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The great switch off – politicalbetting.com
The great switch off – politicalbetting.com
Why do voters who backed Labour now say they'd go elsewhere? It depends where they've gone. Those switching form Labour to Reform are the most likely to cite immigration and to Conservatives for not having kept their manifesto policies, followed by winter fuel.
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The three headline policy changes (WFA, VAT on school fees, IHT on farmland) aren’t going to raise 0.1% of government spending between them. They might as well have raised income tax or VAT rates, and raised some proper money for their unpopularity.
The one thing that will raise money, the Employer NI increase, is going to make them even more unpopular with a number of high-profile redundancies and business closures.
Sorry to labour my point, but here is another gem from the author of the paper that the previous header was based on. It is about the impact of AirBnB:
"The analysis shows how white entrepreneurs attempt to attract guests through a form of colonial discourse: exoticizing difference, emphasizing foreignness, and treating communities as consumable experiences for an outside group. White visitors, in turn, consume these cultural symbols to decorate their own identities of touristic consumption, describing themselves in colonial tropes of brave white adventurers exploring uncharted territories: glorious conquests no longer over gold and ivory, but over sandwiches at a local bodega. This situates Airbnb’s marketing at the urban frontier in a longer history of colonialism and racialized expropriation."
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0308518X19886321
That paper opened my eyes. I've let out my spare bedroom on Airbnb a couple of times and I'm shocked - SHOCKED - to discover that I was taking part in a system of colonialism and racialized expropriation. I thought I was just trying to make a few spare pounds with an otherwise unused asset. I promise to spent the whole of the next year on my knees to atone for my unacceptable oppression of ethnic minorities.
And I still can't believe that the author of the paper blames all of society's ills on the far right but gives the far left a free pass.
President Trump, who has never served a day in the US military, just issued an executive order claiming that the 15,000 trans people serving in our country's armed forces lack the honor, honesty, humility, and selflessness necessary to do their duty.
https://x.com/AriDrennen/status/1884124773694980467
point out the 2023/4 NI cuts weren't actually affordable
increase income tax by 3% to offset the 4% NI cuts that made zero sense
Use the WFA as justification for it going on income tax rather than NI
And then if that wasn't enough raise Employer NI later on...
And most of the NIC related job cuts are things that have been obvious for years - for instance the only Sainsbury's cafes left were the ones no other operator (Costa) wanted.
But I still can’t stretch to seeing how it’s racist. Maybe that’s why I’m an IT guy and not a social sciences guy.
But, freedom of speech and all that - is it worth getting het up about?
In a few years no one will really remember what happened.
As for the farmers' tax it isn't the tax and its contents that irritates people, it is the fact that Lab told them specifically that they would not introduce such a tax. And then introduced it. Not that losing the rural community will bother Lab overly. I think they'd run a mile at the sight of a cow (unless it was actually The Cow in Westbourne Park).
Personally, it's not how I'd describe inequality but it is clearly true that you are more likely to be rich if white and more likely to be poor if you are not white.
They don't go out of their way to publicise it.
I know this because I recognise it in the travelling I have done, particularly if I'm tagging behind a girlfriend. The question is whether this is a bad thing. It certainly feels awkward in Africa, less so in SE Asia or South America. It even extends to grimy bits of Edinburgh - a selling point for AirBnBs in Leith - "working class neighbourhood".
However much you guys dislike woke millenials, it's nothing compared with how much woke millenials dislike woke millenials
I can't recall a single Labour-y thing you've ever said.
You will be able to generate this stuff instantly for zero pence by pushing a button, and it will be “better” - and endless
An entire edifice - academe, academic publishing, the university sector - is about to collapse. See Cardiff university right now - on the verge of bankruptcy. Many more universities will follow it into oblivion. Most of them in fact
The last Government not increasing fees whilst also reducing overseas students was the final straw but universities have been a slow moving train wreck for the past 2 years. The only question was where the true scale of the problem would be reveal first.
We will look back on 2017 to 2024 period as one of unbelievable craziness, given a turbo-boost by the extra hysteria generated during the pandemic.
https://lordashcroftpolls.com/2025/01/net-zero-votes-at-16-who-is-the-opposition-and-how-long-will-labour-last/
The USA is in an interesting state in the same way. No-one has a decent story except Trump. But he has two clear ones. Plutocratic gangster strong man MAGA oligarchy; and being on the side of the ordinary regular American.
But where is the concern for the tenant farmer? Who is just as deep in the manure pile.
Very few last very long in Trumpworld as that loyalty is rarely reciprocated so don't get attached to him.
The collapse of universities will be an epic spectacle
Apart from adding "computational hermeneutics" to my bullshit dictionary, a waste of five minutes of my time.
They’re now mostly selling scarcity of accreditation through the admissions process.
Hopefully, the insane waste of public money subsidising the price of everyone's gas bills will be the last time we see that sort of nonsense. The WFA decision is the right way ahead and governments of every stripe need to follow it.
Nice view though.
interim gov’t forces in #Daraa just captured the alleged #ISIS emir of eastern #Syria, Atta al-Shami, as he arrived to plan an #ISIS revival in southern #Syria.
He’d been working with a local operative, Mohsen al-Hamid - a long-time #Assad intel asset.
https://x.com/Charles_Lister/status/1883847308238078441
It will massively impact towns and constituencies where this happens. And it will happen
I remember when a teacher training college closed in my small home town. That was big and bad. These are UNIVERSITIES. Grim
The govt doesn’t have the £££ to bail them all out
Doubtless, The Donald would do the same had he lived in those times with the same power.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c1kmwp0l997o
But yes, as an Aberystwyth alum, to describe it as a university town would be something of an understatement. It’s going to be pretty grim for many who work in the sector outside the academics themselves.
“Staff at Cardiff University fear huge job cuts are about to be announced by a senior management team that has already spoken of an ‘immediate existential crisis’ ✍️@Ship”
https://x.com/nationcymru/status/1883964966530933089?s=46&t=bulOICNH15U6kB0MwE6Lfw
You may not care, entire towns and cities are gonna be gutted by this
“Inferno burns the Welsh universities
All are running a deficit, have voluntary severance schemes & are looking to cut staff
NI increase was last straw
Labour can expect a hammering in university constituencies in next Senedd elections”
https://x.com/21percentgroup/status/1883997322755154238?s=46&t=bulOICNH15U6kB0MwE6Lfw
The paper looks quite interesting in places, though I've only had a quick glance.
The word clouds comparing how white hosts advertise their airbnb rentals in black majority neighbourhoods in New York have the most common words as
"artist" and "hipster"
whereas for black hosts in those neighbourhoods the most common words are
"surveillance" and "doorman"
Or should I rather ask do they have one?
They will have enhancements as they are voluntary. Does the taxpayer fund this ?
A man who was pardoned last week by Donald Trump for his role in the January 6 Capitol riot has been shot dead by police at a traffic stop.
Matthew Huttle, 42, of Hobart, Indiana, was killed on Sunday by a Jasper County sheriff’s deputy following a heated dispute.
State police, who are investigating the incident, said the deputy tried to arrest Mr Huttle when “an altercation took place between the suspect and the officer, which resulted in the officer firing his weapon and fatally wounding the suspect.
“The investigation also shows that during the traffic stop, the suspect was in possession of a firearm,” state police added.
It is not clear what prompted the traffic stop.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/us/news/2025/01/28/man-pardoned-trump-january-6-capitol-shot-dead-police/
Migrants who arrive on small boats face having phones seized
https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/world/migrants-who-arrive-on-small-boats-face-having-phones-seized/ar-AA1xXg2d?ocid=entnewsntp&pc=U531&cvid=0678c172e47f4f83a9de177b46970cd2&ei=23
@Leon is talking about something else, the essential redundancy of Universities as stores of learning when AI makes much of that learning either unnecessary or irrelevant. I don't believe that will happen although, once again, further growth may prove very difficult. Of course he may be right but it is far too early to say. What we must not do is confuse the first trend of consolidation with the second.
Anyone with an ounce of political sense could have told Reeves to think again when this popped into her head. Or at least map out how to do it in a gradual process that doesn't hit so many people at such a low threshold.
Now we have a POTUS letting thousands of violent thugs out early and that's just the new normal.
Setting that aside, I believe we are looking at something much worse than universities “consolidating”. We are looking at a systemic failure closer to the banks in 2008, I suspect. That article I linked to talks of “an existential crisis in UK universities”
Universities have been a Ponzi scheme for a decade. Reliant on foreign students paying loads and
domestic students racking up debt for ever crappier courses run increasingly online. Et voila, le deluge
Because of the way student loans are already designed to function as a graduate tax and never be repaid, if the government decides to increases tuition fees, that won't actually be paid by students, but from the government's coffers as increased levels of write off at the end of the student loan terms. This is almost certainly why the government doesn't want to allow fees to increase by more than token amounts.
The reality is that far too many people are going to Uni to do low value courses, when they should be going straight into the workforce (in many cases, aged 16 to go and do apprenticeships). This is a stupid and unsustainable waste of lots of money and of people's working lives, and it's the fruit of yet another one of Blair's moronic deeds. The challenge is unwinding the current mess in an orderly way...
I would be interested to see what happened to the people who merely used the Uni system to get their family into the UK. Did they learn and become a productive and contributing member to society along with their family or did we just end up with more people coming in to work in low wage jobs or be economically inactive.
I could see the argument for bringing family in if a Uni student if that degree was going to lead to a highly qualified person in a well paid job.
One or two of us on PB have been banging on about this off and on for months and months.
Earlier, I noticed Hulkenberg's literally old enough to be his team mate's dad.
The last Government in their panic over small boat immigration effectively killed funding from foreign students for the entire university sector through a range of tightened visa regulations.
At the end of the day why go to an unwelcoming sh*thole like Cardiff (or elsewhere in the UK) when universities in New Zealand and Canada are happy to take money from the Saudi, Chinese and Indian Governments?
It was one of the most egregious "f*** business" policies by a "f*** business" government.
I’m actually surprised they’ve managed to hide it from the general public for so long
reading a Deepseek paper and stumbled upon a very beautiful formula where they unify SFT and MOST RL TYPES (DPO, PPO, GRPO, etc.) into ONE FORMULA*
*that requires additional reward functions to be defined.
But the fundamental insight - that all these training methods can be framed as gradient ascent on observed logprobs - is beautiful..
https://x.com/N8Programs/status/1884110306089357361