If I am reading the results correctly it seems to be an 83% turnout. That's pretty impressive.
Though it's usually well into the 70s. 82% in 98. And the old West Germany had turnout in the high 80s, low 90s even. And all that pretty poor showing compared to the old East Germany with turnouts typically over 99%!
Tom Harwood @tomhfh Why are more people not talking about Microsoft’s topological superconductor?
They literally created a new state of matter and the news is leading with the anniversary of a war, elections in Germany, and people praying for the pope.
What Microsoft have done/discovered is mindblowing
Add it to THAT technology and… whooooooooh
The fact xAI have surpassed everybody else in 18 months has not got a single mention either, and quietly built absolutely enormous compute capacity (they have more than the 200k GPU cluster they announced).
They very much haven't. They have grok3 which is almost as good as early last years models. It fails tasks even open-source small models from last autumn could pass, never mind ones from this year. Being generous - they are about a year behind, which puts them on about par with the other commercial providers time-wise.
Not true for my use-case. Grok3 is the best
But we await Claude 4 which is ALSO expected v soon
Even if they all dutifully replied rather than tell Eloniski to fuck off, who is going to read 20 million bullet points?
Grok?
Yes, it is a remarkably dumb idea if the intent was actually to assess how effective people are, even leaving aside that people could just make stuff up. So either it is just dumb, or the disruption was the sole point.
I hadn't heard of BSW before today. It seems they represent pretty much the polar opposite of what I support in almost every way.
Not good for Germany if (when) FDP fails to make the cut but if BSW does make it.
The BSW are old-fashioned leftists (more or less a vehicle for Sahra Wagenknecht), for social spending and dubious about high defence spending, but also sceptical about high immigration and support for Ukraine. They split from the Left Party, who are pro-immigration and pro-Ukraine and after the split have done unexpectedly well.
If the BSW fails to get the required 5%, a simple CDU/CSU-SPD alliance could well be the result. If the BSW makes it, the Government will probably need the Greens to get a majority.
The odd thing is that until a couple of weeks ago BSW were ahead of the Left Party in the opinion polls. Not sure why that changed at the last minute so to speak.
Linke have been running a great social media campaign, on insta and Tiktok. They are pretty old school leftists and plan quite a wealth tax on those with over a million euros in assets. They focus very strongly on domestic issues like housing, childcare etc, while BSW are old school pro-Russian Tankies.
Like I said. No-one more fickle with their vote than the Snow Geese.
I assume the Conservatives there are desperate to disavow Trump's recent comments, but that at least some of their base (even if only a minority) are Trump fans, so waverers don't believe them. Pollievre may well have lost his shot if things continue like this.
Even if they all dutifully replied rather than tell Eloniski to fuck off, who is going to read 20 million bullet points?
Grok?
Yes, it is a remarkably dumb idea if the intent was actually to assess how effective people are, even leaving aside that people could just make stuff up. So either it is just dumb, or the disruption was the sole point.
If I am reading the results correctly it seems to be an 83% turnout. That's pretty impressive.
Though it's usually well into the 70s. 82% in 98. And the old West Germany had turnout in the high 80s, low 90s even. And all that pretty poor showing compared to the old East Germany with turnouts typically over 99%!
One of the benefits of PR is that every vote counts, unlike in FPTP.
Even if they all dutifully replied rather than tell Eloniski to fuck off, who is going to read 20 million bullet points?
Grok?
Yes, it is a remarkably dumb idea if the intent was actually to assess how effective people are, even leaving aside that people could just make stuff up. So either it is just dumb, or the disruption was the sole point.
Yup. How "efficient" is it to give every Government employee MORE paperwork (another legacy term when no paper is involved)
In case you have doubts the events today in Germany were a good thing, take Musk’s silence the last 3 hours or so as a good sign. Trust me. He REALLY wanted the AfD to win and the fact we haven’t heard from him since the results came in is telling. Good job Germany! 😎🇩🇪
We'll know if Musk/Trump are really annoyed if they claim the election has been stolen.
LOOKS LIKE THE CONSERVATIVE PARTY IN GERMANY HAS WON THE VERY BIG AND HIGHLY ANTICIPATED ELECTION. MUCH LIKE THE USA, THE PEOPLE OF GERMANY GOT TIRED OF THE NO COMMON SENSE AGENDA, ESPECIALLY ON ENERGY AND IMMIGRATION, THAT HAS PREVAILED FOR SO MANY YEARS. THIS IS A GREAT DAY FOR GERMANY, AND FOR THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA UNDER THE LEADERSHIP OF A GENTLEMAN NAMED DONALD J. TRUMP. CONGRATULATIONS TO ALL — MANY MORE VICTORIES TO FOLLOW!!!
I know it didn't work as a political attack, but he is rather weird. Who talks like that?
Even if they all dutifully replied rather than tell Eloniski to fuck off, who is going to read 20 million bullet points?
Grok?
Yes, it is a remarkably dumb idea if the intent was actually to assess how effective people are, even leaving aside that people could just make stuff up. So either it is just dumb, or the disruption was the sole point.
Yup. How "efficient" is it to give every Government employee MORE paperwork (another legacy term when no paper is involved)
He seems to be claiming now that it is way of finding out whether the federal employee is dead.
reading a new article from the New York Times today on Jackson County, Fla., in the state's panhandle, which was already struggling in the wake of Hurricane Michael, but which is now also feeling the adverse effects of Trump's government shutdown. The piece included this anecdote:
A few miles away, another prison employee, Crystal Minton, accompanied her fiancé to a friend's house to help clear the remnants of a metal roof mangled by the hurricane. Ms. Minton, a 38-year-old secretary, said she had obtained permission from the warden to put off her Mississippi duty until early February because she is a single mother caring for disabled parents. Her fiancé plans to take vacation days to look after Ms. Minton's 7-year-old twins once she has to go to work.The shutdown on top of the hurricane has caused Ms. Minton to rethink a lot of things."I voted for him, and he's the one who's doing this," she said of Mr. Trump. "I thought he was going to do good things. He's not hurting the people he needs to be hurting."
I've seen plenty of memorable quotes from Trump voters over the last couple of years, but "he's not hurting the people he needs to be hurting" is among the most striking.
This will continue - at least until he gives Musk a Chinese burn.
The emerging bitchfight between Musk and the actually confirmed by the Senate heads of real Government departments will be entertaining and might actually lead to some kind of resolution. Can Musk sack people if their boss tells them he can't?
Popcorn...
The impact on / of the prison system is going to be revealing.
The USA prison system has 1.8 million inmates, which is around the same as the peak population of the Gulag Archipelago in the 1950s afaics, plus 2.9 million on probation and 0.8 million on parole.
They spend around $150bn a year on housing them, despite the conditions being third world level. That's around 0.6% of GDP. Plus a multiplier in impact on economic activity.
I wonder if Musk will start wielding his chainsaw there.
For all Trump's humbug about criminal immigrants, USA born citizens are more likely to be criminals.
Even if they all dutifully replied rather than tell Eloniski to fuck off, who is going to read 20 million bullet points?
Grok?
Yes, it is a remarkably dumb idea if the intent was actually to assess how effective people are, even leaving aside that people could just make stuff up. So either it is just dumb, or the disruption was the sole point.
Yup. How "efficient" is it to give every Government employee MORE paperwork (another legacy term when no paper is involved)
He seems to be claiming now that it is way of finding out whether the federal employee is dead.
When new explanations for actions are produced it is often a sign of invention when the real reason is unpalatable or proven to be nonsense. See also one Putin, Vladimir.
Even if they all dutifully replied rather than tell Eloniski to fuck off, who is going to read 20 million bullet points?
Grok?
Yes, it is a remarkably dumb idea if the intent was actually to assess how effective people are, even leaving aside that people could just make stuff up. So either it is just dumb, or the disruption was the sole point.
Yup. How "efficient" is it to give every Government employee MORE paperwork (another legacy term when no paper is involved)
He seems to be claiming now that it is way of finding out whether the federal employee is dead.
Dead lazy. He says some of them don’t even read their emails.
Trump is now pretending that his administration was backing CDU all along when both the VP and Shadow President Musk very explicitly tried to get center-right Germans to vote AfD instead.
In case you have doubts the events today in Germany were a good thing, take Musk’s silence the last 3 hours or so as a good sign. Trust me. He REALLY wanted the AfD to win and the fact we haven’t heard from him since the results came in is telling. Good job Germany! 😎🇩🇪
We'll know if Musk/Trump are really annoyed if they claim the election has been stolen.
LOOKS LIKE THE CONSERVATIVE PARTY IN GERMANY HAS WON THE VERY BIG AND HIGHLY ANTICIPATED ELECTION. MUCH LIKE THE USA, THE PEOPLE OF GERMANY GOT TIRED OF THE NO COMMON SENSE AGENDA, ESPECIALLY ON ENERGY AND IMMIGRATION, THAT HAS PREVAILED FOR SO MANY YEARS. THIS IS A GREAT DAY FOR GERMANY, AND FOR THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA UNDER THE LEADERSHIP OF A GENTLEMAN NAMED DONALD J. TRUMP. CONGRATULATIONS TO ALL — MANY MORE VICTORIES TO FOLLOW!!!
I wonder what the gentleman named Trump thinks of this ?
“I would’ve never thought I would need to say something like this on television,” Merz said on a post-election panel of party leaders. “But after Donald Trump’s statements last week, it’s clear: this American government doesn’t care for Europe.”
Merz also criticized what he called “interference” from Elon Musk, who had promoted the AfD, “drastic and shameful – similar to what we’ve heard from Moscow in the past”.
If I am reading the results correctly it seems to be an 83% turnout. That's pretty impressive.
Though it's usually well into the 70s. 82% in 98. And the old West Germany had turnout in the high 80s, low 90s even. And all that pretty poor showing compared to the old East Germany with turnouts typically over 99%!
In case you have doubts the events today in Germany were a good thing, take Musk’s silence the last 3 hours or so as a good sign. Trust me. He REALLY wanted the AfD to win and the fact we haven’t heard from him since the results came in is telling. Good job Germany! 😎🇩🇪
We'll know if Musk/Trump are really annoyed if they claim the election has been stolen.
LOOKS LIKE THE CONSERVATIVE PARTY IN GERMANY HAS WON THE VERY BIG AND HIGHLY ANTICIPATED ELECTION. MUCH LIKE THE USA, THE PEOPLE OF GERMANY GOT TIRED OF THE NO COMMON SENSE AGENDA, ESPECIALLY ON ENERGY AND IMMIGRATION, THAT HAS PREVAILED FOR SO MANY YEARS. THIS IS A GREAT DAY FOR GERMANY, AND FOR THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA UNDER THE LEADERSHIP OF A GENTLEMAN NAMED DONALD J. TRUMP. CONGRATULATIONS TO ALL — MANY MORE VICTORIES TO FOLLOW!!!
I know it didn't work as a political attack, but he is rather weird. Who talks like that?
There's going to be a few ups and downs. There's a few constituencies still to come in (in the new Bundesländer) where they will get 10% or more, but there's also a lot of constituencies where they will get less than 5%, so still very hard to say except that it's going to be close.
Trump is now pretending that his administration was backing CDU all along when both the VP and Shadow President Musk very explicitly tried to get center-right Germans to vote AfD instead.
Come on, be reasonable, Trump doesn't have a clue who or what CDU or AfD are.
Even if they all dutifully replied rather than tell Eloniski to fuck off, who is going to read 20 million bullet points?
Grok?
Yes, it is a remarkably dumb idea if the intent was actually to assess how effective people are, even leaving aside that people could just make stuff up. So either it is just dumb, or the disruption was the sole point.
Yup. How "efficient" is it to give every Government employee MORE paperwork (another legacy term when no paper is involved)
He seems to be claiming now that it is way of finding out whether the federal employee is dead.
Dead lazy. He says some of them don’t even read their emails.
Even if they all dutifully replied rather than tell Eloniski to fuck off, who is going to read 20 million bullet points?
Grok?
Yes, it is a remarkably dumb idea if the intent was actually to assess how effective people are, even leaving aside that people could just make stuff up. So either it is just dumb, or the disruption was the sole point.
Yup. How "efficient" is it to give every Government employee MORE paperwork (another legacy term when no paper is involved)
He seems to be claiming now that it is way of finding out whether the federal employee is dead.
I hadn't heard of BSW before today. It seems they represent pretty much the polar opposite of what I support in almost every way.
Not good for Germany if (when) FDP fails to make the cut but if BSW does make it.
The BSW are old-fashioned leftists (more or less a vehicle for Sahra Wagenknecht), for social spending and dubious about high defence spending, but also sceptical about high immigration and support for Ukraine. They split from the Left Party, who are pro-immigration and pro-Ukraine and after the split have done unexpectedly well.
If the BSW fails to get the required 5%, a simple CDU/CSU-SPD alliance could well be the result. If the BSW makes it, the Government will probably need the Greens to get a majority.
The odd thing is that until a couple of weeks ago BSW were ahead of the Left Party in the opinion polls. Not sure why that changed at the last minute so to speak.
I would guess that the Trump effect might have altered people’s perceptions of anti-Ukraine sentiment.
Maybe, but also the Left had clear messaging focusing on high rent, high bills, high cost of living, low wages, low pensions, and inequality. Plus the BSW looked like an incompetent personality cult.
I think that's right - Wagenknecht failed to show that the party was more than a vehicle for herself. But the Left fought a very effecftive campaign, reminding people what positive leftism is about. The SPD fought the election largely as a defensive action.
Trump is now pretending that his administration was backing CDU all along when both the VP and Shadow President Musk very explicitly tried to get center-right Germans to vote AfD instead.
Come on, be reasonable, Trump doesn't have a clue who or what CDU or AfD are.
Even if they all dutifully replied rather than tell Eloniski to fuck off, who is going to read 20 million bullet points?
Grok?
Yes, it is a remarkably dumb idea if the intent was actually to assess how effective people are, even leaving aside that people could just make stuff up. So either it is just dumb, or the disruption was the sole point.
Yup. How "efficient" is it to give every Government employee MORE paperwork (another legacy term when no paper is involved)
He seems to be claiming now that it is way of finding out whether the federal employee is dead.
Dead lazy. He says some of them don’t even read their emails.
Not if they're spam.
If there's one thing I hate its people deciding to just email everyone with whatever stream of consciousness is in their head today.
I've long had thousands of unread emails on my personal account and that doesn't bother me, they can just sit there never to be read. I hate that on my work account though so every few weeks I just mass-archive hundreds of unread emails to reset it back down to zero and let it start to build up again.
No Janice, I've not seen your missing water bottle.
I hadn't heard of BSW before today. It seems they represent pretty much the polar opposite of what I support in almost every way.
Not good for Germany if (when) FDP fails to make the cut but if BSW does make it.
The BSW are old-fashioned leftists (more or less a vehicle for Sahra Wagenknecht), for social spending and dubious about high defence spending, but also sceptical about high immigration and support for Ukraine. They split from the Left Party, who are pro-immigration and pro-Ukraine and after the split have done unexpectedly well.
If the BSW fails to get the required 5%, a simple CDU/CSU-SPD alliance could well be the result. If the BSW makes it, the Government will probably need the Greens to get a majority.
The odd thing is that until a couple of weeks ago BSW were ahead of the Left Party in the opinion polls. Not sure why that changed at the last minute so to speak.
Linke have been running a great social media campaign, on insta and Tiktok. They are pretty old school leftists and plan quite a wealth tax on those with over a million euros in assets. They focus very strongly on domestic issues like housing, childcare etc, while BSW are old school pro-Russian Tankies.
Trump is now pretending that his administration was backing CDU all along when both the VP and Shadow President Musk very explicitly tried to get center-right Germans to vote AfD instead.
Come on, be reasonable, Trump doesn't have a clue who or what CDU or AfD are.
Are we even sure he knows where Germany is?
They were his good guys in World War Two weren't they?
The ones his supporters have national flags of up in their basements.
reading a new article from the New York Times today on Jackson County, Fla., in the state's panhandle, which was already struggling in the wake of Hurricane Michael, but which is now also feeling the adverse effects of Trump's government shutdown. The piece included this anecdote:
A few miles away, another prison employee, Crystal Minton, accompanied her fiancé to a friend's house to help clear the remnants of a metal roof mangled by the hurricane. Ms. Minton, a 38-year-old secretary, said she had obtained permission from the warden to put off her Mississippi duty until early February because she is a single mother caring for disabled parents. Her fiancé plans to take vacation days to look after Ms. Minton's 7-year-old twins once she has to go to work.The shutdown on top of the hurricane has caused Ms. Minton to rethink a lot of things."I voted for him, and he's the one who's doing this," she said of Mr. Trump. "I thought he was going to do good things. He's not hurting the people he needs to be hurting."
I've seen plenty of memorable quotes from Trump voters over the last couple of years, but "he's not hurting the people he needs to be hurting" is among the most striking.
This will continue - at least until he gives Musk a Chinese burn.
The emerging bitchfight between Musk and the actually confirmed by the Senate heads of real Government departments will be entertaining and might actually lead to some kind of resolution. Can Musk sack people if their boss tells them he can't?
Popcorn...
The impact on / of the prison system is going to be revealing.
The USA prison system has 1.8 million inmates, which is around the same as the peak population of the Gulag Archipelago in the 1950s afaics, plus 2.9 million on probation and 0.8 million on parole.
They spend around $150bn a year on housing them, despite the conditions being third world level. That's around 0.6% of GDP. Plus a multiplier in impact on economic activity.
I wonder if Musk will start wielding his chainsaw there.
For all Trump's humbug about criminal immigrants, USA born citizens are more likely to be criminals.
I'm sure Vlad would happily house all those US prisoners in his gulags for, say, $15bn a year.
And there will be absolutely no coercion to make them volunteer to join the troops of the Glorious Motherland in exchange for their sentence being halved...
reading a new article from the New York Times today on Jackson County, Fla., in the state's panhandle, which was already struggling in the wake of Hurricane Michael, but which is now also feeling the adverse effects of Trump's government shutdown. The piece included this anecdote:
A few miles away, another prison employee, Crystal Minton, accompanied her fiancé to a friend's house to help clear the remnants of a metal roof mangled by the hurricane. Ms. Minton, a 38-year-old secretary, said she had obtained permission from the warden to put off her Mississippi duty until early February because she is a single mother caring for disabled parents. Her fiancé plans to take vacation days to look after Ms. Minton's 7-year-old twins once she has to go to work.The shutdown on top of the hurricane has caused Ms. Minton to rethink a lot of things."I voted for him, and he's the one who's doing this," she said of Mr. Trump. "I thought he was going to do good things. He's not hurting the people he needs to be hurting."
I've seen plenty of memorable quotes from Trump voters over the last couple of years, but "he's not hurting the people he needs to be hurting" is among the most striking.
This will continue - at least until he gives Musk a Chinese burn.
The emerging bitchfight between Musk and the actually confirmed by the Senate heads of real Government departments will be entertaining and might actually lead to some kind of resolution. Can Musk sack people if their boss tells them he can't?
Popcorn...
The impact on / of the prison system is going to be revealing.
The USA prison system has 1.8 million inmates, which is around the same as the peak population of the Gulag Archipelago in the 1950s afaics, plus 2.9 million on probation and 0.8 million on parole.
They spend around $150bn a year on housing them, despite the conditions being third world level. That's around 0.6% of GDP. Plus a multiplier in impact on economic activity.
I wonder if Musk will start wielding his chainsaw there.
For all Trump's humbug about criminal immigrants, USA born citizens are more likely to be criminals.
True, but they also do a lot of work for pennies in wages, including making a remarkable proportion of US office furniture.
Trump is now pretending that his administration was backing CDU all along when both the VP and Shadow President Musk very explicitly tried to get center-right Germans to vote AfD instead.
Come on, be reasonable, Trump doesn't have a clue who or what CDU or AfD are.
Are we even sure he knows where Germany is?
He knows it better as the home of the Third Reich.
Trump is now pretending that his administration was backing CDU all along when both the VP and Shadow President Musk very explicitly tried to get center-right Germans to vote AfD instead.
Come on, be reasonable, Trump doesn't have a clue who or what CDU or AfD are.
Are we even sure he knows where Germany is?
They were the country that Poland cruelly invaded in 1939
If it is a Grand Coalition and there is consolidation on the far-left then it will provide the ideal conditions for both the AfD and Die Linke to increase their support.
Why would there be a consolidation on the far left? It seems unlikely that an imminent reconciliation between Wagenknecht and her former party is on the cards. Also, even if BSW falls short of 5%, they're going to be so close to the bar that she, they and their activists have every incentive to try again next time rather than let their supporters go elsewhere.
Trump is now pretending that his administration was backing CDU all along when both the VP and Shadow President Musk very explicitly tried to get center-right Germans to vote AfD instead.
Come on, be reasonable, Trump doesn't have a clue who or what CDU or AfD are.
Are we even sure he knows where Germany is?
They were the country that Poland cruelly invaded in 1939
Or, alternatively, brought it all on themselves by not conceding on all Germany's reasonable requests.
Even if they all dutifully replied rather than tell Eloniski to fuck off, who is going to read 20 million bullet points?
Grok?
Yes, it is a remarkably dumb idea if the intent was actually to assess how effective people are, even leaving aside that people could just make stuff up. So either it is just dumb, or the disruption was the sole point.
Yup. How "efficient" is it to give every Government employee MORE paperwork (another legacy term when no paper is involved)
He seems to be claiming now that it is way of finding out whether the federal employee is dead.
Is there a way of finding out if they are off their tits on ketamine?
Misleading claim alert - it looks increasingly like the AfD could come first in the party vote ahead of the CDU.
No it isn't
The AfD stand everywhere in Germany. The CDU stand everywhere outside Bavaria because the CSU stand in Bavaria.
I doubt the story is true but even if it is it’s comparing an apple with 15/16ths of an apple
you mean 5/6ths
But even if you want to make the false comparison the CDU minus CSU will get over 22% and the AfD will get under 21%, unless the current projections are wrong.
Tom Harwood @tomhfh Why are more people not talking about Microsoft’s topological superconductor?
They literally created a new state of matter and the news is leading with the anniversary of a war, elections in Germany, and people praying for the pope.
What Microsoft have done/discovered is mindblowing
Add it to THAT technology and… whooooooooh
The fact xAI have surpassed everybody else in 18 months has not got a single mention either, and quietly built absolutely enormous compute capacity (they have more than the 200k GPU cluster they announced).
They very much haven't. They have grok3 which is almost as good as early last years models. It fails tasks even open-source small models from last autumn could pass, never mind ones from this year. Being generous - they are about a year behind, which puts them on about par with the other commercial providers time-wise.
Not true for my use-case. Grok3 is the best
But we await Claude 4 which is ALSO expected v soon
The exponential curve is here….
What is your use-case? It's failed pretty much every test-case I have.
And yes, Claude 4 (or the 3.5 'paprika') will be very welcome.
Even if they all dutifully replied rather than tell Eloniski to fuck off, who is going to read 20 million bullet points?
Grok?
Yes, it is a remarkably dumb idea if the intent was actually to assess how effective people are, even leaving aside that people could just make stuff up. So either it is just dumb, or the disruption was the sole point.
Yup. How "efficient" is it to give every Government employee MORE paperwork (another legacy term when no paper is involved)
He seems to be claiming now that it is way of finding out whether the federal employee is dead.
Dead lazy. He says some of them don’t even read their emails.
Not if they're spam.
If there's one thing I hate its people deciding to just email everyone with whatever stream of consciousness is in their head today.
I've long had thousands of unread emails on my personal account and that doesn't bother me, they can just sit there never to be read. I hate that on my work account though so every few weeks I just mass-archive hundreds of unread emails to reset it back down to zero and let it start to build up again.
No Janice, I've not seen your missing water bottle.
If it is a Grand Coalition and there is consolidation on the far-left then it will provide the ideal conditions for both the AfD and Die Linke to increase their support.
Why would there be a consolidation on the far left? It seems unlikely that an imminent reconciliation between Wagenknecht and her former party is on the cards. Also, even if BSW falls short of 5%, they're going to be so close to the bar that she, they and their activists have every incentive to try again next time rather than let their supporters go elsewhere.
You'd think there'd be a market for a properly leftwing party that is also strongly anti-immigration. A lot of AfD voters should probably switch to the BSW logically. But the BSW look too much like a personality cult. And of course the AfD has a lot of establishment backing in Germany, which the BSW doesn't have.
I wonder how they will take it if they narrowly fail to get 5% (which I think is on balance more likely than not). There could be legal action taken if they think there were any problems with the vote.
In the runup the BSW were claiming that pollsters which had them on 4 were deliberately falsely putting them below the 5% threshold to suppress their vote, which was bollocks. So they're not averse to a bit of conspiracy theorising.
Even if they all dutifully replied rather than tell Eloniski to fuck off, who is going to read 20 million bullet points?
Grok?
Yes, it is a remarkably dumb idea if the intent was actually to assess how effective people are, even leaving aside that people could just make stuff up. So either it is just dumb, or the disruption was the sole point.
Yup. How "efficient" is it to give every Government employee MORE paperwork (another legacy term when no paper is involved)
He seems to be claiming now that it is way of finding out whether the federal employee is dead.
Dead lazy. He says some of them don’t even read their emails.
Not if they're spam.
If there's one thing I hate its people deciding to just email everyone with whatever stream of consciousness is in their head today.
I've long had thousands of unread emails on my personal account and that doesn't bother me, they can just sit there never to be read. I hate that on my work account though so every few weeks I just mass-archive hundreds of unread emails to reset it back down to zero and let it start to build up again.
No Janice, I've not seen your missing water bottle.
The lift is out of order
We are holding a "meet-and-greet" on the ground floor at 10am
Tom Harwood @tomhfh Why are more people not talking about Microsoft’s topological superconductor?
They literally created a new state of matter and the news is leading with the anniversary of a war, elections in Germany, and people praying for the pope.
What Microsoft have done/discovered is mindblowing
Add it to THAT technology and… whooooooooh
The fact xAI have surpassed everybody else in 18 months has not got a single mention either, and quietly built absolutely enormous compute capacity (they have more than the 200k GPU cluster they announced).
They very much haven't. They have grok3 which is almost as good as early last years models. It fails tasks even open-source small models from last autumn could pass, never mind ones from this year. Being generous - they are about a year behind, which puts them on about par with the other commercial providers time-wise.
Not true for my use-case. Grok3 is the best
But we await Claude 4 which is ALSO expected v soon
The exponential curve is here….
What is your use-case? It's failed pretty much every test-case I have.
And yes, Claude 4 (or the 3.5 'paprika') will be very welcome.
Literary criticism/editing. It is outstanding. Once you deduce how to prompt it
Even if they all dutifully replied rather than tell Eloniski to fuck off, who is going to read 20 million bullet points?
Grok?
Yes, it is a remarkably dumb idea if the intent was actually to assess how effective people are, even leaving aside that people could just make stuff up. So either it is just dumb, or the disruption was the sole point.
Yup. How "efficient" is it to give every Government employee MORE paperwork (another legacy term when no paper is involved)
He seems to be claiming now that it is way of finding out whether the federal employee is dead.
Dead lazy. He says some of them don’t even read their emails.
Not if they're spam.
If there's one thing I hate its people deciding to just email everyone with whatever stream of consciousness is in their head today.
I've long had thousands of unread emails on my personal account and that doesn't bother me, they can just sit there never to be read. I hate that on my work account though so every few weeks I just mass-archive hundreds of unread emails to reset it back down to zero and let it start to build up again.
No Janice, I've not seen your missing water bottle.
The lift is out of order
We are holding a "meet-and-greet" on the ground floor at 10am
Even if they all dutifully replied rather than tell Eloniski to fuck off, who is going to read 20 million bullet points?
Grok?
Yes, it is a remarkably dumb idea if the intent was actually to assess how effective people are, even leaving aside that people could just make stuff up. So either it is just dumb, or the disruption was the sole point.
Yup. How "efficient" is it to give every Government employee MORE paperwork (another legacy term when no paper is involved)
He seems to be claiming now that it is way of finding out whether the federal employee is dead.
Dead lazy. He says some of them don’t even read their emails.
Not if they're spam.
If there's one thing I hate its people deciding to just email everyone with whatever stream of consciousness is in their head today.
I've long had thousands of unread emails on my personal account and that doesn't bother me, they can just sit there never to be read. I hate that on my work account though so every few weeks I just mass-archive hundreds of unread emails to reset it back down to zero and let it start to build up again.
No Janice, I've not seen your missing water bottle.
The lift is out of order
We are holding a "meet-and-greet" on the ground floor at 10am
A bike was stolen from the bike rack last night
The hot water tap in the sink on the second floor is broken. Facilities have been informed.
Even if they all dutifully replied rather than tell Eloniski to fuck off, who is going to read 20 million bullet points?
Grok?
Yes, it is a remarkably dumb idea if the intent was actually to assess how effective people are, even leaving aside that people could just make stuff up. So either it is just dumb, or the disruption was the sole point.
Yup. How "efficient" is it to give every Government employee MORE paperwork (another legacy term when no paper is involved)
He seems to be claiming now that it is way of finding out whether the federal employee is dead.
Dead lazy. He says some of them don’t even read their emails.
Not if they're spam.
If there's one thing I hate its people deciding to just email everyone with whatever stream of consciousness is in their head today.
I've long had thousands of unread emails on my personal account and that doesn't bother me, they can just sit there never to be read. I hate that on my work account though so every few weeks I just mass-archive hundreds of unread emails to reset it back down to zero and let it start to build up again.
No Janice, I've not seen your missing water bottle.
The lift is out of order
We are holding a "meet-and-greet" on the ground floor at 10am
A bike was stolen from the bike rack last night
The hot water tap in the sink on the second floor is broken. Facilities have been informed.
A reminder is issued that people should lock their pedestals before leaving for the day
Even if they all dutifully replied rather than tell Eloniski to fuck off, who is going to read 20 million bullet points?
Grok?
Yes, it is a remarkably dumb idea if the intent was actually to assess how effective people are, even leaving aside that people could just make stuff up. So either it is just dumb, or the disruption was the sole point.
Yup. How "efficient" is it to give every Government employee MORE paperwork (another legacy term when no paper is involved)
He seems to be claiming now that it is way of finding out whether the federal employee is dead.
Dead lazy. He says some of them don’t even read their emails.
Not if they're spam.
If there's one thing I hate its people deciding to just email everyone with whatever stream of consciousness is in their head today.
I've long had thousands of unread emails on my personal account and that doesn't bother me, they can just sit there never to be read. I hate that on my work account though so every few weeks I just mass-archive hundreds of unread emails to reset it back down to zero and let it start to build up again.
No Janice, I've not seen your missing water bottle.
The lift is out of order
We are holding a "meet-and-greet" on the ground floor at 10am
A bike was stolen from the bike rack last night
The hot water tap in the sink on the second floor is broken. Facilities have been informed.
A reminder is issued that people should lock their pedestals before leaving for the day
Please do not leave unwashed cups and cutlery in the sink. Put them in the spaces provided in the dishwasher
Mike Sington @MikeSington · 2h “It’s over!” James Carville predicts the Trump administration is going to completely collapse in “less than 30 days”. He advises Dems to sit back and let it happen. (Video: SiriusXM/Mediaite)
If it is a Grand Coalition and there is consolidation on the far-left then it will provide the ideal conditions for both the AfD and Die Linke to increase their support.
Why would there be a consolidation on the far left? It seems unlikely that an imminent reconciliation between Wagenknecht and her former party is on the cards. Also, even if BSW falls short of 5%, they're going to be so close to the bar that she, they and their activists have every incentive to try again next time rather than let their supporters go elsewhere.
You'd think there'd be a market for a properly leftwing party that is also strongly anti-immigration. A lot of AfD voters should probably switch to the BSW logically. But the BSW look too much like a personality cult. And of course the AfD has a lot of establishment backing in Germany, which the BSW doesn't have.
I wonder how they will take it if they narrowly fail to get 5% (which I think is on balance more likely than not). There could be legal action taken if they think there were any problems with the vote.
In the runup the BSW were claiming that pollsters which had them on 4 were deliberately falsely putting them below the 5% threshold to suppress their vote, which was bollocks. So they're not averse to a bit of conspiracy theorising.
Not much love lost between Linke and BSW - the Linke spokesman attributing their success to shedding the Wagenknecht wing. But 5 years to the next election is a long time...
A space is available on the mental health awareness committee. Please contact Elaine if you would like to sit on the committee. Meetings are twice monthly.
Mike Sington @MikeSington · 2h “It’s over!” James Carville predicts the Trump administration is going to completely collapse in “less than 30 days”. He advises Dems to sit back and let it happen. (Video: SiriusXM/Mediaite)
Even if they all dutifully replied rather than tell Eloniski to fuck off, who is going to read 20 million bullet points?
Grok?
Yes, it is a remarkably dumb idea if the intent was actually to assess how effective people are, even leaving aside that people could just make stuff up. So either it is just dumb, or the disruption was the sole point.
Yup. How "efficient" is it to give every Government employee MORE paperwork (another legacy term when no paper is involved)
He seems to be claiming now that it is way of finding out whether the federal employee is dead.
Genius
Seems reasonable.
https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/5159866-ultimate-d-boss-move-democratic-senator-rips-musk-email/ “This is the ultimate d‑‑‑ boss move from Musk – except he isn’t even the boss, he’s just a d‑‑‑,” the Minnesota senator said in the first post of a thread on the social platform X after Musk on Saturday warned federal employees about a new policy requiring them to detail their work in an email. “I bet a lot of people have had an experience like this with a bad boss – there’s an email in your inbox on Saturday night saying, ‘Prove to me your worthiness by Monday or else,’” Smith continued in a second post. “I’m on the side of the workers, not the billionaire a‑‑hole bosses.” Musk responded to the first post from Smith later Saturday night, asking her, “What did you get done last week?” “.@ElonMusk I hate to break it to you but you aren’t my boss. I answer to the people of Minnesota,” Smith replied in another X post Sunday. “But since you bring it up, I spent last week fighting to stop tax breaks for billionaires like you, paid for by defunding health care for moms and babies.”..
Tom Harwood @tomhfh Why are more people not talking about Microsoft’s topological superconductor?
They literally created a new state of matter and the news is leading with the anniversary of a war, elections in Germany, and people praying for the pope.
What Microsoft have done/discovered is mindblowing
Add it to THAT technology and… whooooooooh
The fact xAI have surpassed everybody else in 18 months has not got a single mention either, and quietly built absolutely enormous compute capacity (they have more than the 200k GPU cluster they announced).
They very much haven't. They have grok3 which is almost as good as early last years models. It fails tasks even open-source small models from last autumn could pass, never mind ones from this year. Being generous - they are about a year behind, which puts them on about par with the other commercial providers time-wise.
Not true for my use-case. Grok3 is the best
But we await Claude 4 which is ALSO expected v soon
The exponential curve is here….
What is your use-case? It's failed pretty much every test-case I have.
And yes, Claude 4 (or the 3.5 'paprika') will be very welcome.
Literary criticism/editing. It is outstanding. Once you deduce how to prompt it
I'm surprised it's better than some of the OSS models from last year. And now that it's system prompt has been exposed I guess it'll just get copied (other than the Elon/Trump part). I do fairly little editing, but the techniques developed last year seem to work quite well, irrespective of the model. Maybe I'm missing something?
make policies for the young if you want to be politically relevant in 20 years
Too many parties are addicted to the easy chasing of the grey vote to do this, as long term decisions might require some pain now. Cannot see many making the choice.
Peter is leaving at the end of next month. The card is next to the files by Andrea's office. Please send contributions to the following account.
Is this something to do with Musk?
No. BartholemewRoberts complained about inane emails and gave Janice's missing water bottle as an example. I picked up the hook and ran with it, giving mock examples of inane emails I get at work. I can't go into too much detail without identifying the organisation I work for, so I gave the nonspecific ones. I didn't make up the "period awareness" one.
Mike Sington @MikeSington · 2h “It’s over!” James Carville predicts the Trump administration is going to completely collapse in “less than 30 days”. He advises Dems to sit back and let it happen. (Video: SiriusXM/Mediaite)
Edit: Carville says he has NYT piece coming on all this.
Of course, he did predict a Harris win, so, erm...
I often find that my triumphant enemies collapse by themselves whilst I do nothing. Happens all the time. I just sit down and they just stab themselves and hit themselves with hammers. 'Mazing
Given some large cities haven’t reported yet the odds must surely favour them .
I make it 7 constituencies from the East they should do well in and 48 from the West they won't do so well in. So very roughly calculated, it's still too close to call.
Peter is leaving at the end of next month. The card is next to the files by Andrea's office. Please send contributions to the following account.
Is this something to do with Musk?
No. BartholemewRoberts complained about inane emails and gave Janice's missing water bottle as an example. I picked up the hook and ran with it, giving mock examples of inane emails I get at work. I can't go into too much detail without identifying the organisation I work for, so I gave the nonspecific ones. I didn't make up the "period awareness" one.
Mrs Biggles (along with every girlfriend I had in the past) seems perfectly aware of her period without any external help. I had thought that was the norm. Evidently not.
All of the East German results are astonishing. The AfD are comfortably first by a long way in Brandenburg, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Sachsen, Sachsen-Anhalt and Thüringen.
Comments
He would be in the wrong to try to get action against them, but it's a headache best to avoid. So I guess outsiders doing it makes sense.
82% in 98.
And the old West Germany had turnout in the high 80s, low 90s even.
And all that pretty poor showing compared to the old East Germany with turnouts typically over 99%!
But we await Claude 4 which is ALSO expected v soon
The exponential curve is here….
FDP is on 4.1% - appears out of it.
A very big difference depending upon which 5.0% it is.
The USA prison system has 1.8 million inmates, which is around the same as the peak population of the Gulag Archipelago in the 1950s afaics, plus 2.9 million on probation and 0.8 million on parole.
They spend around $150bn a year on housing them, despite the conditions being third world level. That's around 0.6% of GDP. Plus a multiplier in impact on economic activity.
I wonder if Musk will start wielding his chainsaw there.
For all Trump's humbug about criminal immigrants, USA born citizens are more likely to be criminals.
Matthew Yglesias
@mattyglesias
·
1h
Replying to @mattyglesias
Trump is now pretending that his administration was backing CDU all along when both the VP and Shadow President Musk very explicitly tried to get center-right Germans to vote AfD instead.
“I would’ve never thought I would need to say something like this on television,” Merz said on a post-election panel of party leaders. “But after Donald Trump’s statements last week, it’s clear: this American government doesn’t care for Europe.”
Merz also criticized what he called “interference” from Elon Musk, who had promoted the AfD, “drastic and shameful – similar to what we’ve heard from Moscow in the past”.
https://www.tagesschau.de/wahl/archiv/2025-02-23-BT-DE/index.shtml
I've long had thousands of unread emails on my personal account and that doesn't bother me, they can just sit there never to be read. I hate that on my work account though so every few weeks I just mass-archive hundreds of unread emails to reset it back down to zero and let it start to build up again.
No Janice, I've not seen your missing water bottle.
All my oldies (all on defined benefit pensions) think I'm enormously rich because of my defined contribution pension pots.
The ones his supporters have national flags of up in their basements.
And there will be absolutely no coercion to make them volunteer to join the troops of the Glorious Motherland in exchange for their sentence being halved...
I doubt the story is true but even if it is it’s comparing an apple with 15/16ths of an apple
It seems unlikely that an imminent reconciliation between Wagenknecht and her former party is on the cards.
Also, even if BSW falls short of 5%, they're going to be so close to the bar that she, they and their activists have every incentive to try again next time rather than let their supporters go elsewhere.
Like a lithiumed Chinese EV cruising towards the silver medal
But even if you want to make the false comparison the CDU minus CSU will get over 22% and the AfD will get under 21%, unless the current projections are wrong.
And yes, Claude 4 (or the 3.5 'paprika') will be very welcome.
https://www.bundeswahlleiterin.de/en/bundestagswahlen/2025/ergebnisse/bund-99/land-16.html
I wonder how they will take it if they narrowly fail to get 5% (which I think is on balance more likely than not). There could be legal action taken if they think there were any problems with the vote.
In the runup the BSW were claiming that pollsters which had them on 4 were deliberately falsely putting them below the 5% threshold to suppress their vote, which was bollocks. So they're not averse to a bit of conspiracy theorising.
"House democrats know what they are doing"
"The collapse is coming"
Mike Sington
@MikeSington
·
2h
“It’s over!” James Carville predicts the Trump administration is going to completely collapse in “less than 30 days”. He advises Dems to sit back and let it happen. (Video: SiriusXM/Mediaite)
https://x.com/MikeSington/status/1893755499851485248
Edit: Carville says he has NYT piece coming on all this.
Of course, he did predict a Harris win, so, erm...
Trump and Musk are chaotic, but everyone fought too hard and bitter to 'completely collapse', even something has to give from this frenetic beginning.
https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/5159866-ultimate-d-boss-move-democratic-senator-rips-musk-email/
“This is the ultimate d‑‑‑ boss move from Musk – except he isn’t even the boss, he’s just a d‑‑‑,” the Minnesota senator said in the first post of a thread on the social platform X after Musk on Saturday warned federal employees about a new policy requiring them to detail their work in an email.
“I bet a lot of people have had an experience like this with a bad boss – there’s an email in your inbox on Saturday night saying, ‘Prove to me your worthiness by Monday or else,’” Smith continued in a second post. “I’m on the side of the workers, not the billionaire a‑‑hole bosses.”
Musk responded to the first post from Smith later Saturday night, asking her, “What did you get done last week?”
“.@ElonMusk I hate to break it to you but you aren’t my boss. I answer to the people of Minnesota,” Smith replied in another X post Sunday. “But since you bring it up, I spent last week fighting to stop tax breaks for billionaires like you, paid for by defunding health care for moms and babies.”..
https://x.com/simongerman600/status/1893787066938380708
Too many parties are addicted to the easy chasing of the grey vote to do this, as long term decisions might require some pain now. Cannot see many making the choice.
But inertia will still see many remain in play.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c4g0xnnwkppo
But they couldn't find the fiver for the vaccine plant in Liverpool.
Given some large cities haven’t reported yet the odds must surely favour them .
(narrator: Democrats are bloody useless)
https://bundeswahlleiterin.de/bundestagswahlen/2025/ergebnisse/bund-99/land-12.html
https://bundeswahlleiterin.de/bundestagswahlen/2025/ergebnisse/bund-99/land-13.html
https://bundeswahlleiterin.de/bundestagswahlen/2025/ergebnisse/bund-99/land-14.html
https://bundeswahlleiterin.de/bundestagswahlen/2025/ergebnisse/bund-99/land-15.html
https://bundeswahlleiterin.de/bundestagswahlen/2025/ergebnisse/bund-99/land-16.html
But in Berlin, Die Linke have edged out the CDU, SPD and Greens to come first.
https://bundeswahlleiterin.de/bundestagswahlen/2025/ergebnisse/bund-99/land-11.html