These children ask for organic options for tea – or sushi on Deliveroo. They moan about the lack of sports and big class sizes. They get picked up by a nanny (always Filipino). When my children get invited over to playdates, they get lost in their massive houses. Their open-plan kitchens are the size of my entire flat.
The other day, Liberty nearly got strangled in a boy’s five-storey house by a long piece of string that they use to dangle down the staircase with a felt basket to bring up pencils and notes. The parents, of course, were devastated when I sent them photos on WhatsApp of her lacerated neck – and they promptly sent their nanny off to buy me organic healing cream from a King’s Road pharmacy.
Another mum does the majority of the school run in an Uber – which she admits “saves on the parking tickets”. I didn’t dream of telling her I could hardly afford my heating bill. These parents are happy-clappy with the huge savings on fees – especially if they have more than one child. Two children at nearby Notting Hill Prep costs £8,783 per term.
The line The other day, Liberty nearly got strangled in a boy’s five-storey house by a long piece of string that they use to dangle down the staircase with a felt basket to bring up pencils and notes. The parents, of course, were devastated when I sent them photos on WhatsApp of her lacerated neck – and they promptly sent their nanny off to buy me organic healing cream from a King’s Road pharmacy. suggest parody.
Firstly, who the hell calls their kid Liberty. Secondly, how do you lacerate a neck with string? (And if you did, you wouldn't get "healing cream".)
That said... I totally believe the "Uber for the school run", not least because it's often insanely busy around schools and parking is non-existent. For those who don't want to take the bus (we took the bus), an Uber wouldn't be a ridiculous expense.
She probably doesn't know what "lacerate" means. Also how do you "dangle" a piece of string down a staircase? Doesn't she mean stairwell? Let's not be too harsh.
The Independent should commission a piece by somebody from the social group she lampoons.
These children ask for organic options for tea – or sushi on Deliveroo. They moan about the lack of sports and big class sizes. They get picked up by a nanny (always Filipino). When my children get invited over to playdates, they get lost in their massive houses. Their open-plan kitchens are the size of my entire flat.
The other day, Liberty nearly got strangled in a boy’s five-storey house by a long piece of string that they use to dangle down the staircase with a felt basket to bring up pencils and notes. The parents, of course, were devastated when I sent them photos on WhatsApp of her lacerated neck – and they promptly sent their nanny off to buy me organic healing cream from a King’s Road pharmacy.
Another mum does the majority of the school run in an Uber – which she admits “saves on the parking tickets”. I didn’t dream of telling her I could hardly afford my heating bill. These parents are happy-clappy with the huge savings on fees – especially if they have more than one child. Two children at nearby Notting Hill Prep costs £8,783 per term.
The line The other day, Liberty nearly got strangled in a boy’s five-storey house by a long piece of string that they use to dangle down the staircase with a felt basket to bring up pencils and notes. The parents, of course, were devastated when I sent them photos on WhatsApp of her lacerated neck – and they promptly sent their nanny off to buy me organic healing cream from a King’s Road pharmacy. suggest parody.
Firstly, who the hell calls their kid Liberty. Secondly, how do you lacerate a neck with string? (And if you did, you wouldn't get "healing cream".)
That said... I totally believe the "Uber for the school run", not least because it's often insanely busy around schools and parking is non-existent. For those who don't want to take the bus (we took the bus), an Uber wouldn't be a ridiculous expense.
This is the person who named her daughter Liberty:
Charlotte Cripps is a Senior Culture Writer at The Independent who specialises in profile interviews. Her highly amusing and irreverant weekly column about IVF and being a single mother ran in The Independent from 2019 to 2021. She acted as arts editor/commissioning editor for The Independent's culture desk from 2017 to 2018. She began her career writing for Tatler and Harpers & Queen, before joining The Independent as a writer.
Was having a look as some of the people known to work at xAI, there are some super serious players that they hired from OpenAI, DeepMind and Microsoft. Is interesting that while Musk is ever more controversial online that he can still hired such people. It won't be money either, OpenAI guys on are on footballer money and the early employees have share options worth $100m+.
Always funny to me that "listen to your people when they object to mass migration" and "censorship is bad" is treated as a "threat to democracy."
Do you know what "democracy" actually means?
The transatlantic elite have created so many institutions to silence their own people and to delegitimize the beliefs of the public. Of course, the Biden administration was the worst offender.
Even if you disagree with me substantively, these institutions have revealed themselves to be so brittle. AfD is in second place in Germany. The "far right" keeps getting closer in France.
Always funny to me that "listen to your people when they object to mass migration" and "censorship is bad" is treated as a "threat to democracy."
Do you know what "democracy" actually means?
The transatlantic elite have created so many institutions to silence their own people and to delegitimize the beliefs of the public. Of course, the Biden administration was the worst offender.
Even if you disagree with me substantively, these institutions have revealed themselves to be so brittle. AfD is in second place in Germany. The "far right" keeps getting closer in France.
Wake up!
The problem is not that people are not listening, it's that i) the Trump administration is firing scientists and appointing anti-science conspiracies, ii) and that they are conducting mass firings unconstitutionally, iii) and that whilst doing so they are endangering and/or hurting people.
Government has to act within the law and the constitution. Trump is a president, not a king.
Very warm here but the thunder clouds are gathering over the Ruahine Ranges so we may yet have a fun evening.
I mentioned Austria a while back - could be a taste of things to come here if Reform win most votes and seats at the next GE but are well short of a majority.
As for Germany, we’ll see. IF both Linke and Bundnis Wagenknecht get into the next Bundestag and the FDP doesn’t, it may even make a CDU/CSU/SPD coalition problematic.
Vance is always interesting to read. To be fair, both Europe and the USA have relied on mass migration at times to promote economic growth. American immigration wasn’t that much different to the Huguenots coming to England. Cheap and plentiful (and skilled) labour allied to technological innovation has led to periods of extended growth but in times of stagnation attitudes to migrants harden sharply.
Vance fails to make an argument for growth absent cheap labour, cheap resources or innovation. He seems to think if you pull up the drawbridge the castle will prosper - not sure that was always the case.
Always funny to me that "listen to your people when they object to mass migration" and "censorship is bad" is treated as a "threat to democracy."
Do you know what "democracy" actually means?
The transatlantic elite have created so many institutions to silence their own people and to delegitimize the beliefs of the public. Of course, the Biden administration was the worst offender.
Even if you disagree with me substantively, these institutions have revealed themselves to be so brittle. AfD is in second place in Germany. The "far right" keeps getting closer in France.
Wake up!
The problem is not that people are not listening, it's that i) the Trump administration is firing scientists and appointing anti-science conspiracies, ii) and that they are conducting mass firings unconstitutionally, iii) and that whilst doing so they are endangering and/or hurting people.
Government has to act within the law and the constitution. Trump is a president, not a king.
Why do you think so many ordinary people have lost confidence in what you might call "rationalism"? I think it's because their lives have got worse over the last 15 or 20 years, and what's the point in rationality and experts if life gets worse? I can sort of understand it.
Always funny to me that "listen to your people when they object to mass migration" and "censorship is bad" is treated as a "threat to democracy."
Do you know what "democracy" actually means?
The transatlantic elite have created so many institutions to silence their own people and to delegitimize the beliefs of the public. Of course, the Biden administration was the worst offender.
Even if you disagree with me substantively, these institutions have revealed themselves to be so brittle. AfD is in second place in Germany. The "far right" keeps getting closer in France.
Wake up!
Wow.
If only he showed the same degree of concern about the mass migration of Russian troops into Ukraine.
Sir Jim Ratcliffe’s Ineos sparked Mercedes-Benz backlash with sponsorship threat Exclusive: Revelation comes amid string of shock splits and cutbacks across billionaire’s sporting portfolio, most notably at Man Utd ... Indeed, such is the financial pressure on Ineos, two leading credit ratings agencies recently raised red flags over the group. Fitch Ratings and Moody’s, which provide financial health checks for most big companies, said Ratcliffe’s business had racked up debts that were between five to six times larger than the company’s annual earnings. The agencies downgraded their outlooks for the company to “negative”. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/formula-1/2025/02/17/sir-jim-ratcliffe-ineos-sparked-mercedes-benz-backlash/ (£££)
Manchester United, Mercedes F1, NZ Rugby, America's Cup.
Sir Jim Ratcliffe’s Ineos sparked Mercedes-Benz backlash with sponsorship threat Exclusive: Revelation comes amid string of shock splits and cutbacks across billionaire’s sporting portfolio, most notably at Man Utd ... Indeed, such is the financial pressure on Ineos, two leading credit ratings agencies recently raised red flags over the group. Fitch Ratings and Moody’s, which provide financial health checks for most big companies, said Ratcliffe’s business had racked up debts that were between five to six times larger than the company’s annual earnings. The agencies downgraded their outlooks for the company to “negative”. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/formula-1/2025/02/17/sir-jim-ratcliffe-ineos-sparked-mercedes-benz-backlash/ (£££)
Manchester United, Mercedes F1, NZ Rugby, America's Cup.
Always odd when companies like this sponsor events. I mean, it's not direct advertising to the consumer. So either it's indirect brand awareness to help with regulatory fights with nation states, or it's just fun for the directors with the shareholder's money.
Sir Jim Ratcliffe’s Ineos sparked Mercedes-Benz backlash with sponsorship threat Exclusive: Revelation comes amid string of shock splits and cutbacks across billionaire’s sporting portfolio, most notably at Man Utd ... Indeed, such is the financial pressure on Ineos, two leading credit ratings agencies recently raised red flags over the group. Fitch Ratings and Moody’s, which provide financial health checks for most big companies, said Ratcliffe’s business had racked up debts that were between five to six times larger than the company’s annual earnings. The agencies downgraded their outlooks for the company to “negative”. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/formula-1/2025/02/17/sir-jim-ratcliffe-ineos-sparked-mercedes-benz-backlash/ (£££)
Manchester United, Mercedes F1, NZ Rugby, America's Cup.
Always odd when companies like this sponsor events. I mean, it's not direct advertising to the consumer. So either it's indirect brand awareness to help with regulatory fights with nation states, or it's just fun for the directors with the shareholder's money.
Ownership (or partial ownership stakes) as well but yes. Formula 1 and football might be about making money as well as boosting Ratcliffe's ego, but when it comes to the business of sport, is Ratcliffe Trump or Musk, or both? Price hikes and mass layoffs at Old Trafford have left Manchester United in the bottom third.
Always funny to me that "listen to your people when they object to mass migration" and "censorship is bad" is treated as a "threat to democracy."
Do you know what "democracy" actually means?
The transatlantic elite have created so many institutions to silence their own people and to delegitimize the beliefs of the public. Of course, the Biden administration was the worst offender.
Even if you disagree with me substantively, these institutions have revealed themselves to be so brittle. AfD is in second place in Germany. The "far right" keeps getting closer in France.
Wake up!
Wow.
If only he showed the same degree of concern about the mass migration of Russian troops into Ukraine.
I think the failure of the Liberal elites to control migration, prioritise their own citizens, and not act in their immediate self-interest (instead preferring to condemn those who object) has an awful lot to answer for though.
Contrary to the prevailing doom and gloom from some on here, and it may just be because it’s a glorious afternoon here in Hawke’s Bay with sunshine and the temperature approaching 30c, I’m not that pessimistic.
It was freezing cold today in central England with a horribly cold wind blowing. Enjoy the NZ weather. 😊
Bit rainy in Bangkok today. First non-sunny day in six weeks!
Still, 30C and should brighten up, so it's not disastrous. Cheer up everyone
totally unworkable but iirc housing benefit is £30bn per year.
And defence spending is about £30bn short.
It would play havoc with all sorts of dependencies and cause the comedy of rioting landlords.
Most MPs would be storming their own barricades.
I’d like to see the end of state subsidy support for generationally debilitating house pricing though.
I’d settle for 10% now. 10% more next year. £3bn would buy some drones and 155mm shells.
This is not a bad idea. You could restrict HB, or UCHE as it is now, to Social Landlords who have the job of housing those most in need. The Private Rental Sector would still exist as there are many who wish to rent modern, well maintained properties and have the income to pay higher rents.
By switching HB to the SL's exclusively would give them additional income to allow them to increase borrowings to build more affordable properties.
Sir Jim Ratcliffe’s Ineos sparked Mercedes-Benz backlash with sponsorship threat Exclusive: Revelation comes amid string of shock splits and cutbacks across billionaire’s sporting portfolio, most notably at Man Utd ... Indeed, such is the financial pressure on Ineos, two leading credit ratings agencies recently raised red flags over the group. Fitch Ratings and Moody’s, which provide financial health checks for most big companies, said Ratcliffe’s business had racked up debts that were between five to six times larger than the company’s annual earnings. The agencies downgraded their outlooks for the company to “negative”. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/formula-1/2025/02/17/sir-jim-ratcliffe-ineos-sparked-mercedes-benz-backlash/ (£££)
Manchester United, Mercedes F1, NZ Rugby, America's Cup.
The INEOS / Mercedes F1 deal is a bit more than sponsorship. They actually bought a 33% stake in the team, with Daimler Benz and Toto Wolff also having a third each.
That investment will only have gone up considerably in value in the intervening years.
Investing in a football club, on the other hand, has always been a good way to make a small fortune - so long as one starts with a large fortune! MU need to spend hundreds of millions on a crumbling stadium, and hundreds of millions more on some decent players.
Well according to Twitter this morning, it’s Donald Trump’s fault that a plane ran off the runway in terrible weather in Canada.
Looking at the pictures it’s a wonder no-one died and there’s only a handful of serious injuries. Plane somehow ended up pretty much intact but upside-down.
Contrary to the prevailing doom and gloom from some on here, and it may just be because it’s a glorious afternoon here in Hawke’s Bay with sunshine and the temperature approaching 30c, I’m not that pessimistic.
It was freezing cold today in central England with a horribly cold wind blowing. Enjoy the NZ weather. 😊
Bit rainy in Bangkok today. First non-sunny day in six weeks!
Still, 30C and should brighten up, so it's not disastrous. Cheer up everyone
I’m looking up at cloudy and broody skies too. Fingers crossed will be back to the usual hot and sunny by lunchtime though. Enjoy!
Always funny to me that "listen to your people when they object to mass migration" and "censorship is bad" is treated as a "threat to democracy."
Do you know what "democracy" actually means?
The transatlantic elite have created so many institutions to silence their own people and to delegitimize the beliefs of the public. Of course, the Biden administration was the worst offender.
Even if you disagree with me substantively, these institutions have revealed themselves to be so brittle. AfD is in second place in Germany. The "far right" keeps getting closer in France.
Wake up!
Wow.
If only he showed the same degree of concern about the mass migration of Russian troops into Ukraine.
I think the failure of the Liberal elites to control migration, prioritise their own citizens, and not act in their immediate self-interest (instead preferring to condemn those who object) has an awful lot to answer for though.
They haven't been listening for 20 years.
Plenty still aren't.
Cynicism, and alienation of Western populations towards their governments, suits the purposes of the world’s dictators perfectly. If our leaders don’t think that their societies are worth defending, why should the masses?
Vance, however, has no real interest in trying to turn that around. He would prefer the USA to be more like Russia or China, rather than offer an alternative.
Always funny to me that "listen to your people when they object to mass migration" and "censorship is bad" is treated as a "threat to democracy."
Do you know what "democracy" actually means?
The transatlantic elite have created so many institutions to silence their own people and to delegitimize the beliefs of the public. Of course, the Biden administration was the worst offender.
Even if you disagree with me substantively, these institutions have revealed themselves to be so brittle. AfD is in second place in Germany. The "far right" keeps getting closer in France.
Wake up!
Wow.
If only he showed the same degree of concern about the mass migration of Russian troops into Ukraine.
I think the failure of the Liberal elites to control migration, prioritise their own citizens, and not act in their immediate self-interest (instead preferring to condemn those who object) has an awful lot to answer for though.
They haven't been listening for 20 years.
Plenty still aren't.
With all due respect, no one is perfect. And politicians have repeatedly fucked up, and we get to kick them out.
The success of Marine Le Pen is a feature, not a bug.
But when lecturing your allies on the importance of freedom of speech, while effectively supporting a regime that has no freedom of speech, and has invaded a neighbour, then -candidly- fuck you.
Was having a look as some of the people known to work at xAI, there are some super serious players that they hired from OpenAI, DeepMind and Microsoft. Is interesting that while Musk is ever more controversial online that he can still hired such people. It won't be money either, OpenAI guys on are on footballer money and the early employees have share options worth $100m+.
Musk’s reputation as a business leader (as opposed to an internet sh!tposter or government waste-finder) is really good. Most of the senior management at his companies stay around for years.
Here’s a good comment by investor Marc Andersen talking about Musk’s management style. He’ll come in to each company every week for a day or half a day, will ask them what’s the single biggest issue they’re facing in the business and work out how to fix it immediately. This means that his companies all fix their biggest 50 issues every year, when most copanies of a similar size are still having meetings about having meetings. In other words he’s keeping the startup mentality going as the companies expand. He also spends time on the floor talking to the people doing the work and not just the senior managers, tries to understand as much as he can about what everyone is actually doing.
Was having a look as some of the people known to work at xAI, there are some super serious players that they hired from OpenAI, DeepMind and Microsoft. Is interesting that while Musk is ever more controversial online that he can still hired such people. It won't be money either, OpenAI guys on are on footballer money and the early employees have share options worth $100m+.
Musk’s reputation as a business leader (as opposed to an internet sh!tposter or government waste-finder) is really good. Most of the senior management at his companies stay around for years.
Here’s a good comment by investor Marc Andersen talking about Musk’s management style. He’ll come in to each company every week for a day or half a day, will ask them what’s the single biggest issue they’re facing in the business and work out how to fix it immediately. This means that his companies all fix their biggest 50 issues every year, when most copanies of a similar size are still having meetings about having meetings. In other words he’s keeping the startup mentality going as the companies expand. He also spends time on the floor talking to the people doing the work and not just the senior managers, tries to understand as much as he can about what everyone is actually doing.
He is an amazing driven guy, who gets people to do amazing things. And who understood how batteries and solar would revolutionise energy and transportation.
And that's just Tesla: with SpaceX, he's turned the space world on its head, and is putting in place an internet access system that could change the world.
But he's also spreads antisemitic posts on X, and his commitment to free speech has turned out to really only mean free speech he agrees with.
Good luck today to Marco Rubio, about to be the most senior Western politician to meet the Russian leadership since the invasion of Ukraine. He’s meeting Lavrov in Riyadh.
Hopefully the start of serious negotiations to end the war, though I suspect and fear that the Russians have no intention of acting in good faith.
totally unworkable but iirc housing benefit is £30bn per year.
And defence spending is about £30bn short.
It would play havoc with all sorts of dependencies and cause the comedy of rioting landlords.
Most MPs would be storming their own barricades.
I’d like to see the end of state subsidy support for generationally debilitating house pricing though.
I’d settle for 10% now. 10% more next year. £3bn would buy some drones and 155mm shells.
This is not a bad idea. You could restrict HB, or UCHE as it is now, to Social Landlords who have the job of housing those most in need. The Private Rental Sector would still exist as there are many who wish to rent modern, well maintained properties and have the income to pay higher rents.
By switching HB to the SL's exclusively would give them additional income to allow them to increase borrowings to build more affordable properties.
You withdraw housing benefit, the poor in crap rentals get evicted, a lot of them end up as street homeless, and all the families with kids end up in grotty temporary accommodation - costing councils an immense fortune, and purchased off... private sector landlords. Very much a case of central government washing its hands of an expensive problem and leaving local government to pick up the pieces, and shoulder the blame for the inevitably deficient response.
Looking at it that way, I'm surprised they've not done it already.
And he’s also a shitposter (unelected) who is running government.
When you’re the one with access to the figures, the lies you post can take a week for those who don’t, to work out just how to debunk your bullshite.
And here's the number of RECIPIENTS of social security in each age bucket with the death field set to false (and recipient set to true). A mere 89,106 are aged 99+, not the tens of millions suggested by @elonmusk https://x.com/JustinWolfers/status/1891678450487841007
Which, unsurprisingly, quite closely matches the number of those aged 99+ in the US.
Good luck today to Marco Rubio, about to be the most senior Western politician to meet the Russian leadership since the invasion of Ukraine. He’s meeting Lavrov in Riyadh.
Hopefully the start of serious negotiations to end the war, though I suspect and fear that the Russians have no intention of acting in good faith.
Don't drink the tea, go for walks on balconies, in fact sit there in a hazmat suit and don't move....
And he’s also a shitposter (unelected) who is running government.
When you’re the one with access to the figures, the lies you post can take a week for those who don’t, to work out just how to debunk your bullshite.
And here's the number of RECIPIENTS of social security in each age bucket with the death field set to false (and recipient set to true). A mere 89,106 are aged 99+, not the tens of millions suggested by @elonmusk https://x.com/JustinWolfers/status/1891678450487841007
Which, unsurprisingly, quite closely matches the number of those aged 99+ in the US.
The dogs bark, but the caravan has moved on. Sadly.
Europe cannot rely on this happening in four years.
As it almost certainly wont now unless there has been civil war.
Michael McFaul @McFaul · 3h Europeans, don't give up on America yet! Trump does not represent us all. Most believe, like I do, that a strong NATO serves US security interests We need to limit the damage over the next 4 years so that we can rebuild our transatlantic partnership again in the future.
It won't matter if it does. The concept of the United States as "leader of the free world" is dead and buried. Even if there's much of a free world left for it to lead in four years' time.
I love comments like this. What is it that you expect to happen to the free world in the next four years? And show your working.
I'm giving in to pessimism, and why not? The entire state of the world gives no cause for anything else. Four years is ample time for Ukraine to be dismembered, the Baltics to fall to the next invasion like a pack of cards, Germany to discover the joys of neo-Nazism and fuck knows what else, and that's just in our little corner of this dying planet. The country is rotting, we are beset by insoluble problems at home and surrounded by extreme danger of several different kinds. I don't see any prospect of our circumstances improving, just getting worse and worse and worse. Perhaps you'd like to show your working for how everything *doesn't* go to hell in a handcart?
I've decided to become a Buddhist monk. What other options do I have?
Good luck today to Marco Rubio, about to be the most senior Western politician to meet the Russian leadership since the invasion of Ukraine. He’s meeting Lavrov in Riyadh.
Hopefully the start of serious negotiations to end the war, though I suspect and fear that the Russians have no intention of acting in good faith.
I doubt that an accurate translation of "good faith" exists in Russian.
xAI now has 200k H100 GPUs in their cluster...they really aren't dicking around.
I'm intrigued to see how well Grok 3 works.
I'm doubly intrigued, given how good Deepseek was having been trained on a far smaller dataset.
Well the numbers they presented at the presentation made it #1 model in various benchmarks. Now wouldn't be surprised if some cherry picking going on, but Igor Babuschkin was sitting there reading them out. He is a serious person, as is Christian Szegedy. Maybe they would be happy to trash their reputations, but seems unlikely.
These people are not the DOGE kiddies. Szegedy work has over 250k citations.
xAI now has 200k H100 GPUs in their cluster...they really aren't dicking around.
I'm intrigued to see how well Grok 3 works.
I'm doubly intrigued, given how good Deepseek was having been trained on a far smaller dataset.
Well the numbers they presented at the presentation made it #1 model in various benchmarks. Now wouldn't be surprised if some cherry picking going on, but Igor Babuschkin was sitting there reading them out. He is a serious person, as is Christian Szegedy. Maybe they would be happy to trash their reputations, but seems unlikely.
These people are not the DOGE kiddies.
I suspect it's number one until GPT5 is released in a few weeks.
That said... I've started running Deepseek on my tailnet using Ollama and open webui. It's great to have it "local"
Always funny to me that "listen to your people when they object to mass migration" and "censorship is bad" is treated as a "threat to democracy."
Do you know what "democracy" actually means?
The transatlantic elite have created so many institutions to silence their own people and to delegitimize the beliefs of the public. Of course, the Biden administration was the worst offender.
Even if you disagree with me substantively, these institutions have revealed themselves to be so brittle. AfD is in second place in Germany. The "far right" keeps getting closer in France.
Wake up!
As you know, JD Vance is spreading lies and misinformation, backed up by psychopathic oligarchs, to boost neonazis. That is a 'threat to democracy'.
Now, maybe you're just reporting his words for ridicule, but given your other output you are also spreading misinformation to boost neonazis you utter shit.
Always funny to me that "listen to your people when they object to mass migration" and "censorship is bad" is treated as a "threat to democracy."
Do you know what "democracy" actually means?
The transatlantic elite have created so many institutions to silence their own people and to delegitimize the beliefs of the public. Of course, the Biden administration was the worst offender.
Even if you disagree with me substantively, these institutions have revealed themselves to be so brittle. AfD is in second place in Germany. The "far right" keeps getting closer in France.
Wake up!
Wow.
If only he showed the same degree of concern about the mass migration of Russian troops into Ukraine.
I think the failure of the Liberal elites to control migration, prioritise their own citizens, and not act in their immediate self-interest (instead preferring to condemn those who object) has an awful lot to answer for though.
They haven't been listening for 20 years.
Plenty still aren't.
Do you consider the Tory led government from 2010-24 part of this evil liberal elite? If so then why did you support it?
Good luck today to Marco Rubio, about to be the most senior Western politician to meet the Russian leadership since the invasion of Ukraine. He’s meeting Lavrov in Riyadh.
Hopefully the start of serious negotiations to end the war, though I suspect and fear that the Russians have no intention of acting in good faith.
I suspect and fear that the Americans have no intention of acting in good faith.
Based on 10 minutes of playing, I'd say Grok's reasoning ability appears to be excellent, and it's web search seems to be on a par with OpenAI's.
It's also lost the annoying "witty" persona.
It doesn't seem to be as good at programming as OpenAI, nor at really large context windows as Antropic, but it's clearly a really strong entry into the LLM space, albeit with the proviso that there are lots of really strong entries in the space.
Latest YouGov German poll has die Linke up to 9%. This (unlike the AfD) is a properly anti-elite party:
Für Vermögen unter einer Million zahlt man nichts. Eine Person, die eine Million und einen Euro besitzt, muss nur auf diesen einen Euro Steuern zahlen. Wir schlagen einen ansteigenden Steuersatz vor: Ab einem Vermögen von einer Million Euro 1 Prozent im Jahr, ab 50 Millionen wird ein Steuersatz von 5 Prozent fällig. Über einer Milliarde zahlen Milliardär*innen 12% pro Jahr. Wir finden: Milliardär*innen gehören abgeschafft!
(You pay nothing on assets under one million. A person who owns one million and one euro only has to pay tax on this one euro. We propose an increasing tax rate: 1 per cent a year for assets of one million euros or more, and a tax rate of 5 per cent for assets of 50 million or more. Over one billion, billionaires pay 12 per cent per year. We think: Billionaires should be abolished! )
Based on 10 minutes of playing, I'd say Grok's reasoning ability appears to be excellent, and it's web search seems to be on a par with OpenAI's.
It's also lost the annoying "witty" persona.
It doesn't seem to be as good at programming as OpenAI, nor at really large context windows as Antropic, but it's clearly a really strong entry into the LLM space, albeit with the proviso that there are lots of really strong entries in the space.
Grok also joins Perplexity in having an API that can search the Internet, which is super useful.
Based on 10 minutes of playing, I'd say Grok's reasoning ability appears to be excellent, and it's web search seems to be on a par with OpenAI's.
It's also lost the annoying "witty" persona.
It doesn't seem to be as good at programming as OpenAI, nor at really large context windows as Antropic, but it's clearly a really strong entry into the LLM space, albeit with the proviso that there are lots of really strong entries in the space.
Grok also joins Perplexity in having an API that can search the Internet, which is super useful.
Ha!
I asked Grok 3 to compare its API pricing with Perplexity's API pricing, but amusingly it is able to tell me Perplexity's pricing, but not its own.
Just on Vance, I wonder if anyone pointed out that at a security/defence gathering the biggest risk might just be the country that's invaded a European nation rather than something else.
Good luck today to Marco Rubio, about to be the most senior Western politician to meet the Russian leadership since the invasion of Ukraine. He’s meeting Lavrov in Riyadh.
Hopefully the start of serious negotiations to end the war, though I suspect and fear that the Russians have no intention of acting in good faith.
I suspect and fear that the Americans have no intention of acting in good faith.
The USA's 'plan' seems to be: 1) Russia gets sanctions dropped and to effectively keep annexed territory 2) The USA gets 'compensated' for its military aid by means of resource extraction from Ukraine 3) Ukraine gets to do as it's told 4) Europe (mostly EU but also the UK, I imagine) gets to fund an incredibly expensive peacekeeping force without the USA bothering to dirty itself in such a way
Just on Vance, I wonder if anyone pointed out that at a security/defence gathering the biggest risk might just be the country that's invaded a European nation rather than something else.
Good luck today to Marco Rubio, about to be the most senior Western politician to meet the Russian leadership since the invasion of Ukraine. He’s meeting Lavrov in Riyadh.
Hopefully the start of serious negotiations to end the war, though I suspect and fear that the Russians have no intention of acting in good faith.
I suspect and fear that the Americans have no intention of acting in good faith.
The USA's 'plan' seems to be: 1) Russia gets sanctions dropped and to effectively keep annexed territory 2) The USA gets 'compensated' for its military aid by means of resource extraction from Ukraine 3) Ukraine gets to do as it's told 4) Europe (mostly EU but also the UK, I imagine) gets to fund an incredibly expensive peacekeeping force without the USA bothering to dirty itself in such a way
Which would not end the war in the medium term, and would be an utter betrayal of Ukraine.
Especially if that's the American's starting point for negotiations...
I think he’s more interested in hot young Jewish chicks. This week at least.
I know Musk at the terminal coding, but I genuinely have no idea how he has any time for shagging. Just even having meeting to check in on progress of all of the ongoing project is 25hrs a day.
Nick Robinson is just such a giant twat. He was interviewing someone about the possibility of defence spending increases and touched on today’s Sun highlighting £8b of what the spSun says is waste (not sure what as haven’t read it) and then opined that £8billion is just a fiver per year in government spending and the economist trilled in with mention of trillions of spending.
This has really become a bugbear of mine now - £8 billion is not a “fiver” but a huge amount of money. It can buy huge amounts of kit for defence, improve conditions even to attract more people to the milirptary and more importantly keep experienced military.
All these absolute fuckers who dismiss £90m, £8b as insignificant “in the wider scale of things” need to give their heads a wobble. Stop just thinking this money is nothing because all these “fivers” add up and when you don’t mind them being spent on things that aren’t vital you are depriving those funds to things that are more vital.
Some people seem to think there is an endless supply of money. There isn’t. It’s usually people who live off the largess of entities that don’t have to bust their balls to generate the money so never have to tester on the edge of their salaries going or being cut because of markets or it’s people who always think that someone else needs to pay more tax to cover these “fivers” and that someone will always be someone who earns a little bit more than them but not actually them.
Always funny to me that "listen to your people when they object to mass migration" and "censorship is bad" is treated as a "threat to democracy."
Do you know what "democracy" actually means?
The transatlantic elite have created so many institutions to silence their own people and to delegitimize the beliefs of the public. Of course, the Biden administration was the worst offender.
Even if you disagree with me substantively, these institutions have revealed themselves to be so brittle. AfD is in second place in Germany. The "far right" keeps getting closer in France.
Wake up!
Wow.
If only he showed the same degree of concern about the mass migration of Russian troops into Ukraine.
I think the failure of the Liberal elites to control migration, prioritise their own citizens, and not act in their immediate self-interest (instead preferring to condemn those who object) has an awful lot to answer for though.
They haven't been listening for 20 years.
Plenty still aren't.
With all due respect, no one is perfect. And politicians have repeatedly fucked up, and we get to kick them out.
The success of Marine Le Pen is a feature, not a bug.
But when lecturing your allies on the importance of freedom of speech, while effectively supporting a regime that has no freedom of speech, and has invaded a neighbour, then -candidly- fuck you.
I agree with some of Vance’s diagnosis.
But, his remedy is to turn the US into a kleptocracy, in a world of kleptocracies.
Back in the day when people go their news from the BBC/ITV + various newspapers, would we have tolerated it if they were all owned by hostile foreigners?
The US has had a ban on foreign media ownership since 1934
@rcs1000 Would JD Vance have validated the 2020 election results on Jan 6?
Note that there has been a major change in the law since 2020:
The Electoral Count Reform and Presidential Transition Improvement Act of 2022
The law clarifies that the vice president's role in the counting of the electoral votes is "solely ministerial," with no power to "determine, accept, reject, or otherwise adjudicate or resolve disputes over the proper list of electors, the validity of electors, or the votes of electors."
Back in the day when people go their news from the BBC/ITV + various newspapers, would we have tolerated it if they were all owned by hostile foreigners?
The US has had a ban on foreign media ownership since 1934
Are you saying they aren't "free speech absolutists?"
Nick Robinson is just such a giant twat. He was interviewing someone about the possibility of defence spending increases and touched on today’s Sun highlighting £8b of what the spSun says is waste (not sure what as haven’t read it) and then opined that £8billion is just a fiver per year in government spending and the economist trilled in with mention of trillions of spending.
This has really become a bugbear of mine now - £8 billion is not a “fiver” but a huge amount of money. It can buy huge amounts of kit for defence, improve conditions even to attract more people to the milirptary and more importantly keep experienced military.
All these absolute fuckers who dismiss £90m, £8b as insignificant “in the wider scale of things” need to give their heads a wobble. Stop just thinking this money is nothing because all these “fivers” add up and when you don’t mind them being spent on things that aren’t vital you are depriving those funds to things that are more vital.
Some people seem to think there is an endless supply of money. There isn’t. It’s usually people who live off the largess of entities that don’t have to bust their balls to generate the money so never have to tester on the edge of their salaries going or being cut because of markets or it’s people who always think that someone else needs to pay more tax to cover these “fivers” and that someone will always be someone who earns a little bit more than them but not actually them.
Based on 10 minutes of playing, I'd say Grok's reasoning ability appears to be excellent, and it's web search seems to be on a par with OpenAI's.
It's also lost the annoying "witty" persona.
It doesn't seem to be as good at programming as OpenAI, nor at really large context windows as Antropic, but it's clearly a really strong entry into the LLM space, albeit with the proviso that there are lots of really strong entries in the space.
I struggle to square the claims of these founders that they are on the cusp of creating artificial general intelligence/superintelligence in the next couple of years, with their requests to raise ever more money and spend it building infrastructure which will surely take many years to be complete?
Is it just hype to get more funding? Am I missing something?
Just on Vance, I wonder if anyone pointed out that at a security/defence gathering the biggest risk might just be the country that's invaded a European nation rather than something else.
Good luck today to Marco Rubio, about to be the most senior Western politician to meet the Russian leadership since the invasion of Ukraine. He’s meeting Lavrov in Riyadh.
Hopefully the start of serious negotiations to end the war, though I suspect and fear that the Russians have no intention of acting in good faith.
I suspect and fear that the Americans have no intention of acting in good faith.
The USA's 'plan' seems to be: 1) Russia gets sanctions dropped and to effectively keep annexed territory 2) The USA gets 'compensated' for its military aid by means of resource extraction from Ukraine 3) Ukraine gets to do as it's told 4) Europe (mostly EU but also the UK, I imagine) gets to fund an incredibly expensive peacekeeping force without the USA bothering to dirty itself in such a way
I imagine that what Trump and his clique have in mind is a grand bargain whereby (a) Putin gets a free hand in Eastern Europe, so long as the US gets mineral rights (b) the US gets a free hand in the Arctic (c) The US and Israel get the green light to ethnically cleanse Gaza and (d) China gets Taiwan.
He is an amazing driven guy, who gets people to do amazing things. And who understood how batteries and solar would revolutionise energy and transportation.
And that's just Tesla: with SpaceX, he's turned the space world on its head, and is putting in place an internet access system that could change the world.
But he's also spreads antisemitic posts on X, and his commitment to free speech has turned out to really only mean free speech he agrees with.
Hitler was also charismatic, and he got the trains to run on time all the way to Poland...
Always funny to me that "listen to your people when they object to mass migration" and "censorship is bad" is treated as a "threat to democracy."
Do you know what "democracy" actually means?
The transatlantic elite have created so many institutions to silence their own people and to delegitimize the beliefs of the public. Of course, the Biden administration was the worst offender.
Even if you disagree with me substantively, these institutions have revealed themselves to be so brittle. AfD is in second place in Germany. The "far right" keeps getting closer in France.
Wake up!
I think the consensus view was that pretending that Trump won the 2020 election, as Vance does, is the biggest threat to democracy.
Based on 10 minutes of playing, I'd say Grok's reasoning ability appears to be excellent, and it's web search seems to be on a par with OpenAI's.
It's also lost the annoying "witty" persona.
It doesn't seem to be as good at programming as OpenAI, nor at really large context windows as Antropic, but it's clearly a really strong entry into the LLM space, albeit with the proviso that there are lots of really strong entries in the space.
I struggle to square the claims of these founders that they are on the cusp of creating artificial general intelligence/superintelligence in the next couple of years, with their requests to raise ever more money and spend it building infrastructure which will surely take many years to be complete?
Is it just hype to get more funding? Am I missing something?
The models are genuinely very impressive and useful. Are they AGI, no, do they have value and will increase productivity, yes. The big unknown if they the $100bns being poured into them can be fully recovered.
Always funny to me that "listen to your people when they object to mass migration" and "censorship is bad" is treated as a "threat to democracy."
Do you know what "democracy" actually means?
The transatlantic elite have created so many institutions to silence their own people and to delegitimize the beliefs of the public. Of course, the Biden administration was the worst offender.
Even if you disagree with me substantively, these institutions have revealed themselves to be so brittle. AfD is in second place in Germany. The "far right" keeps getting closer in France.
Wake up!
Wow.
If only he showed the same degree of concern about the mass migration of Russian troops into Ukraine.
I think the failure of the Liberal elites to control migration, prioritise their own citizens, and not act in their immediate self-interest (instead preferring to condemn those who object) has an awful lot to answer for though.
They haven't been listening for 20 years.
Plenty still aren't.
Of course they haven't. Their tactic has simply be to denigrate anyone who raised any concerns about the vast cultural and demographic changes imposed on the country without any real democratic mandate as racist aided and abetted by an army of online posters with pink hair and nose rings.
Just on Vance, I wonder if anyone pointed out that at a security/defence gathering the biggest risk might just be the country that's invaded a European nation rather than something else.
Good luck today to Marco Rubio, about to be the most senior Western politician to meet the Russian leadership since the invasion of Ukraine. He’s meeting Lavrov in Riyadh.
Hopefully the start of serious negotiations to end the war, though I suspect and fear that the Russians have no intention of acting in good faith.
I suspect and fear that the Americans have no intention of acting in good faith.
The USA's 'plan' seems to be: 1) Russia gets sanctions dropped and to effectively keep annexed territory 2) The USA gets 'compensated' for its military aid by means of resource extraction from Ukraine 3) Ukraine gets to do as it's told 4) Europe (mostly EU but also the UK, I imagine) gets to fund an incredibly expensive peacekeeping force without the USA bothering to dirty itself in such a way
I imagine that what Trump and his clique have in mind is a grand bargain whereby (a) Putin gets a free hand in Eastern Europe, so long as the US gets mineral rights (b) the US gets a free hand in the Arctic (c) The US and Israel get the green light to ethnically cleanse Gaza and (d) China gets Taiwan.
What happens to Iran then ?
Surely Israel will want the green light to go after Iran.
Good luck today to Marco Rubio, about to be the most senior Western politician to meet the Russian leadership since the invasion of Ukraine. He’s meeting Lavrov in Riyadh.
Hopefully the start of serious negotiations to end the war, though I suspect and fear that the Russians have no intention of acting in good faith.
And you still believe that the Trump administration *are* acting in good faith? Trump is selling Ukraine down the river.
There aint gonna be a "future" POTUS for a very long time.
Hardly anyone seems to get what has happened. Even pol experts and polling gurus. Elections are over in America. He told usa voters what he would do and he is doing it.
If the mid-terms happen normally, will you doubt your thesis?
Yes.
The elections will go ahead as normal imo.
Yes, undoubtedly.
What happens next will however depend to a great degree on the results.
He is an amazing driven guy, who gets people to do amazing things. And who understood how batteries and solar would revolutionise energy and transportation.
And that's just Tesla: with SpaceX, he's turned the space world on its head, and is putting in place an internet access system that could change the world.
But he's also spreads antisemitic posts on X, and his commitment to free speech has turned out to really only mean free speech he agrees with.
Hitler was also charismatic, and he got the trains to run on time all the way to Poland...
Actually, the Nazi logistics were utterly fucked.
One of the July Bomb plot conspirators used to give a lecture on how Germany was fucked - he would diagram to his students the logistics problems of the Russian campaign (this was in 1942) and ask them to try and come up with solutions. And shoot down their attempts one by one…..
An interesting vignette on how the Army, pre-bomb plot, had some freedom within the regime. And did nothing with it.
Based on 10 minutes of playing, I'd say Grok's reasoning ability appears to be excellent, and it's web search seems to be on a par with OpenAI's.
It's also lost the annoying "witty" persona.
It doesn't seem to be as good at programming as OpenAI, nor at really large context windows as Antropic, but it's clearly a really strong entry into the LLM space, albeit with the proviso that there are lots of really strong entries in the space.
I struggle to square the claims of these founders that they are on the cusp of creating artificial general intelligence/superintelligence in the next couple of years, with their requests to raise ever more money and spend it building infrastructure which will surely take many years to be complete?
Is it just hype to get more funding? Am I missing something?
Based on 10 minutes of playing, I'd say Grok's reasoning ability appears to be excellent, and it's web search seems to be on a par with OpenAI's.
It's also lost the annoying "witty" persona.
It doesn't seem to be as good at programming as OpenAI, nor at really large context windows as Antropic, but it's clearly a really strong entry into the LLM space, albeit with the proviso that there are lots of really strong entries in the space.
I struggle to square the claims of these founders that they are on the cusp of creating artificial general intelligence/superintelligence in the next couple of years, with their requests to raise ever more money and spend it building infrastructure which will surely take many years to be complete?
Is it just hype to get more funding? Am I missing something?
Based on 10 minutes of playing, I'd say Grok's reasoning ability appears to be excellent, and it's web search seems to be on a par with OpenAI's.
It's also lost the annoying "witty" persona.
It doesn't seem to be as good at programming as OpenAI, nor at really large context windows as Antropic, but it's clearly a really strong entry into the LLM space, albeit with the proviso that there are lots of really strong entries in the space.
I struggle to square the claims of these founders that they are on the cusp of creating artificial general intelligence/superintelligence in the next couple of years, with their requests to raise ever more money and spend it building infrastructure which will surely take many years to be complete?
Is it just hype to get more funding? Am I missing something?
It’s hype to get more funding.
We are past the hype stage now, they actually do very useful things.
Always funny to me that "listen to your people when they object to mass migration" and "censorship is bad" is treated as a "threat to democracy."
Do you know what "democracy" actually means?
The transatlantic elite have created so many institutions to silence their own people and to delegitimize the beliefs of the public. Of course, the Biden administration was the worst offender.
Even if you disagree with me substantively, these institutions have revealed themselves to be so brittle. AfD is in second place in Germany. The "far right" keeps getting closer in France.
Wake up!
Wow.
If only he showed the same degree of concern about the mass migration of Russian troops into Ukraine.
I think the failure of the Liberal elites to control migration, prioritise their own citizens, and not act in their immediate self-interest (instead preferring to condemn those who object) has an awful lot to answer for though.
They haven't been listening for 20 years.
Plenty still aren't.
Of course they haven't. Their tactic has simply be to denigrate anyone who raised any concerns about the vast cultural and demographic changes imposed on the country without any real democratic mandate as racist aided and abetted by an army of online posters with pink hair and nose rings.
And they have now sowed the seeds of civil strife. Genius
Based on 10 minutes of playing, I'd say Grok's reasoning ability appears to be excellent, and it's web search seems to be on a par with OpenAI's.
It's also lost the annoying "witty" persona.
It doesn't seem to be as good at programming as OpenAI, nor at really large context windows as Antropic, but it's clearly a really strong entry into the LLM space, albeit with the proviso that there are lots of really strong entries in the space.
I struggle to square the claims of these founders that they are on the cusp of creating artificial general intelligence/superintelligence in the next couple of years, with their requests to raise ever more money and spend it building infrastructure which will surely take many years to be complete?
Is it just hype to get more funding? Am I missing something?
It’s hype to get more funding.
We are past the hype stage now, they actually do very useful things.
It's both. The product is good, but they still want funding - and to beat their competitors.
Hence the constant hyping.
(I remember when a self-proclaimed 'genius' on here said that the AI companies did not need any more funding...)
Always funny to me that "listen to your people when they object to mass migration" and "censorship is bad" is treated as a "threat to democracy."
Do you know what "democracy" actually means?
The transatlantic elite have created so many institutions to silence their own people and to delegitimize the beliefs of the public. Of course, the Biden administration was the worst offender.
Even if you disagree with me substantively, these institutions have revealed themselves to be so brittle. AfD is in second place in Germany. The "far right" keeps getting closer in France.
Wake up!
Wow.
If only he showed the same degree of concern about the mass migration of Russian troops into Ukraine.
I think the failure of the Liberal elites to control migration, prioritise their own citizens, and not act in their immediate self-interest (instead preferring to condemn those who object) has an awful lot to answer for though.
They haven't been listening for 20 years.
Plenty still aren't.
Of course they haven't. Their tactic has simply be to denigrate anyone who raised any concerns about the vast cultural and demographic changes imposed on the country without any real democratic mandate as racist aided and abetted by an army of online posters with pink hair and nose rings.
For the majority of the last 20 years, the Conservative Party has been in power and they rarely stopped talked about immigration concerns, giving us such highlights as the hostile environment and Brexit.
I think he’s more interested in hot young Jewish chicks. This week at least.
I know Musk at the terminal coding, but I genuinely have no idea how he has any time for shagging. Just even having meeting to check in on progress of all of the ongoing project is 25hrs a day.
The rumour/suggestion is that the dozens of kids don’t turn up in the conventional way, but rather by arrangement with the clinic.
The particular woman either doesn’t appear to understand the nature of their relationship, or is trying to get a bigger cheque from him by going to the media. Neither of which are likely to end well for her.
She’s already being compared to Amber Heard (another Musk ex) and Meghan Markle, and we now know that her university nickname was Smashley because she was the college bike. She also claims to be 26 today, in which case possession of the photos she was posting online back in 2013 could earn a jail sentence.
Definitely the weirdest internet story of 2025 so far.
These children ask for organic options for tea – or sushi on Deliveroo. They moan about the lack of sports and big class sizes. They get picked up by a nanny (always Filipino). When my children get invited over to playdates, they get lost in their massive houses. Their open-plan kitchens are the size of my entire flat.
The other day, Liberty nearly got strangled in a boy’s five-storey house by a long piece of string that they use to dangle down the staircase with a felt basket to bring up pencils and notes. The parents, of course, were devastated when I sent them photos on WhatsApp of her lacerated neck – and they promptly sent their nanny off to buy me organic healing cream from a King’s Road pharmacy.
Another mum does the majority of the school run in an Uber – which she admits “saves on the parking tickets”. I didn’t dream of telling her I could hardly afford my heating bill. These parents are happy-clappy with the huge savings on fees – especially if they have more than one child. Two children at nearby Notting Hill Prep costs £8,783 per term.
The line The other day, Liberty nearly got strangled in a boy’s five-storey house by a long piece of string that they use to dangle down the staircase with a felt basket to bring up pencils and notes. The parents, of course, were devastated when I sent them photos on WhatsApp of her lacerated neck – and they promptly sent their nanny off to buy me organic healing cream from a King’s Road pharmacy. suggest parody.
Firstly, who the hell calls their kid Liberty. Secondly, how do you lacerate a neck with string? (And if you did, you wouldn't get "healing cream".)
That said... I totally believe the "Uber for the school run", not least because it's often insanely busy around schools and parking is non-existent. For those who don't want to take the bus (we took the bus), an Uber wouldn't be a ridiculous expense.
This is the person who named her daughter Liberty:
Charlotte Cripps is a Senior Culture Writer at The Independent who specialises in profile interviews. Her highly amusing and irreverant weekly column about IVF and being a single mother ran in The Independent from 2019 to 2021. She acted as arts editor/commissioning editor for The Independent's culture desk from 2017 to 2018. She began her career writing for Tatler and Harpers & Queen, before joining The Independent as a writer.
I think he’s more interested in hot young Jewish chicks. This week at least.
I know Musk at the terminal coding, but I genuinely have no idea how he has any time for shagging. Just even having meeting to check in on progress of all of the ongoing project is 25hrs a day.
The rumour/suggestion is that the dozens of kids don’t turn up in the conventional way, but rather by arrangement with the clinic.
The particular woman either doesn’t appear to understand the nature of their relationship, or is trying to get a bigger cheque from him by going to the media. Neither of which are likely to end well for her.
She’s already being compared to Amber Heard (another Musk ex) and Meghan Markle, and we now know that her university nickname was Smashley because she was the college bike. She also claims to be 26 today, in which case possession of the photos she was posting online back in 2013 could earn a jail sentence.
Definitely the weirdest internet story of 2025 so far.
So Musk potentially had naughty sex with (or impregnated) a woman, and now the Muscovite shitheads are ganging up on her?
Back in the day when people go their news from the BBC/ITV + various newspapers, would we have tolerated it if they were all owned by hostile foreigners?
The US has had a ban on foreign media ownership since 1934
Are you saying they aren't "free speech absolutists?"
Well they have a ban I think on foreigners owning more than 20% if broadcast media.
They don't need a ban on foreign ownership of social networks (which is where most young people get their news) because they aren't foreign owned. Except TikTok and look what happened there.
If European countries closed down foreign owned social networks they would be just following the US example. It's actually needed if we want to keep our sovereignty and democracy.
Based on 10 minutes of playing, I'd say Grok's reasoning ability appears to be excellent, and it's web search seems to be on a par with OpenAI's.
It's also lost the annoying "witty" persona.
It doesn't seem to be as good at programming as OpenAI, nor at really large context windows as Antropic, but it's clearly a really strong entry into the LLM space, albeit with the proviso that there are lots of really strong entries in the space.
I struggle to square the claims of these founders that they are on the cusp of creating artificial general intelligence/superintelligence in the next couple of years, with their requests to raise ever more money and spend it building infrastructure which will surely take many years to be complete?
Is it just hype to get more funding? Am I missing something?
It’s hype to get more funding.
We are past the hype stage now, they actually do very useful things.
They do do very useful things. We’ve got one research programme working with them and are waiting to hear on another funding application. However, rkrkrk asked about their claims to be “on the cusp of creating artificial general intelligence/superintelligence”. Those claims are hype.
If these companies were claiming that LLMs are very useful tools that they can make even better, I wouldn’t disagree with them.
Always funny to me that "listen to your people when they object to mass migration" and "censorship is bad" is treated as a "threat to democracy."
Do you know what "democracy" actually means?
The transatlantic elite have created so many institutions to silence their own people and to delegitimize the beliefs of the public. Of course, the Biden administration was the worst offender.
Even if you disagree with me substantively, these institutions have revealed themselves to be so brittle. AfD is in second place in Germany. The "far right" keeps getting closer in France.
Wake up!
Wow.
If only he showed the same degree of concern about the mass migration of Russian troops into Ukraine.
I think the failure of the Liberal elites to control migration, prioritise their own citizens, and not act in their immediate self-interest (instead preferring to condemn those who object) has an awful lot to answer for though.
They haven't been listening for 20 years.
Plenty still aren't.
Of course they haven't. Their tactic has simply be to denigrate anyone who raised any concerns about the vast cultural and demographic changes imposed on the country without any real democratic mandate as racist aided and abetted by an army of online posters with pink hair and nose rings.
For the majority of the last 20 years, the Conservative Party has been in power and they rarely stopped talked about immigration concerns, giving us such highlights as the hostile environment and Brexit.
What they say, of course, being the direct opposite of what they wanted to do, and actually did.
These children ask for organic options for tea – or sushi on Deliveroo. They moan about the lack of sports and big class sizes. They get picked up by a nanny (always Filipino). When my children get invited over to playdates, they get lost in their massive houses. Their open-plan kitchens are the size of my entire flat.
The other day, Liberty nearly got strangled in a boy’s five-storey house by a long piece of string that they use to dangle down the staircase with a felt basket to bring up pencils and notes. The parents, of course, were devastated when I sent them photos on WhatsApp of her lacerated neck – and they promptly sent their nanny off to buy me organic healing cream from a King’s Road pharmacy.
Another mum does the majority of the school run in an Uber – which she admits “saves on the parking tickets”. I didn’t dream of telling her I could hardly afford my heating bill. These parents are happy-clappy with the huge savings on fees – especially if they have more than one child. Two children at nearby Notting Hill Prep costs £8,783 per term.
The line The other day, Liberty nearly got strangled in a boy’s five-storey house by a long piece of string that they use to dangle down the staircase with a felt basket to bring up pencils and notes. The parents, of course, were devastated when I sent them photos on WhatsApp of her lacerated neck – and they promptly sent their nanny off to buy me organic healing cream from a King’s Road pharmacy. suggest parody.
Firstly, who the hell calls their kid Liberty. Secondly, how do you lacerate a neck with string? (And if you did, you wouldn't get "healing cream".)
That said... I totally believe the "Uber for the school run", not least because it's often insanely busy around schools and parking is non-existent. For those who don't want to take the bus (we took the bus), an Uber wouldn't be a ridiculous expense.
This is the person who named her daughter Liberty:
Charlotte Cripps is a Senior Culture Writer at The Independent who specialises in profile interviews. Her highly amusing and irreverant weekly column about IVF and being a single mother ran in The Independent from 2019 to 2021. She acted as arts editor/commissioning editor for The Independent's culture desk from 2017 to 2018. She began her career writing for Tatler and Harpers & Queen, before joining The Independent as a writer.
I though this quote interesting, it seems German Youth are not brownshirts after all:
"A mock election held among the under-18s last week showed the Linke coming in first place with more than 20%, followed by the SPD on 18%, the CDU/CSU and the AfD nearly tied at almost 16% each. The Greens came in a distant last place among the main parties with just over 12%."
Always funny to me that "listen to your people when they object to mass migration" and "censorship is bad" is treated as a "threat to democracy."
Do you know what "democracy" actually means?
The transatlantic elite have created so many institutions to silence their own people and to delegitimize the beliefs of the public. Of course, the Biden administration was the worst offender.
Even if you disagree with me substantively, these institutions have revealed themselves to be so brittle. AfD is in second place in Germany. The "far right" keeps getting closer in France.
Wake up!
Wow.
If only he showed the same degree of concern about the mass migration of Russian troops into Ukraine.
I think the failure of the Liberal elites to control migration, prioritise their own citizens, and not act in their immediate self-interest (instead preferring to condemn those who object) has an awful lot to answer for though.
They haven't been listening for 20 years.
Plenty still aren't.
Of course they haven't. Their tactic has simply be to denigrate anyone who raised any concerns about the vast cultural and demographic changes imposed on the country without any real democratic mandate as racist aided and abetted by an army of online posters with pink hair and nose rings.
For the majority of the last 20 years, the Conservative Party has been in power and they rarely stopped talked about immigration concerns, giving us such highlights as the hostile environment and Brexit.
What they say, of course, being the direct opposite of what they wanted to do, and actually did.
It’s curious to blame the liberal elites for the actions of 14 years of Conservative government.
These children ask for organic options for tea – or sushi on Deliveroo. They moan about the lack of sports and big class sizes. They get picked up by a nanny (always Filipino). When my children get invited over to playdates, they get lost in their massive houses. Their open-plan kitchens are the size of my entire flat.
The other day, Liberty nearly got strangled in a boy’s five-storey house by a long piece of string that they use to dangle down the staircase with a felt basket to bring up pencils and notes. The parents, of course, were devastated when I sent them photos on WhatsApp of her lacerated neck – and they promptly sent their nanny off to buy me organic healing cream from a King’s Road pharmacy.
Another mum does the majority of the school run in an Uber – which she admits “saves on the parking tickets”. I didn’t dream of telling her I could hardly afford my heating bill. These parents are happy-clappy with the huge savings on fees – especially if they have more than one child. Two children at nearby Notting Hill Prep costs £8,783 per term.
The line The other day, Liberty nearly got strangled in a boy’s five-storey house by a long piece of string that they use to dangle down the staircase with a felt basket to bring up pencils and notes. The parents, of course, were devastated when I sent them photos on WhatsApp of her lacerated neck – and they promptly sent their nanny off to buy me organic healing cream from a King’s Road pharmacy. suggest parody.
Firstly, who the hell calls their kid Liberty. Secondly, how do you lacerate a neck with string? (And if you did, you wouldn't get "healing cream".)
That said... I totally believe the "Uber for the school run", not least because it's often insanely busy around schools and parking is non-existent. For those who don't want to take the bus (we took the bus), an Uber wouldn't be a ridiculous expense.
IT could be that she is getting free taxiing to school under SEND provisions.
Always funny to me that "listen to your people when they object to mass migration" and "censorship is bad" is treated as a "threat to democracy."
Do you know what "democracy" actually means?
The transatlantic elite have created so many institutions to silence their own people and to delegitimize the beliefs of the public. Of course, the Biden administration was the worst offender.
Even if you disagree with me substantively, these institutions have revealed themselves to be so brittle. AfD is in second place in Germany. The "far right" keeps getting closer in France.
Wake up!
Wow.
If only he showed the same degree of concern about the mass migration of Russian troops into Ukraine.
I think the failure of the Liberal elites to control migration, prioritise their own citizens, and not act in their immediate self-interest (instead preferring to condemn those who object) has an awful lot to answer for though.
They haven't been listening for 20 years.
Plenty still aren't.
Of course they haven't. Their tactic has simply be to denigrate anyone who raised any concerns about the vast cultural and demographic changes imposed on the country without any real democratic mandate as racist aided and abetted by an army of online posters with pink hair and nose rings.
For the majority of the last 20 years, the Conservative Party has been in power and they rarely stopped talked about immigration concerns, giving us such highlights as the hostile environment and Brexit.
What they say, of course, being the direct opposite of what they wanted to do, and actually did.
It’s curious to blame the liberal elites for the actions of 14 years of Conservative government.
5 years of that was coalition govt of course and it depends how one perceives the govt in those 14 years too.
Just on Vance, I wonder if anyone pointed out that at a security/defence gathering the biggest risk might just be the country that's invaded a European nation rather than something else.
Good luck today to Marco Rubio, about to be the most senior Western politician to meet the Russian leadership since the invasion of Ukraine. He’s meeting Lavrov in Riyadh.
Hopefully the start of serious negotiations to end the war, though I suspect and fear that the Russians have no intention of acting in good faith.
I suspect and fear that the Americans have no intention of acting in good faith.
The USA's 'plan' seems to be: 1) Russia gets sanctions dropped and to effectively keep annexed territory 2) The USA gets 'compensated' for its military aid by means of resource extraction from Ukraine 3) Ukraine gets to do as it's told 4) Europe (mostly EU but also the UK, I imagine) gets to fund an incredibly expensive peacekeeping force without the USA bothering to dirty itself in such a way
Neither we nor Ukraine are obliged to accept such terms, of course.
And looking at the cost/benefit if just saying no, we shouldn't.
Back in the day when people go their news from the BBC/ITV + various newspapers, would we have tolerated it if they were all owned by hostile foreigners?
The US has had a ban on foreign media ownership since 1934
Are you saying they aren't "free speech absolutists?"
Well they have a ban I think on foreigners owning more than 20% if broadcast media.
They don't need a ban on foreign ownership of social networks (which is where most young people get their news) because they aren't foreign owned. Except TikTok and look what happened there.
If European countries closed down foreign owned social networks they would be just following the US example. It's actually needed if we want to keep our sovereignty and democracy.
At the very least, I don't think there is any point in the government using twitter as a form of communication because every post is flooded by Putin bots and Musk's supplicants, making the exercise futile. Time to abandon ship and stick to traditional media.
Nick Robinson is just such a giant twat. He was interviewing someone about the possibility of defence spending increases and touched on today’s Sun highlighting £8b of what the spSun says is waste (not sure what as haven’t read it) and then opined that £8billion is just a fiver per year in government spending and the economist trilled in with mention of trillions of spending.
This has really become a bugbear of mine now - £8 billion is not a “fiver” but a huge amount of money. It can buy huge amounts of kit for defence, improve conditions even to attract more people to the milirptary and more importantly keep experienced military.
All these absolute fuckers who dismiss £90m, £8b as insignificant “in the wider scale of things” need to give their heads a wobble. Stop just thinking this money is nothing because all these “fivers” add up and when you don’t mind them being spent on things that aren’t vital you are depriving those funds to things that are more vital.
Some people seem to think there is an endless supply of money. There isn’t. It’s usually people who live off the largess of entities that don’t have to bust their balls to generate the money so never have to tester on the edge of their salaries going or being cut because of markets or it’s people who always think that someone else needs to pay more tax to cover these “fivers” and that someone will always be someone who earns a little bit more than them but not actually them.
You owe the "giant twat" an apology; he was talking about nine million.
Always funny to me that "listen to your people when they object to mass migration" and "censorship is bad" is treated as a "threat to democracy."
Do you know what "democracy" actually means?
The transatlantic elite have created so many institutions to silence their own people and to delegitimize the beliefs of the public. Of course, the Biden administration was the worst offender.
Even if you disagree with me substantively, these institutions have revealed themselves to be so brittle. AfD is in second place in Germany. The "far right" keeps getting closer in France.
Wake up!
Wow.
If only he showed the same degree of concern about the mass migration of Russian troops into Ukraine.
I think the failure of the Liberal elites to control migration, prioritise their own citizens, and not act in their immediate self-interest (instead preferring to condemn those who object) has an awful lot to answer for though.
They haven't been listening for 20 years.
Plenty still aren't.
With all due respect, no one is perfect. And politicians have repeatedly fucked up, and we get to kick them out.
The success of Marine Le Pen is a feature, not a bug.
But when lecturing your allies on the importance of freedom of speech, while effectively supporting a regime that has no freedom of speech, and has invaded a neighbour, then -candidly- fuck you.
I agree with some of Vance’s diagnosis.
But, his remedy is to turn the US into a kleptocracy, in a world of kleptocracies.
JD Vance seems to me to be a creature / protege of Peter Thiel, who funded his businesses, then his political career. His views are not really that much of a surprise therefore, though afaics more extreme.
(Peter Thiel, amongst other things, is in the Elon Musk set - having been a co-investor in Paypal back in the early noughties. One of his moves was that he paid tax in advance on a tiny stake in the company that became Paypal via a vehicle called a Roth IRA - which is like a Tax In Advance ISA, which means that under the relevant setup he now owes no CGT equivalent on the stake that has grown from $1700 to $5 billion and it can be drawn down tax free aiui.
He funded the lawsuit that took Nick Denton down, as he had been Outed as gay by Gawker.
He's from a fundamentalist family, but in the end adopted a somewhat less reductionist / transactional (without substitutionary atonement) version of Christianity, following a late 20C French thinker called https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ren%C3%A9_Girard. And has ideas in line with some of the current American RIght emphases.
Here is a conversation with NT Wright from 2016 entitled "What is the Hope for Humanity? A discussion of technology, politics, and theology". It is in a university conversation forum called the Veritas Forum. NT Wright is very well respected indeed, and a former Bishop of Durham.
Always funny to me that "listen to your people when they object to mass migration" and "censorship is bad" is treated as a "threat to democracy."
Do you know what "democracy" actually means?
The transatlantic elite have created so many institutions to silence their own people and to delegitimize the beliefs of the public. Of course, the Biden administration was the worst offender.
Even if you disagree with me substantively, these institutions have revealed themselves to be so brittle. AfD is in second place in Germany. The "far right" keeps getting closer in France.
Wake up!
Given that AfD were the party Vance met with after his speech to the EU, presumably he’s happy that they’re in second place. What does JD call his brand of ‘right’? Or has he Overtoned his crew into sensible centrists?
Always funny to me that "listen to your people when they object to mass migration" and "censorship is bad" is treated as a "threat to democracy."
Do you know what "democracy" actually means?
The transatlantic elite have created so many institutions to silence their own people and to delegitimize the beliefs of the public. Of course, the Biden administration was the worst offender.
Even if you disagree with me substantively, these institutions have revealed themselves to be so brittle. AfD is in second place in Germany. The "far right" keeps getting closer in France.
Wake up!
Wow.
If only he showed the same degree of concern about the mass migration of Russian troops into Ukraine.
I think the failure of the Liberal elites to control migration, prioritise their own citizens, and not act in their immediate self-interest (instead preferring to condemn those who object) has an awful lot to answer for though.
They haven't been listening for 20 years.
Plenty still aren't.
Of course they haven't. Their tactic has simply be to denigrate anyone who raised any concerns about the vast cultural and demographic changes imposed on the country without any real democratic mandate as racist aided and abetted by an army of online posters with pink hair and nose rings.
For the majority of the last 20 years, the Conservative Party has been in power and they rarely stopped talked about immigration concerns, giving us such highlights as the hostile environment and Brexit.
What they say, of course, being the direct opposite of what they wanted to do, and actually did.
It’s curious to blame the liberal elites for the actions of 14 years of Conservative government.
5 years of that was coalition govt of course and it depends how one perceives the govt in those 14 years too.
Immigration policy in the coalition was led by the Tories. May was Home Secretary.
Good luck today to Marco Rubio, about to be the most senior Western politician to meet the Russian leadership since the invasion of Ukraine. He’s meeting Lavrov in Riyadh.
Hopefully the start of serious negotiations to end the war, though I suspect and fear that the Russians have no intention of acting in good faith.
And you still believe that the Trump administration *are* acting in good faith? Trump is selling Ukraine down the river.
Always funny to me that "listen to your people when they object to mass migration" and "censorship is bad" is treated as a "threat to democracy."
Do you know what "democracy" actually means?
The transatlantic elite have created so many institutions to silence their own people and to delegitimize the beliefs of the public. Of course, the Biden administration was the worst offender.
Even if you disagree with me substantively, these institutions have revealed themselves to be so brittle. AfD is in second place in Germany. The "far right" keeps getting closer in France.
Wake up!
Wow.
If only he showed the same degree of concern about the mass migration of Russian troops into Ukraine.
I think the failure of the Liberal elites to control migration, prioritise their own citizens, and not act in their immediate self-interest (instead preferring to condemn those who object) has an awful lot to answer for though.
They haven't been listening for 20 years.
Plenty still aren't.
Of course they haven't. Their tactic has simply be to denigrate anyone who raised any concerns about the vast cultural and demographic changes imposed on the country without any real democratic mandate as racist aided and abetted by an army of online posters with pink hair and nose rings.
For the majority of the last 20 years, the Conservative Party has been in power and they rarely stopped talked about immigration concerns, giving us such highlights as the hostile environment and Brexit.
What they say, of course, being the direct opposite of what they wanted to do, and actually did.
Were I being picky, I’d say that they sometimes did what they wanted to, but, yes, you’re right, broadly speaking, the Tories talked a lot about their immigration concerns while greatly increasing immigration. (In particular, Brexit had the opposite effect.) That always seemed like a foolish strategy to me, but that’s what they did.
So, the issue *isn’t* liberal elites denigrating any discussion of immigration. Rather, it’s Conservative elites promoting discussion of immigration, while acting otherwise.
Always funny to me that "listen to your people when they object to mass migration" and "censorship is bad" is treated as a "threat to democracy."
Do you know what "democracy" actually means?
The transatlantic elite have created so many institutions to silence their own people and to delegitimize the beliefs of the public. Of course, the Biden administration was the worst offender.
Even if you disagree with me substantively, these institutions have revealed themselves to be so brittle. AfD is in second place in Germany. The "far right" keeps getting closer in France.
Wake up!
Wow.
If only he showed the same degree of concern about the mass migration of Russian troops into Ukraine.
I think the failure of the Liberal elites to control migration, prioritise their own citizens, and not act in their immediate self-interest (instead preferring to condemn those who object) has an awful lot to answer for though.
They haven't been listening for 20 years.
Plenty still aren't.
Of course they haven't. Their tactic has simply be to denigrate anyone who raised any concerns about the vast cultural and demographic changes imposed on the country without any real democratic mandate as racist aided and abetted by an army of online posters with pink hair and nose rings.
For the majority of the last 20 years, the Conservative Party has been in power and they rarely stopped talked about immigration concerns, giving us such highlights as the hostile environment and Brexit.
What they say, of course, being the direct opposite of what they wanted to do, and actually did.
It’s curious to blame the liberal elites for the actions of 14 years of Conservative government.
5 years of that was coalition govt of course and it depends how one perceives the govt in those 14 years too.
It’s a meme the right definitely want to spin, but they shouldn’t be allowed to get away with it.
I though this quote interesting, it seems German Youth are not brownshirts after all:
"A mock election held among the under-18s last week showed the Linke coming in first place with more than 20%, followed by the SPD on 18%, the CDU/CSU and the AfD nearly tied at almost 16% each. The Greens came in a distant last place among the main parties with just over 12%."
Almost all schools (at secondry + level)hold a mock election in Germany. So as far as I can tell from the information given here, that "mock election" could be from a population of around 400 pupils.
Good luck today to Marco Rubio, about to be the most senior Western politician to meet the Russian leadership since the invasion of Ukraine. He’s meeting Lavrov in Riyadh.
Hopefully the start of serious negotiations to end the war, though I suspect and fear that the Russians have no intention of acting in good faith.
And you still believe that the Trump administration *are* acting in good faith? Trump is selling Ukraine down the river.
It's good faith in a way because he's doing exactly what he said he would. He doesn't give a toss about Ukraine other than what's in it for him and never pretended otherwise.
Always funny to me that "listen to your people when they object to mass migration" and "censorship is bad" is treated as a "threat to democracy."
Do you know what "democracy" actually means?
The transatlantic elite have created so many institutions to silence their own people and to delegitimize the beliefs of the public. Of course, the Biden administration was the worst offender.
Even if you disagree with me substantively, these institutions have revealed themselves to be so brittle. AfD is in second place in Germany. The "far right" keeps getting closer in France.
Wake up!
Wow.
If only he showed the same degree of concern about the mass migration of Russian troops into Ukraine.
I think the failure of the Liberal elites to control migration, prioritise their own citizens, and not act in their immediate self-interest (instead preferring to condemn those who object) has an awful lot to answer for though.
They haven't been listening for 20 years.
Plenty still aren't.
Of course they haven't. Their tactic has simply be to denigrate anyone who raised any concerns about the vast cultural and demographic changes imposed on the country without any real democratic mandate as racist aided and abetted by an army of online posters with pink hair and nose rings.
For the majority of the last 20 years, the Conservative Party has been in power and they rarely stopped talked about immigration concerns, giving us such highlights as the hostile environment and Brexit.
What they say, of course, being the direct opposite of what they wanted to do, and actually did.
Were I being picky, I’d say that they sometimes did what they wanted to, but, yes, you’re right, broadly speaking, the Tories talked a lot about their immigration concerns while greatly increasing immigration. (In particular, Brexit had the opposite effect.) That always seemed like a foolish strategy to me, but that’s what they did.
So, the issue *isn’t* liberal elites denigrating any discussion of immigration. Rather, it’s Conservative elites promoting discussion of immigration, while acting otherwise.
And, of course, the Tories tried to deflect attention from the massive increase in legal immigration by demonising the relatively tiny number of illegal immigrants.
Good luck today to Marco Rubio, about to be the most senior Western politician to meet the Russian leadership since the invasion of Ukraine. He’s meeting Lavrov in Riyadh.
Hopefully the start of serious negotiations to end the war, though I suspect and fear that the Russians have no intention of acting in good faith.
And you still believe that the Trump administration *are* acting in good faith? Trump is selling Ukraine down the river.
It's good faith in a way because he's doing exactly what he said he would. He doesn't give a toss about Ukraine other than what's in it for him and never pretended otherwise.
Which is why the dual positions of supporting Ukraine and supporting Trump/GOP are utterly inconsistent.
Good luck today to Marco Rubio, about to be the most senior Western politician to meet the Russian leadership since the invasion of Ukraine. He’s meeting Lavrov in Riyadh.
Hopefully the start of serious negotiations to end the war, though I suspect and fear that the Russians have no intention of acting in good faith.
And you still believe that the Trump administration *are* acting in good faith? Trump is selling Ukraine down the river.
It's good faith in a way because he's doing exactly what he said he would. He doesn't give a toss about Ukraine other than what's in it for him and never pretended otherwise.
You are right. It’s not Trump’s fault that Sandpit deluded himself over Trump’s approach to Ukraine.
Good luck today to Marco Rubio, about to be the most senior Western politician to meet the Russian leadership since the invasion of Ukraine. He’s meeting Lavrov in Riyadh.
Hopefully the start of serious negotiations to end the war, though I suspect and fear that the Russians have no intention of acting in good faith.
And you still believe that the Trump administration *are* acting in good faith? Trump is selling Ukraine down the river.
It's good faith in a way because he's doing exactly what he said he would. He doesn't give a toss about Ukraine other than what's in it for him and never pretended otherwise.
No one can be shocked at this. As you say, he is doing what he said he would.
America first.
People are focussing on this and ignoring the threat from reciprocal tariffs.
Comments
The Independent should commission a piece by somebody from the social group she lampoons.
Is she related to Stafford Cripps?
https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/features/happy-talk-addiction-suicide-b986288.html
Always funny to me that "listen to your people when they object to mass migration" and "censorship is bad" is treated as a "threat to democracy."
Do you know what "democracy" actually means?
The transatlantic elite have created so many institutions to silence their own people and to delegitimize the beliefs of the public. Of course, the Biden administration was the worst offender.
Even if you disagree with me substantively, these institutions have revealed themselves to be so brittle. AfD is in second place in Germany. The "far right" keeps getting closer in France.
Wake up!
Government has to act within the law and the constitution. Trump is a president, not a king.
Very warm here but the thunder clouds are gathering over the Ruahine Ranges so we may yet have a fun evening.
I mentioned Austria a while back - could be a taste of things to come here if Reform win most votes and seats at the next GE but are well short of a majority.
As for Germany, we’ll see. IF both Linke and Bundnis Wagenknecht get into the next Bundestag and the FDP doesn’t, it may even make a CDU/CSU/SPD coalition problematic.
Vance is always interesting to read. To be fair, both Europe and the USA have relied on mass migration at times to promote economic growth. American immigration wasn’t that much different to the Huguenots coming to England. Cheap and plentiful (and skilled) labour allied to technological innovation has led to periods of extended growth but in times of stagnation attitudes to migrants harden sharply.
Vance fails to make an argument for growth absent cheap labour, cheap resources or innovation. He seems to think if you pull up the drawbridge the castle will prosper - not sure that was always the case.
If only he showed the same degree of concern about the mass migration of Russian troops into Ukraine.
Exclusive: Revelation comes amid string of shock splits and cutbacks across billionaire’s sporting portfolio, most notably at Man Utd
...
Indeed, such is the financial pressure on Ineos, two leading credit ratings agencies recently raised red flags over the group. Fitch Ratings and Moody’s, which provide financial health checks for most big companies, said Ratcliffe’s business had racked up debts that were between five to six times larger than the company’s annual earnings. The agencies downgraded their outlooks for the company to “negative”.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/formula-1/2025/02/17/sir-jim-ratcliffe-ineos-sparked-mercedes-benz-backlash/ (£££)
Manchester United, Mercedes F1, NZ Rugby, America's Cup.
Here is the gift link if you want to read the whole article:-
https://telegraph.co.uk/gift/8b8875e2f676d8fa
They haven't been listening for 20 years.
Plenty still aren't.
Still, 30C and should brighten up, so it's not disastrous. Cheer up everyone
By switching HB to the SL's exclusively would give them additional income to allow them to increase borrowings to build more affordable properties.
https://www.mercedesamgf1.com/news/the-team-welcomes-ineos-as-a-one-third-equal-shareholder-alongside-daimler-and-toto-wolff
That investment will only have gone up considerably in value in the intervening years.
Investing in a football club, on the other hand, has always been a good way to make a small fortune - so long as one starts with a large fortune! MU need to spend hundreds of millions on a crumbling stadium, and hundreds of millions more on some decent players.
Looking at the pictures it’s a wonder no-one died and there’s only a handful of serious injuries. Plane somehow ended up pretty much intact but upside-down.
https://www.electoralcommission.org.uk/voting-and-elections/voter-id
Vance, however, has no real interest in trying to turn that around. He would prefer the USA to be more like Russia or China, rather than offer an alternative.
The success of Marine Le Pen is a feature, not a bug.
But when lecturing your allies on the importance of freedom of speech, while effectively supporting a regime that has no freedom of speech, and has invaded a neighbour, then -candidly- fuck you.
Here’s a good comment by investor Marc Andersen talking about Musk’s management style. He’ll come in to each company every week for a day or half a day, will ask them what’s the single biggest issue they’re facing in the business and work out how to fix it immediately. This means that his companies all fix their biggest 50 issues every year, when most copanies of a similar size are still having meetings about having meetings. In other words he’s keeping the startup mentality going as the companies expand. He also spends time on the floor talking to the people doing the work and not just the senior managers, tries to understand as much as he can about what everyone is actually doing.
https://x.com/christiandean_/status/1850599895939293280
And that's just Tesla: with SpaceX, he's turned the space world on its head, and is putting in place an internet access system that could change the world.
But he's also spreads antisemitic posts on X, and his commitment to free speech has turned out to really only mean free speech he agrees with.
Hopefully the start of serious negotiations to end the war, though I suspect and fear that the Russians have no intention of acting in good faith.
Looking at it that way, I'm surprised they've not done it already.
When you’re the one with access to the figures, the lies you post can take a week for those who don’t, to work out just how to debunk your bullshite.
And here's the number of RECIPIENTS of social security in each age bucket with the death field set to false (and recipient set to true). A mere 89,106 are aged 99+, not the tens of millions suggested by @elonmusk
https://x.com/JustinWolfers/status/1891678450487841007
Which, unsurprisingly, quite closely matches the number of those aged 99+ in the US.
I'm doubly intrigued, given how good Deepseek was having been trained on a far smaller dataset.
These people are not the DOGE kiddies. Szegedy work has over 250k citations.
That said... I've started running Deepseek on my tailnet using Ollama and open webui. It's great to have it "local"
Now, maybe you're just reporting his words for ridicule, but given your other output you are also spreading misinformation to boost neonazis you utter shit.
It's also lost the annoying "witty" persona.
It doesn't seem to be as good at programming as OpenAI, nor at really large context windows as Antropic, but it's clearly a really strong entry into the LLM space, albeit with the proviso that there are lots of really strong entries in the space.
Für Vermögen unter einer Million zahlt man nichts. Eine Person, die eine Million und einen Euro besitzt, muss nur auf diesen einen Euro Steuern zahlen. Wir schlagen einen ansteigenden Steuersatz vor: Ab einem Vermögen von einer Million Euro 1 Prozent im Jahr, ab 50 Millionen wird ein Steuersatz von 5 Prozent fällig. Über einer Milliarde zahlen Milliardär*innen 12% pro Jahr. Wir finden: Milliardär*innen gehören abgeschafft!
(You pay nothing on assets under one million. A person who owns one million and one euro only has to pay tax on this one euro. We propose an increasing tax rate: 1 per cent a year for assets of one million euros or more, and a tax rate of 5 per cent for assets of 50 million or more. Over one billion, billionaires pay 12 per cent per year. We think: Billionaires should be abolished!
)
https://www.die-linke.de/themen/steuern/vermoegensteuer/
I asked Grok 3 to compare its API pricing with Perplexity's API pricing, but amusingly it is able to tell me Perplexity's pricing, but not its own.
Just on Vance, I wonder if anyone pointed out that at a security/defence gathering the biggest risk might just be the country that's invaded a European nation rather than something else. The USA's 'plan' seems to be:
1) Russia gets sanctions dropped and to effectively keep annexed territory
2) The USA gets 'compensated' for its military aid by means of resource extraction from Ukraine
3) Ukraine gets to do as it's told
4) Europe (mostly EU but also the UK, I imagine) gets to fund an incredibly expensive peacekeeping force without the USA bothering to dirty itself in such a way
Especially if that's the American's starting point for negotiations...
This has really become a bugbear of mine now - £8 billion is not a “fiver” but a huge amount of money. It can buy huge amounts of kit for defence, improve conditions even to attract more people to the milirptary and more importantly keep experienced military.
All these absolute fuckers who dismiss £90m, £8b as insignificant “in the wider scale of things” need to give their heads a wobble. Stop just thinking this money is nothing because all these “fivers” add up and when you don’t mind them being spent on things that aren’t vital you are depriving those funds to things that are more vital.
Some people seem to think there is an endless supply of money. There isn’t. It’s usually people who live off the largess of entities that don’t have to bust their balls to generate the money so never have to tester on the edge of their salaries going or being cut because of markets or it’s people who always think that someone else needs to pay more tax to cover these “fivers” and that someone will always be someone who earns a little bit more than them but not actually them.
But, his remedy is to turn the US into a kleptocracy, in a world of kleptocracies.
The US has had a ban on foreign media ownership since 1934
"Trump's 78 years old. The 7 is silent."
The Electoral Count Reform and Presidential Transition Improvement Act of 2022
The law clarifies that the vice president's role in the counting of the electoral votes is "solely ministerial," with no power to "determine, accept, reject, or otherwise adjudicate or resolve disputes over the proper list of electors, the validity of electors, or the votes of electors."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_Count_Reform_and_Presidential_Transition_Improvement_Act_of_2022
Is it just hype to get more funding? Am I missing something?
Surely Israel will want the green light to go after Iran.
What happens next will however depend to a great degree on the results.
One of the July Bomb plot conspirators used to give a lecture on how Germany was fucked - he would diagram to his students the logistics problems of the Russian campaign (this was in 1942) and ask them to try and come up with solutions. And shoot down their attempts one by one…..
An interesting vignette on how the Army, pre-bomb plot, had some freedom within the regime. And did nothing with it.
Not
Hence the constant hyping.
(I remember when a self-proclaimed 'genius' on here said that the AI companies did not need any more funding...)
The particular woman either doesn’t appear to understand the nature of their relationship, or is trying to get a bigger cheque from him by going to the media. Neither of which are likely to end well for her.
She’s already being compared to Amber Heard (another Musk ex) and Meghan Markle, and we now know that her university nickname was Smashley because she was the college bike. She also claims to be 26 today, in which case possession of the photos she was posting online back in 2013 could earn a jail sentence.
Definitely the weirdest internet story of 2025 so far.
The Musk weird nerd squad are working overtime!
They don't need a ban on foreign ownership of social networks (which is where most young people get their news) because they aren't foreign owned. Except TikTok and look what happened there.
If European countries closed down foreign owned social networks they would be just following the US example. It's actually needed if we want to keep our sovereignty and democracy.
If these companies were claiming that LLMs are very useful tools that they can make even better, I wouldn’t disagree with them.
I think Linke have shed much of their old Stalinist tendency when the BSW formed.
It does look as if their surge is genuine.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/feb/18/could-the-left-linke-surprise-in-german-election-elon-musk-afd-election?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other
I though this quote interesting, it seems German Youth are not brownshirts after all:
"A mock election held among the under-18s last week showed the Linke coming in first place with more than 20%, followed by the SPD on 18%, the CDU/CSU and the AfD nearly tied at almost 16% each. The Greens came in a distant last place among the main parties with just over 12%."
And looking at the cost/benefit if just saying no, we shouldn't.
What does that make you ?
(Peter Thiel, amongst other things, is in the Elon Musk set - having been a co-investor in Paypal back in the early noughties. One of his moves was that he paid tax in advance on a tiny stake in the company that became Paypal via a vehicle called a Roth IRA - which is like a Tax In Advance ISA, which means that under the relevant setup he now owes no CGT equivalent on the stake that has grown from $1700 to $5 billion and it can be drawn down tax free aiui.
He funded the lawsuit that took Nick Denton down, as he had been Outed as gay by Gawker.
He's from a fundamentalist family, but in the end adopted a somewhat less reductionist / transactional (without substitutionary atonement) version of Christianity, following a late 20C French thinker called https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ren%C3%A9_Girard. And has ideas in line with some of the current American RIght emphases.
Here is a conversation with NT Wright from 2016 entitled "What is the Hope for Humanity? A discussion of technology, politics, and theology". It is in a university conversation forum called the Veritas Forum. NT Wright is very well respected indeed, and a former Bishop of Durham.
https://youtu.be/N9Mlu7sHEHE?t=12
It's quite long, and there is a summary article here:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/valleyvoices/2015/06/24/peter-thiel-n-t-wright-on-technology-hope-and-the-end-of-death/
Some here won't like the nod to theology, but imo because it is inside the head of so many of them we need to consider it.
His wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Thiel)
What does JD call his brand of ‘right’? Or has he Overtoned his crew into sensible centrists?
Was she part of this liberal elite too?
Which river are they selling them down?
So, the issue *isn’t* liberal elites denigrating any discussion of immigration. Rather, it’s Conservative elites promoting discussion of immigration, while acting otherwise.
America first.
People are focussing on this and ignoring the threat from reciprocal tariffs.
NEW THREAD