probably their favourite of the various visits from various providers of various services that they receive.
Comments
Scotsman "Aye"
Ian Murray: "What, AI? Well it's a bit of a stretch but I'll take it"
There have been suggestions that independent repairs are being made deliberately difficult to protect revenue models. In the US certainly, there has been a lot of lobbying against “Right to repair” legislation.
The modern "AI" thing is about using GPU computing technology to implement many, many more "neurons" than previous attempts.
There's a brief history at https://www.inf.ed.ac.uk/about/AIhistory.html
"The Department of Artificial Intelligence can trace its origins to a small research group established in a flat at 4 Hope Park Square in 1963 by Donald Michie, then Reader in Surgical Science. During the Second World War, through his membership of Max Newman's code-breaking group at Bletchley Park, Michie had been introduced to computing and had come to believe in the possibility of building machines that could think and learn. By the early 1960s, the time appeared to be ripe to embark on this endeavour. Looking back, there are four discernible periods in the development of AI at Edinburgh, each of roughly ten years' duration. The first covers the period from 1963 to the publication of the Lighthill Report by the Science Research Council in l973....."
A reversing camera, itself, is a few pounds. The problem is the extreme difficultly of removing the old one and putting the new one in.
That is the core of the Right To Repair movement.
Pointless and irrelevant anecdata: Mrs Thatcher offered to pay for my MSc in AI back in the 1980s but I chose Unix and C instead. Not Mrs T personally but a government scheme to upgrade unemployed graduates.
ETA Scooped by Malmesbury's no doubt AI-assisted reading and typing.
Edit: and @Malmesbury.
I still don't follow the maths of more cars on the road. Isn't it the just the same number of cars, for a (slightly) longer period? In Edinburgh we had a 22% reduction in collisions as a result of 20mph.
The other day I criticised SKS over the way he speaks. He's a bit better at this PMQs (though that's a very low hurdle to cross), but Badenoch is awful in a different way. Her voice is more appealing, but she makes too many wordslips, and the content of what she says is absolutely meh. Worse, she cannot think on her feet.
It really is two drunken amateurs slugging it out at the bar.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Testicles_as_food
(Banger page title from Wikipedia there)
Edit: Calling Edinburgh the AI capital of the world is farcical. Nowhere is that.
Okay this gets scary quickly.
However the electoral calculus depends only on how the economy performs over the shorter term (eg a parliament) which is overwhelmingly correlated to global factors, how the world economy performs, and only marginally correlated to what the UK government does (barring extreme negative actions). The government can stimulate short term growth but this will be of the frothy unsustainable variety.
Therefore it's unfortunate imo that Labour have made "growth" their big banana, the thing on which we are invited to judge them. They clearly felt they needed to in order to secure the GE victory but I wish they hadn't. It's effectively a punt on something they have next to no control over, the global economy. If this does ok, we'll do ok too and Labour will claim the credit. If it doesn't (which looks the more likely to me) we won't either and Labour will get the blame. It's irrational either way and leaves their political fortunes in the lap of the gods.
Of course I don't mean economic growth shouldn't be a priority for the government. It should. They should be encouraging it as much as they can, to the extent consistent with other priorities (of which there are, or should be, many), I just mean it's a mistake to have it up in lights as the defining mission. I'd rather see "End Poverty" or something like that, if we do feel a Just One Thing type of messaging is necessary.
@RossKempsell
Labour's Chagos sellout is collapsing - Mauritius refuses to sign after Cabinet meeting this morning, sending negotiators back to London, presumably to bid up the price to UK taxpayers even more
Star Wars: A New Hope is closer to the Wall Street crash than today.
It’s no fun being a sci-fi geek from the 80s.
Both historically, with John McCarthy at Stanford, and practically, with the companies now headquartered there.
Industrially, TSMC enters the chat.
I have an argument I wheel out now and again about how culture hasn't really moved on much in the last 40 years. Today doesn't really look much different to the early 90s. It's a bit different, but not as different as 1985 was to the early 50s. I still consume the cultural outputs of the 1980s. Hell, my daughter does. She has Smiths records. I certainly didn't have Perry Como records at her age. I still listen to very little from before the 1970s and nothing at all from before the 1960s.
https://youtu.be/3D8TEJtQRhw?si=17naCmBio8U6Rbu0
It is a complete political fraud for governments to set up issues X, Y and Z to judge themselves on. Their job is to run and do everything they have taken to themselves to run and do competently and well.
We don't judge Tesco just on bananas, baked beans and double cream. Nor do they ask us to. We judge them in totality. Same with government. They should grow up.
There is so much history and it's well distributed.
It's also notable that there is no "Capital of AI" now.
Nor will there be. The actual hardware doesn't need to be on the same continent as the researchers and users.
"You rejected that. Today it's a 999 year lease. Tomorrow, who knows?"
The one interesting thing they said was that all the white goods that snaked their way back from Ukraine to Russia in the early months of the invasion were being taken to strip out microchips and various parts that could be repurposed for weaponry.
I’m trying to work out if this is BS - I didn’t think the Russians had planned Ukraine well so this would be even more unlikely as a good idea.
Then it does actually make sense to ensure you get every possible component just in case the war drags on and sanctions bite.
Would be nice to know if there is an authoritative source on this if anyone knows.
Has there ever before been so many US regulations and Executive Orders issued in the last week or two of a Presidency before? It’s doubly concerning when we know that the big man isn’t entirely all with it at the moment, so who’s actually writing all this stuff, and hoping to ram it all through before the change of administration?
Meanwhile, Defence Secretary nominee Pate Hesgeth was running rings around the Senate Defence Committee yesterday, a bunch of old people who had very little military experience between them.
Instead they were marginalised, ignored, despised, insulted and treated with complete contempt, by all three major parties.
And now Reform is on 25%. I wonder why?
The Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents has a paper summarising teh evidence we have, and a nuanced policy position:
https://www.rospa.com/rospaweb/docs/advice-services/road-safety/drivers/20-mph-zone-factsheet.pdf
I think data from Wales in a couple of years time will be informative.
Invite them for lunch.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ad9n9qWkVxo
He has had some decent ideas on pensions in the past.
Will he be able to implement any changes
https://www.msn.com/en-gb/money/other/labour-s-radical-new-pensions-minister-called-for-triple-lock-to-be-scrapped/ar-AA1xeUUz?ocid=entnewsntp&pc=U531&cvid=be346ecd02624311b443246b8ff4b552&ei=14
It's not as if the big man has done something really extreme, like sending a bunch of thugs to lynch Congress and the Veep.
I would start the bidding a $20 billion. With a reserve price.
Their plan was to have Russian flags flying in Kiev after three or four days, so the original idea is unlikely.
Of more concern is the tens of thousands of Ukranian children now in Russia.
TBF it looks like the right wing parties are belatedly coming round to this, with the Badenoch/Jenrick discourse on “not all cultures are equal”
Most Brits would be pretty happy with quite high immigration if the cultural impact of differing migrant types was acknowledged, and our immigration policy framed to reflect that
Industrial policy again enters the chat. Government is by a very long way pharma's biggest customer in the UK. But it could do a lot more to encourage the domestic industry (which is still globally competitive even though it's experienced relative decline in global terms).
The GLP1 drugs for obesity are a good
example. We have the prospect of spending multiple billions every year on the NHS prescribing them - and our domestic industry have nothing of significance even in early development.
A 50/50 government/industry deal to acquire a couple of the more promising overseas biotechs developing them might make extremely good financial sense.
Even under Communism, a parallel, criminal source for equipment and parts existed. factory managers would make a deal, "On The Left" with all kinds of shady brokers.
This style has persisted. Since the original invasion/attack in 2014, stuff from the Ukraine was getting harder to access. So the smugglers/brokers were already in business. They just stepped up a notch.
See a plethora of companies that buy stuff in India. Then move it to Russia, via various routes.
Cf McConnell’s ‘best wee country in the world’.
Eg you could have a policy of net no migration, which I believe was Reform's policy last time, which would still entail over a hundred thousand people per year immigrating to net against those who emigrate.
Or you could have a policy of no immigration which if you don't prevent emigration would mean net emigration over 100k per annum.
The various US tech restrictions which I noted upthread place some geographic limits on where big compute is going to be, and indeed who can access it.
Capital and talent are mobile, but again aggregate in particular locations.
There will be geographical have and have nots. And also have mosts.
It has been discussed on Ukraine the Latest a couple of times.
Here's a modest questioning from Forbes in early 2023:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/erictegler/2023/01/20/is-russia-really-buying-home-appliances-to-harvest-computer-chips-for-ukraine-bound-weapons-systems/
I think the thing that has changed is that we have found out more about how effective the smuggling operations via intermediate nations, eg Georgia and others, have been.
So - possibly, but it was a nice media story to be waffled on about which fits easy assumption.
That's not quite what you asked for - sorry !
Completed online application for my son for his new passport on evening of 7th Jan. Received text back confirming receipt. Sent old passport back on 8th Jan. Received text back confirming receipt. Received new passport in the post yesterday (14th).
It can be done - efficient, using technology. Impressed. Looking at their stats, average waiting time has been under 10 days for over a year now.
Sam Freedman @samfr.bsky.social
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39m
In stark constrast to the Tories the Lib Dems have a very clear strategy.
Be the anti Musk/Trump/Farage party while attacking Labour on healthcare and niche taxes that hit their constituencies.
https://bsky.app/profile/samfr.bsky.social/post/3lfrqxoj5m62q
They will have to eventually to make it sustainable.
My fellow Americans, our long national nightmare is over
https://x.com/buccocapital/status/1879225677234500059
(I'm trying to spread the rumour that the 2025 Xmas throwback classic will be "The Claws Of Axos in Black and White")
Don't you have to prove to the French Gendarmerie that you can change a bulb if they ask you?
What do they do if you have to swap an entire LED unit designed to blind all other road users?
On reversing cameras and all the other gadgets, do they decrease or increase the overall cost of maintenance? If there are half the number of low speed accidents but each accident costs three times more, that's not a win...
This is the definitive position.
The largest aircraft carrier should always be named the USS William Howard Taft.
https://x.com/TomcatJunkie/status/1879186639181979726
It’s completely plausible that Russia is importing white goods from abroad /now/ to strip them for parts, but that’s not what was happening on the ground during the invasion - people underestimate just how poor the arse end of Russia is even today. Dirt roads & houses without modern conveniences are common.
I don’t know if there‘s an “official” source for this though - it’s not as if the Russian state will have been keeping track of the stuff their army was looting from the field.
Trump will understand. "Transactional".
If people want to pay more to have their nails done than have someone get their mum dressed in the morning, how do we go about fixing that?
Not saying it would necessarily be a bad thing, but it pretty obviously isn't a quadruple anything.
No deal on Chagos islands. Mauritius attorney general set to return to London tonight for more talks. Chances of a deal before Trump takes power next week diminishing."
https://x.com/christopherhope/status/1879492060585337333
Nsfw in case anyone can be arsed looking at his tweets.
"The Government announced the Quadruple lock today. An additional tie between income, taxation and pensions.
Kathleen Bullshit, the Minister for Lying - "Today's announcement is about the low paid & pensioners and making life better for them."
The enormous effort she put into being actively bad at her job needs rewarding.
Then again, as a certified member of the NU10K, holding her accountable for her own actions is probably a human rights violation.
Take 3 years as follows for the purposes of the exercise.
Year 1, prices drop by 50%, earnings drop by 50%.
Year 2 prices rise by 100%, earnings stay flat.
year 3 prices stay flat, earnings rise by 100%.
Say the pension is £10,000.
After yr 1 it is worth £10,250 with the 2.5% "lock".
In yr 2 it is worth £20,500 with the prices "lock".
In yr 3 it is worth £41,000 with the earnings "lock".
£10,000 is worth the same as it was at the end of yr 3 as it was at the start - but
The pension has gone by 310% in real terms over the course of 3 years !
Obviously I've exaggerated what would happen in the real world but if you get a lot of hops between the higher of prices and earnings in individual years then the value goes up and up and up (In terms of real prices, real earnings and nominal). It mathematically MUST beat inflation in the long run !
Sounds like a House of Lords prospect, or perhaps Chief Legal Officer at a government department?
- Higher paid
- Better perks
- Similar enough duties that it is a punch in the face to those she failed.