Government to ban sale of energy drinks with more than 150mg of caffeine, citing concerns over obesity and lack of concentration
Under-16s in England will be banned from buying energy drinks such as Red Bull and Monster because they fuel obesity, cause sleep problems and leave them unable to concentrate.
Health experts, teaching unions and dentists welcomed the ban and said it would boost children and young people’s health. It fulfils a pledge Labour included in its manifesto for last year’s general election.
Though I believe they dropped the caffeine after US government pressure.
Our own homegrown Buckfast Tonic Wine still mixes alcohol with caffeine. Mind you, so does whisky and coke.
Who on earth would ever mix whisky with coke, and I say this as someone who is not a whisky drinker, but I have never come across anyone who does?! My Dad was from the central belt and had never ventured up to the Highlands until he left home to join the military and he discovered and fell in love with the area after he did his mountain training up there. He devoloped a lifelong love of hill/mountain climbing and as a result he always used to spend part of his leave exploring and climbing in the Highlands and that is how my parents met.
Back in the early 60s he was up in a remote spot in the Highlands with a friend having spent a couple of days climbing Munros, they ventured into this small rural pub in the back of beyond and they decided they wanted to try a malt whisky which they asked for with lemonade and they were taken aback when the barman refused. They were told in no uncertain terms he would serve them a malt whisky but only straight, with water or if he had any ice as adding a soft drink mixer would utterly ruin the experience. They opted for water that night, but my Dad as he began to really enjoy and appreciate a good malt over the years finally settled on just a couple of ice cubes if adding anything at all.
As for Buckfast, the history of how a tonic Wine made by Benedictine monks at Buckfast Abbey in Devon become such an iconic drink associated with Scotland to this day is rooted in the history of the working classes in the central belt discovering it up here.
The other thing with this 'i applied to one million jobs and got nowhere' is that the unemployment rate has been steady at around 4% since around 2015.
Ah, but. When it's I'm educated, was stonkingly well paid, but AI has got rid of my job, and I have no other discernible skills... Then it's a story in the Telegraph.
It's because this unemployment is hitting the middle classes FIRST, isn't that obvious? Copywriters, in this case
So it hits home for Telegraph readers. Many of whom will have kids at uni, or aiming for uni, or out of uni, and everyone is thinking the same thing: Shiiiiiiiit
As my daughter put it, "What are we all going to DO?"
I don’t know about Telegraph readers, but I can’t think of any Telegraph journalists worthy of their employment.
Defence and Foreign Affairs teams at the Telegraph are worth their dollar, imo.
Sir Keir Starmer will drive through money-saving welfare reforms following his No 10 reset, The Telegraph understands.
The Prime Minister remains determined to overhaul the disability benefits payments system to get more people stuck on long-term sickness back into work, despite opposition from Labour MPs.
It is understood that reviving plans to reform welfare will be a key focus of the Prime Minister’s “powerful” new Downing Street team.
The Haweswater Aqueduct requires replacing - that is a water pipe (almost Roman style 110km) system with siphons for uphill sections and so on, from Haweswater to Manchester. The capacity is 100 million gallons per day - whatever that is in modern English.
The Telegraph is trying to go NIMBY !! NIMBY !! NIMBY !!, which is quite funny, and getting disembowelled by their own commentators because it's one that just needs to be done:
The headline is as meaningless as they walways are:
"Backlash over 80-mile aqueduct overhaul that will rip up national parks Residents fear ‘intrusive’ plans will bring up to 40 trucks an hour to once-tranquil villages"
My only suggestion would be that the water company domestic meter installation target be hiked up substantially to reduce consumption for greater future resilience. United Utilities only have ~3.5 million of 7 million customers on meters, with a target of just 4.5 million by 2030.
Somebody gave an "e-bike" to a 13 year old *, who used it to speed up a playground roundabout, to a speed which threw a 12 year old off and killed him. The 13-year old was detained on suspicion of causing death by dangerous driving.
It sounds like a throttle-based illegal motorbike - or maybe a scooter, because the legal ones require pedalling or it cuts out, so could not be used in that way.
Is it recent that the tabloids do not allow comments on such stories?
I wonder which was the Press will jump - will they want to ban playground roundabouts?
I don't think we are quite in a UK Gilts doom loop quite yet, but its on the radar. Government borrowing up, the premium for debt rising, real inflation adjusted GDP stagnant, its not a pretty picture of UK PLC.
The UK may not be alone in the rising bond yield environment, but its way too easy a target for what some might call speculators or others may call it the people who lend the UK government the money.
What's the best thing we can do to alleviate the sitiuation?
Cut less productive gov't spend. Defence, pensions, welfare, NHS spend on the oldest
So we were right about the motive for the Space Force HQ move.
Trump on moving Space Force base from Colorado: "The problem I have with Colorado -- they do mail in voting. They went to all mail in voting, so they have automatically crooked elections. And we can't have that." https://x.com/atrupar/status/1962952067288326221
The evil old liar is lying, of course.
Colorado has the safest and most honest elections process (with bipartisan scrutiny at every point of the system) of any state in the US.
What Trump objects to is that Colorado makes it easy to register legally, and to vote.
Somebody gave an "e-bike" to a 13 year old *, who used it to speed up a playground roundabout, to a speed which threw a 12 year old off and killed him. The 13-year old was detained on suspicion of causing death by dangerous driving.
It sounds like a throttle-based illegal motorbike - or maybe a scooter, because the legal ones require pedalling or it cuts out, so could not be used in that way.
Is it recent that the tabloids do not allow comments on such stories?
I wonder which was the Press will jump - will they want to ban playground roundabouts?
* To me this has certain parallels to the Cardiff case we mentioned the other day, from what we know so far.
Its a total joke these high powered Chinese e-bikes are being tolerated. They are imported with a limiter on them and most model are only legal for "off road purposes", but it only takes snipping one wire to remove it, and its all nudge nudge wink wink about how easily this can be done. Those buying them know what they are buying, and the manufacturer is well aware of this.
Sir Keir Starmer will drive through money-saving welfare reforms following his No 10 reset, The Telegraph understands.
The Prime Minister remains determined to overhaul the disability benefits payments system to get more people stuck on long-term sickness back into work, despite opposition from Labour MPs.
It is understood that reviving plans to reform welfare will be a key focus of the Prime Minister’s “powerful” new Downing Street team.
Nah, they've seen him cave on welfare and WFA. Probably going to save about half a billion quid at most here
Also, calling it "saving" is giving him too much credit as he is just snipping a bit off soaring expenditure projections.
Starmer has been a more or less total failure as Prime Minister and his government is less effective than many minority administrations despite its huge majority.
Somebody gave an "e-bike" to a 13 year old *, who used it to speed up a playground roundabout, to a speed which threw a 12 year old off and killed him. The 13-year old was detained on suspicion of causing death by dangerous driving.
It sounds like a throttle-based illegal motorbike - or maybe a scooter, because the legal ones require pedalling or it cuts out, so could not be used in that way.
Is it recent that the tabloids do not allow comments on such stories?
I wonder which was the Press will jump - will they want to ban playground roundabouts?
* To me this has certain parallels to the Cardiff case we mentioned the other day, from what we know so far.
Its a total joke these high powered Chinese e-bikes are being tolerated. They are imported with a limiter on them and most model are only legal for "off road purposes", but it only takes snipping one wire to remove it, and its all nudge nudge wink wink about how easily this can be done. Those buying them know what they are buying, and the manufacturer is well aware of this.
We need to recognise that we do not yet have full information on this incident.
On the E-motorcycles sold as pedal cycles, it is worse than that. For some it is in the computer in a hidden menu - some dealers publish unlock codes on their own websites.
‘I’ve applied for more than 5,000 jobs – it’s brutal out there’
When lay-offs hit my role as a senior copywriter at Virgin Media O2 in August 2023, I knew the job hunt wouldn’t be easy. But two years, a drained bank account and a psychiatric unit later, I never imagined it would be this brutal.
5000 jobs in two years is seven a day. He really needs to think about tailoring his applications.
I often think this when I see stories like this. I’ve been lucky - I’m in a job I love and have been able to progress here too. But I think I’ve genuinely only applied for about 10 jobs in my life, plus about six letters asking about post doc positions. And each application was crafted to match the job specs, and all the rest. Those who are applying for 5000 jobs are not really applying for 5000 jobs. A better focus would help.
Without being funny, you are in academia, its a very different world. I spent quite a number of years in academia, and basically never truly applied for a position, certainly not in the way a traditional job goes down and certainly not how modern corporate employment is (we are copying the Americans as usual). It was all networking, your supervisor knows x or y has money and looking for somebody with this interest, you write to them, there is often mutual understanding of the research, the interview is chatting of your research interests and their problem, perhaps you give a presentation about your previous works. Its quite different to the way modern corporate employment has gone, particularly with LLMs.
This will hit academe soon. Universities are completely doomed. People won't take on £50k debt when there is no job at the end
There will be no job at 18 either though, if your more vivid extrapolations come to pass. Essentially the end of employment.
It is utter Luddite bullshit.
AI will do what technologies have always done, automate shit that we no longer need to do.
So employment will then expand to fill in the gaps, as it always has, including doing some stuff we'd never dream of doing today.
If writing bullshit is your day job, then be afraid, be very afraid.
If you're doing something productive with a human touch? That's different.
This is true, but the transitions are messy. Many of the ex-miners never got other jobs, because they didn't have the skills, experience, training or lived in the wrong place.
Exactly. The agricultural revolution was a huge advance for humankind, but it also meant the clearing of people off the land to fishing villages, and eventually to places like Canada. It's enormously disruptive and not necessarily a good thing for everyone, even if overall we experience economic growth.
The other thing Barty misses is that technological progress often means we don't have to work as much. 9 to 5, Saturday off, holidays and so on. I think AI is as likely to deliver a 3-day working week for the middle class as it is a significant change in the kind of work we do. The balance between work and leisure is shifting for those of us lucky enough to have some capital; productivity gains will be offset by a reduction in hours worked.
There are some big questions about what this means about the shape of the economy. Health, culture, sport will likely grow as proportions, but I'm just guessing.
So chaos leads to evolution and improvements over time. Not only have I not missed it, I've said as much repeatedly.
The problem is too many people want staid stability over disruptive improvements.
The thing about evolution is that it delivers improvements for the species, eventually.
But the mechanism to do that is failure and death for most of the individuals. Where most actually means nearly all. The path from primordial slime to us is a narrow one, surrounded by skeletons as far as the eye can see.
Humans have been rebelling against that for as long as there have been humans; consider skeletons with healed injuries that show that the individual was nurses though an event are one of the markers of sapiens becoming sapiens.
You may be OK with turning up the evolutionary pressure to get faster progress down the line, but most people aren't. And if we consider which the sorts of societies where people are generally happier, it's not obvious that they are wrong to do so.
Somebody gave an "e-bike" to a 13 year old *, who used it to speed up a playground roundabout, to a speed which threw a 12 year old off and killed him. The 13-year old was detained on suspicion of causing death by dangerous driving.
It sounds like a throttle-based illegal motorbike - or maybe a scooter, because the legal ones require pedalling or it cuts out, so could not be used in that way.
Is it recent that the tabloids do not allow comments on such stories?
I wonder which was the Press will jump - will they want to ban playground roundabouts?
* To me this has certain parallels to the Cardiff case we mentioned the other day, from what we know so far.
Its a total joke these high powered Chinese e-bikes are being tolerated. They are imported with a limiter on them and most model are only legal for "off road purposes", but it only takes snipping one wire to remove it, and its all nudge nudge wink wink about how easily this can be done. Those buying them know what they are buying, and the manufacturer is well aware of this.
Trading standards and HMRC need to stop them coming in, and to clamp down hard on those selling them in the country.
On the positive side, some of the phone-stealing scrotes have also ended up in prison for motoring offences related to the illegal motorbikes, so it’s not all bad.
The Haweswater Aqueduct requires replacing - that is a water pipe (almost Roman style 110km) system with siphons for uphill sections and so on, from Haweswater to Manchester. The capacity is 100 million gallons per day - whatever that is in modern English.
The Telegraph is trying to go NIMBY !! NIMBY !! NIMBY !!, which is quite funny, and getting disembowelled by their own commentators because it's one that just needs to be done:
The headline is as meaningless as they walways are:
"Backlash over 80-mile aqueduct overhaul that will rip up national parks Residents fear ‘intrusive’ plans will bring up to 40 trucks an hour to once-tranquil villages"
My only suggestion would be that the water company domestic meter installation target be hiked up substantially to reduce consumption for greater future resilience. United Utilities only have ~3.5 million of 7 million customers on meters, with a target of just 4.5 million by 2030.
Cut off the water supply to those complaining. See how they like it.
The Haweswater Aqueduct requires replacing - that is a water pipe (almost Roman style 110km) system with siphons for uphill sections and so on, from Haweswater to Manchester. The capacity is 100 million gallons per day - whatever that is in modern English.
The Telegraph is trying to go NIMBY !! NIMBY !! NIMBY !!, which is quite funny, and getting disembowelled by their own commentators because it's one that just needs to be done:
The headline is as meaningless as they walways are:
"Backlash over 80-mile aqueduct overhaul that will rip up national parks Residents fear ‘intrusive’ plans will bring up to 40 trucks an hour to once-tranquil villages"
My only suggestion would be that the water company domestic meter installation target be hiked up substantially to reduce consumption for greater future resilience. United Utilities only have ~3.5 million of 7 million customers on meters, with a target of just 4.5 million by 2030.
Cut off the water supply to those complaining. See how they like it.
I'm not sure if they are all supplied by the same company tbf.
But on this one I'd treat as national infra, and support a Miniserial "Yes", assuming the project is sound etc. That is, the same as the Wombling debate in East Anglia - should the electricity network be underground or overground.
The government is saying that the Linenah arrest is a "police matter".
But don't we have Police and Crime Commissioners?
Aren't they supposed to be the way that voters can exert some control over policing matters?
Any word from the PCC?
It's the Met, so not PCC in control. It is the Home Secretary, though neither she nor PCCs should interfere in operational decisions.
So what do PCCs do?
I never agreed with the idea in the first place - more Cameron/Steve Hilton bollocks - but i did at least think it meant there was supposed to be some link between the voters and putting pressure on police over policing policy and actions.
They were a bloody dumb idea in the first place. Even combining the election days with local elections often sees them get lower turnout, albeit it from the woeful amounts from the first set in 2012.
The idea that people judge them locally was classic politician thinking which is unrealistic to boot. Sure, some indies have managed from time to time, but given the broadness of areas for the most part PCCs are judged on party label even more than an MP would be, regardless of performance, so the principal idea behind them is bollocks.
Mayors will be similar now they are being pushed out to cover all areas, including ones which have no real cohesive identity, but politicians love creating new roles for people to be elected to, even though the main purpose of the new mayoralties appears to make it easier for Whitehall to dictate to a couple dozen mayors and more reason to ignore hundreds of council leaders.
We should just abolish local elections, local council leaders and devolve powers down to individuals to make their own free choices.
But too many politicians enjoy the boondongle.
Who empties your bin?
Pay for someone to empty it, just as you already have to do with garden waste.
Would cost a hell of a lot less than Council Tax and plenty of organisations already exist with the capability to do that.
Time to revisit that Libertarian paradise of Grafton, New Hampshire:
Somebody gave an "e-bike" to a 13 year old *, who used it to speed up a playground roundabout, to a speed which threw a 12 year old off and killed him. The 13-year old was detained on suspicion of causing death by dangerous driving.
It sounds like a throttle-based illegal motorbike - or maybe a scooter, because the legal ones require pedalling or it cuts out, so could not be used in that way.
Is it recent that the tabloids do not allow comments on such stories?
I wonder which was the Press will jump - will they want to ban playground roundabouts?
The Haweswater Aqueduct requires replacing - that is a water pipe (almost Roman style 110km) system with siphons for uphill sections and so on, from Haweswater to Manchester. The capacity is 100 million gallons per day - whatever that is in modern English.
The Telegraph is trying to go NIMBY !! NIMBY !! NIMBY !!, which is quite funny, and getting disembowelled by their own commentators because it's one that just needs to be done:
The headline is as meaningless as they walways are:
"Backlash over 80-mile aqueduct overhaul that will rip up national parks Residents fear ‘intrusive’ plans will bring up to 40 trucks an hour to once-tranquil villages"
My only suggestion would be that the water company domestic meter installation target be hiked up substantially to reduce consumption for greater future resilience. United Utilities only have ~3.5 million of 7 million customers on meters, with a target of just 4.5 million by 2030.
The Telegraph went bonkers conkers some time ago. As did the Mail.
We may be reaching the state ("millions are asking... When did Britain become North Korea?") that this is getting impossible to ignore.
So we were right about the motive for the Space Force HQ move.
Trump on moving Space Force base from Colorado: "The problem I have with Colorado -- they do mail in voting. They went to all mail in voting, so they have automatically crooked elections. And we can't have that." https://x.com/atrupar/status/1962952067288326221
The evil old liar is lying, of course.
Colorado has the safest and most honest elections process (with bipartisan scrutiny at every point of the system) of any state in the US.
What Trump objects to is that Colorado makes it easy to register legally, and to vote.
Somebody gave an "e-bike" to a 13 year old *, who used it to speed up a playground roundabout, to a speed which threw a 12 year old off and killed him. The 13-year old was detained on suspicion of causing death by dangerous driving.
It sounds like a throttle-based illegal motorbike - or maybe a scooter, because the legal ones require pedalling or it cuts out, so could not be used in that way.
Is it recent that the tabloids do not allow comments on such stories?
I wonder which was the Press will jump - will they want to ban playground roundabouts?
Somebody gave an "e-bike" to a 13 year old *, who used it to speed up a playground roundabout, to a speed which threw a 12 year old off and killed him. The 13-year old was detained on suspicion of causing death by dangerous driving.
It sounds like a throttle-based illegal motorbike - or maybe a scooter, because the legal ones require pedalling or it cuts out, so could not be used in that way.
Is it recent that the tabloids do not allow comments on such stories?
I wonder which was the Press will jump - will they want to ban playground roundabouts?
* To me this has certain parallels to the Cardiff case we mentioned the other day, from what we know so far.
Tabloids stopped comments on the stories as people aren’t generally sympathetic to boys in balaclavas riding around.
They’re seen as a social menace.
C'mon man! How else are people supposed to get their drugs delivered?
It's the newspaper round of modern Britain.
We'll have something in the Road Safety initiative in the autumn on this, I expect.
They seem to be looking at measures where there is good public support, judging by all the rest, and nothing revolutionary. This - e-scooters, micromobility etc - should be one such. No one will like all of it, of course, but we should have some more clarity.
Down my way, Derbyshire Constabulary are going a bit bonkers on confiscating e-scooters to the letter of the law, which is not where we need to be. We need better law, which permits the use which is OK - and that is a lot of it.
Derbyshire Constabulary has seized a further 33 e-scooters during the month of May as part of an ongoing crackdown on illegal use across the county.
This brings the total number of e-scooters seized to 459, following the introduction of a new approach from November last year to tackle the growing issue.
I may be in a minority on here, but I don't favour advocating violence. Nor think those who do are martyrs
Linehan is an extremist. If he stopped at ‘make a fuss, call the cops’ then it would be better. But of course he has strong views and is subject to lots of hate back at him.
I’m not defending him as a martyr, I’m criticising the state we have got into where his X posts lead to being arrested by five armed police officers as he lands in the U.K. Even if what he has done is worthy of arrest, it could be done with so much less show. But of course the show is part of it.
That wasn't a purely anti-Lineham comment. It includes the Labour councillor Jones, trans activists and Jo Brand's chuck acid on Farage "joke". I don't aspire to a USA definition of "free speech". No other nation does. I don't want that kind of language normalised. Nor "it's just a joke" to be a defence. Was all a bit over the top mind. I don't want Lucy Connolly to become a role model for anyone. How am I supposed to teach Year 7 civil discourse if it does?
Acceptable behaviour and legal behaviour are very different things.
One can cheat on one's spouse without fear of prosecution. Doesn't mean you should do it.
There's a bit of a difference now, thanks to social media.
In the old days, the way that unacceptable behaviour was informally policed was through being shunned by your community. That worked pretty well when your community was the 100 or so people who happened to live around you. One of the reasons individuals have liked to move to cities is to get away from those 100 busybodies and find a community more like them.
Social media does the same thing, turned up to 11^11. There are communities for every interest and niche, and they won't judge you because they are just like you.
Great if it's for healthy things, like the intersection of politics and betting. Less so if it's 'cheating on your spouse' or 'disliking trans people so much that you think it's OK to suggest punching them'.
In the old days, your community may have shunned you in a noticeable way. Now it's more likely to cheer you on. It's a lot like the difference between a proper randomly sampled survey and a newspaper readers' poll.
I don't know what we do about this. Replacing informal policing by formal policing is logical but create its own problems, as we are seeing.
Somebody gave an "e-bike" to a 13 year old *, who used it to speed up a playground roundabout, to a speed which threw a 12 year old off and killed him. The 13-year old was detained on suspicion of causing death by dangerous driving.
It sounds like a throttle-based illegal motorbike - or maybe a scooter, because the legal ones require pedalling or it cuts out, so could not be used in that way.
Is it recent that the tabloids do not allow comments on such stories?
I wonder which was the Press will jump - will they want to ban playground roundabouts?
* To me this has certain parallels to the Cardiff case we mentioned the other day, from what we know so far.
Tabloids stopped comments on the stories as people aren’t generally sympathetic to boys in balaclavas riding around.
They’re seen as a social menace.
I don't see why they would stop that.
Every article is about identifying a "them", and then leaving the great self-righteous "Thank God I'm not like that" unwashed to dogpile in the comments and say how much they hate "them", and what should be done.
The Chinese parade certainly trumped Trump's pathetic birthday parade.
It illustrated China's potency. China is well on the road to becoming the most militarily and economically important country in the world and is the leading country in the BRICS group, the biggest economic/political grouping in the world (surpassing the waning G7 group).
The UK needs to work more closely with China and BRICS. The USA is not the future.
Did he just make up his 20% statistic or am I missing something?
Of course he made it up.
Total global solar potential is something like a couple of orders of magnitude greater that total global energy usage (all energy, not just electric generation).
Did he just make up his 20% statistic or am I missing something?
Of course he made it up.
Total global solar potential is something like a couple of orders of magnitude greater that total global energy usage (all energy, not just electric generation).
A little fact I found out the other day. It takes 96 tons of vegetable matter (and several hundred million years) to make 5 litres of petrol.
The Chinese parade certainly trumped Trump's pathetic birthday parade.
It illustrated China's potency. China is well on the road to becoming the most militarily and economically important country in the world and is the leading country in the BRICS group, the biggest economic/political grouping in the world (surpassing the waning G7 group).
The UK needs to work more closely with China and BRICS. The USA is not the future.
China has always put on impressive willy waving parades, as until recently did Russia.
The UK needn’t choose between the megalomaniac in Washington and the megalomaniacs of Beijing, Moscow or Pyongyang.
Here's a presumably accurate (it is X) description of police policy towards hate crimes. Nothing to worry about there. Except just about every PB poster could bring such a complaint against every other PB poster with some legitimacy. With the exception of Big G, perhaps.
Interesting that "All reports undergo detailed investigation, exploring evidence and assessing whether the incident qualifies as a hate crime or non-crime hate incident."
Yet it seems if you ring them and say someone is shoplifting they say someone might come around and give a crime number next week.
The advantage of online crime - like inciting violence on twitter - is that the evidence is easy to collect and the perpetrators are less likely to resist arrest.
There's no conspiracy to suppress wrongthink. It's a simple matter of the police finding the path of least resistance.
What's missing - again! - is leadership.
An effective police leadership would provide direction that crimes like shoplifting were more important than social media, and so the emphasis would be placed on one over the other, even if it led to more policing in the rain.
Police and Crime Commissioners have failed to provide that leadership - where are they in responding to the wave of shoplifting? They should be abolished as pointless.
‘I’ve applied for more than 5,000 jobs – it’s brutal out there’
When lay-offs hit my role as a senior copywriter at Virgin Media O2 in August 2023, I knew the job hunt wouldn’t be easy. But two years, a drained bank account and a psychiatric unit later, I never imagined it would be this brutal.
5000 jobs in two years is seven a day. He really needs to think about tailoring his applications.
I often think this when I see stories like this. I’ve been lucky - I’m in a job I love and have been able to progress here too. But I think I’ve genuinely only applied for about 10 jobs in my life, plus about six letters asking about post doc positions. And each application was crafted to match the job specs, and all the rest. Those who are applying for 5000 jobs are not really applying for 5000 jobs. A better focus would help.
Without being funny, you are in academia, its a very different world. I spent quite a number of years in academia, and basically never truly applied for a position, certainly not in the way a traditional job goes down and certainly not how modern corporate employment is (we are copying the Americans as usual). It was all networking, your supervisor knows x or y has money and looking for somebody with this interest, you write to them, there is often mutual understanding of the research, the interview is chatting of your research interests and their problem, perhaps you give a presentation about your previous works. Its quite different to the way modern corporate employment has gone, particularly with LLMs.
This will hit academe soon. Universities are completely doomed. People won't take on £50k debt when there is no job at the end
There will be no job at 18 either though, if your more vivid extrapolations come to pass. Essentially the end of employment.
It is utter Luddite bullshit.
AI will do what technologies have always done, automate shit that we no longer need to do.
So employment will then expand to fill in the gaps, as it always has, including doing some stuff we'd never dream of doing today.
If writing bullshit is your day job, then be afraid, be very afraid.
If you're doing something productive with a human touch? That's different.
This is true, but the transitions are messy. Many of the ex-miners never got other jobs, because they didn't have the skills, experience, training or lived in the wrong place.
Exactly. The agricultural revolution was a huge advance for humankind, but it also meant the clearing of people off the land to fishing villages, and eventually to places like Canada. It's enormously disruptive and not necessarily a good thing for everyone, even if overall we experience economic growth.
The other thing Barty misses is that technological progress often means we don't have to work as much. 9 to 5, Saturday off, holidays and so on. I think AI is as likely to deliver a 3-day working week for the middle class as it is a significant change in the kind of work we do. The balance between work and leisure is shifting for those of us lucky enough to have some capital; productivity gains will be offset by a reduction in hours worked.
There are some big questions about what this means about the shape of the economy. Health, culture, sport will likely grow as proportions, but I'm just guessing.
So chaos leads to evolution and improvements over time. Not only have I not missed it, I've said as much repeatedly.
The problem is too many people want staid stability over disruptive improvements.
I want action taken to smooth over the consequences of the transition, not to prevent it from happening
The government is saying that the Linenah arrest is a "police matter".
But don't we have Police and Crime Commissioners?
Aren't they supposed to be the way that voters can exert some control over policing matters?
Any word from the PCC?
It's the Met, so not PCC in control. It is the Home Secretary, though neither she nor PCCs should interfere in operational decisions.
So what do PCCs do?
I never agreed with the idea in the first place - more Cameron/Steve Hilton bollocks - but i did at least think it meant there was supposed to be some link between the voters and putting pressure on police over policing policy and actions.
They were a bloody dumb idea in the first place. Even combining the election days with local elections often sees them get lower turnout, albeit it from the woeful amounts from the first set in 2012.
The idea that people judge them locally was classic politician thinking which is unrealistic to boot. Sure, some indies have managed from time to time, but given the broadness of areas for the most part PCCs are judged on party label even more than an MP would be, regardless of performance, so the principal idea behind them is bollocks.
Mayors will be similar now they are being pushed out to cover all areas, including ones which have no real cohesive identity, but politicians love creating new roles for people to be elected to, even though the main purpose of the new mayoralties appears to make it easier for Whitehall to dictate to a couple dozen mayors and more reason to ignore hundreds of council leaders.
We should just abolish local elections, local council leaders and devolve powers down to individuals to make their own free choices.
But too many politicians enjoy the boondongle.
Who empties your bin?
Pay for someone to empty it, just as you already have to do with garden waste.
Would cost a hell of a lot less than Council Tax and plenty of organisations already exist with the capability to do that.
Privatisation of waste collection has not been a roaring success in Ireland.
I confidently predict that if it ever happened in Britain you would pay more on your waste collection then you would save on a discount from your council tax. Plus you'd see a rise in fly-tipping.
Here's a presumably accurate (it is X) description of police policy towards hate crimes. Nothing to worry about there. Except just about every PB poster could bring such a complaint against every other PB poster with some legitimacy. With the exception of Big G, perhaps.
Interesting that "All reports undergo detailed investigation, exploring evidence and assessing whether the incident qualifies as a hate crime or non-crime hate incident."
Yet it seems if you ring them and say someone is shoplifting they say someone might come around and give a crime number next week.
The advantage of online crime - like inciting violence on twitter - is that the evidence is easy to collect and the perpetrators are less likely to resist arrest.
There's no conspiracy to suppress wrongthink. It's a simple matter of the police finding the path of least resistance.
What's missing - again! - is leadership.
An effective police leadership would provide direction that crimes like shoplifting were more important than social media, and so the emphasis would be placed on one over the other, even if it led to more policing in the rain.
Police and Crime Commissioners have failed to provide that leadership - where are they in responding to the wave of shoplifting? They should be abolished as pointless.
If policing was about preventing crime with the most negative consequences then they'd be out on the roads trying to catch dangerous drivers and reduce KSIs. The public would hate that though.
So we were right about the motive for the Space Force HQ move.
Trump on moving Space Force base from Colorado: "The problem I have with Colorado -- they do mail in voting. They went to all mail in voting, so they have automatically crooked elections. And we can't have that." https://x.com/atrupar/status/1962952067288326221
The evil old liar is lying, of course.
Colorado has the safest and most honest elections process (with bipartisan scrutiny at every point of the system) of any state in the US.
What Trump objects to is that Colorado makes it easy to register legally, and to vote.
‘I’ve applied for more than 5,000 jobs – it’s brutal out there’
When lay-offs hit my role as a senior copywriter at Virgin Media O2 in August 2023, I knew the job hunt wouldn’t be easy. But two years, a drained bank account and a psychiatric unit later, I never imagined it would be this brutal.
5000 jobs in two years is seven a day. He really needs to think about tailoring his applications.
I often think this when I see stories like this. I’ve been lucky - I’m in a job I love and have been able to progress here too. But I think I’ve genuinely only applied for about 10 jobs in my life, plus about six letters asking about post doc positions. And each application was crafted to match the job specs, and all the rest. Those who are applying for 5000 jobs are not really applying for 5000 jobs. A better focus would help.
Yes, he should have spent more time building his skills to better prepare him for a job.
My guess is this is the core problem. His expertise is in an area that LLMs have and will even more so eat the role. If he doesn't have much to add beyond crafting words nicely, its a difficult hire.
Honestly, he should have spent two years doing woodworking or something. People always need cupboards built and doors adjusting. Electrical work is what I'd do today.
Having observed the trades as we had our extension done I think I’d agree. Building (bricks, blocks, concreting etc) looked like hard graft. Woodwork not as bad. Plumbing, even with an entirely new installation still seemed to involve getting into tight spaces and odd angles. But the sparkies generally seemed to have it best.
Nephew gave up on doing any more education after school and now does gardening/landscaping. Not exactly high powered, but plenty of market for it and he's not 50k in debt. Quite a sane decision if he sticks with it.
Better than some pointless "academic" course that really isn't fit for anything.
This 50% to university thing is going to have to go - but how we get back to 10% without a lot of squealing I don't know.
Not to put a downer on it (good for him). But. Doesn't "plenty of market for it" rather rely on lots of well paid people not having their jobs made obsolete by AI?
Pensioners who are no longer able to maintain their own gardens but thanks to the triple lock can afford to pay someone to do it for them.
Being currently exceptionally time poor we pay a chap for two hours a fortnight to generally weed and tidy. It’s £30. Not a huge wage, but he’s happy.
So you're paying £15 an hour? Aldi isn't far behind. I'm delighted he's happy. But it isn't really aspirational. Be difficult to make the rent on that.
Depends how many gardens he is weeding, he si his own boss and can decide when he works etc , as long as not also claiming benefits then it is perfect job. Also maybe it is what he aspires to , just because you would rather be a lab rat chasing illusions does not mean everyone else has to be the same.
Government to ban sale of energy drinks with more than 150mg of caffeine, citing concerns over obesity and lack of concentration
Under-16s in England will be banned from buying energy drinks such as Red Bull and Monster because they fuel obesity, cause sleep problems and leave them unable to concentrate.
Health experts, teaching unions and dentists welcomed the ban and said it would boost children and young people’s health. It fulfils a pledge Labour included in its manifesto for last year’s general election.
Comments
Back in the early 60s he was up in a remote spot in the Highlands with a friend having spent a couple of days climbing Munros, they ventured into this small rural pub in the back of beyond and they decided they wanted to try a malt whisky which they asked for with lemonade and they were taken aback when the barman refused. They were told in no uncertain terms he would serve them a malt whisky but only straight, with water or if he had any ice as adding a soft drink mixer would utterly ruin the experience. They opted for water that night, but my Dad as he began to really enjoy and appreciate a good malt over the years finally settled on just a couple of ice cubes if adding anything at all.
As for Buckfast, the history of how a tonic Wine made by Benedictine monks at Buckfast Abbey in Devon become such an iconic drink associated with Scotland to this day is rooted in the history of the working classes in the central belt discovering it up here.
The Telegraph is trying to go NIMBY !! NIMBY !! NIMBY !!, which is quite funny, and getting disembowelled by their own commentators because it's one that just needs to be done:
(Full article link): https://www.telegraph.co.uk/gift/1a5b9bdaa10e03a7
The headline is as meaningless as they walways are:
"Backlash over 80-mile aqueduct overhaul that will rip up national parks
Residents fear ‘intrusive’ plans will bring up to 40 trucks an hour to once-tranquil villages"
My only suggestion would be that the water company domestic meter installation target be hiked up substantially to reduce consumption for greater future resilience. United Utilities only have ~3.5 million of 7 million customers on meters, with a target of just 4.5 million by 2030.
Somebody gave an "e-bike" to a 13 year old *, who used it to speed up a playground roundabout, to a speed which threw a 12 year old off and killed him. The 13-year old was detained on suspicion of causing death by dangerous driving.
It sounds like a throttle-based illegal motorbike - or maybe a scooter, because the legal ones require pedalling or it cuts out, so could not be used in that way.
Is it recent that the tabloids do not allow comments on such stories?
I wonder which was the Press will jump - will they want to ban playground roundabouts?
https://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/greater-manchester-news/boy-arrested-after-12-year-32393581
* To me this has certain parallels to the Cardiff case we mentioned the other day, from what we know so far.
Trump on moving Space Force base from Colorado: "The problem I have with Colorado -- they do mail in voting. They went to all mail in voting, so they have automatically crooked elections. And we can't have that."
https://x.com/atrupar/status/1962952067288326221
The evil old liar is lying, of course.
Colorado has the safest and most honest elections process (with bipartisan scrutiny at every point of the system) of any state in the US.
What Trump objects to is that Colorado makes it easy to register legally, and to vote.
https://coloradonewsline.com/2024/08/20/register-to-vote-in-colorado/
https://coloradonewsline.com/2024/08/27/voting-basics-how-to-vote-in-colorado/
https://coloradonewsline.com/2024/09/05/voting-basics-how-ballot-signature-verification-works/
https://coloradonewsline.com/2024/09/19/voting-basics-colorado-elections-accurate-secure/
The United States 🇺🇸 Secretary of ENERGY actually posted this<.I>
https://x.com/StockMKTNewz/status/1962942287836479913
Starmer has been a more or less total failure as Prime Minister and his government is less effective than many minority administrations despite its huge majority.
What a shower.
On the E-motorcycles sold as pedal cycles, it is worse than that. For some it is in the computer in a hidden menu - some dealers publish unlock codes on their own websites.
But the mechanism to do that is failure and death for most of the individuals. Where most actually means nearly all. The path from primordial slime to us is a narrow one, surrounded by skeletons as far as the eye can see.
Humans have been rebelling against that for as long as there have been humans; consider skeletons with healed injuries that show that the individual was nurses though an event are one of the markers of sapiens becoming sapiens.
You may be OK with turning up the evolutionary pressure to get faster progress down the line, but most people aren't. And if we consider which the sorts of societies where people are generally happier, it's not obvious that they are wrong to do so.
On the positive side, some of the phone-stealing scrotes have also ended up in prison for motoring offences related to the illegal motorbikes, so it’s not all bad.
But on this one I'd treat as national infra, and support a Miniserial "Yes", assuming the project is sound etc. That is, the same as the Wombling debate in East Anglia - should the electricity network be underground or overground.
https://newrepublic.com/article/159662/libertarian-walks-into-bear-book-review-free-town-project
They’re seen as a social menace.
We may be reaching the state ("millions are asking... When did Britain become North Korea?") that this is getting impossible to ignore.
It's the newspaper round of modern Britain.
They seem to be looking at measures where there is good public support, judging by all the rest, and nothing revolutionary. This - e-scooters, micromobility etc - should be one such. No one will like all of it, of course, but we should have some more clarity.
Down my way, Derbyshire Constabulary are going a bit bonkers on confiscating e-scooters to the letter of the law, which is not where we need to be. We need better law, which permits the use which is OK - and that is a lot of it.
Derbyshire Constabulary has seized a further 33 e-scooters during the month of May as part of an ongoing crackdown on illegal use across the county.
This brings the total number of e-scooters seized to 459, following the introduction of a new approach from November last year to tackle the growing issue.
The initiative, which focuses on educating and preventing people from buying the vehicles and seizing e-scooters being used illegally, was launched in response to increasing concerns from the public about the illegal and unsafe use of e-scooters on public roads and pavements.
https://www.derbyshire.police.uk/news/derbyshire/news/campaigns/2025/june/459-e-scooters-seized-to-date-as-action-continues/
In the old days, the way that unacceptable behaviour was informally policed was through being shunned by your community. That worked pretty well when your community was the 100 or so people who happened to live around you. One of the reasons individuals have liked to move to cities is to get away from those 100 busybodies and find a community more like them.
Social media does the same thing, turned up to 11^11. There are communities for every interest and niche, and they won't judge you because they are just like you.
Great if it's for healthy things, like the intersection of politics and betting. Less so if it's 'cheating on your spouse' or 'disliking trans people so much that you think it's OK to suggest punching them'.
In the old days, your community may have shunned you in a noticeable way. Now it's more likely to cheer you on. It's a lot like the difference between a proper randomly sampled survey and a newspaper readers' poll.
I don't know what we do about this. Replacing informal policing by formal policing is logical but create its own problems, as we are seeing.
Every article is about identifying a "them", and then leaving the great self-righteous "Thank God I'm not like that" unwashed to dogpile in the comments and say how much they hate "them", and what should be done.
The UK needs to work more closely with China and BRICS. The USA is not the future.
Total global solar potential is something like a couple of orders of magnitude greater that total global energy usage (all energy, not just electric generation).
The UK needn’t choose between the megalomaniac in Washington and the megalomaniacs of Beijing, Moscow or Pyongyang.
There's no conspiracy to suppress wrongthink. It's a simple matter of the police finding the path of least resistance.
What's missing - again! - is leadership.
An effective police leadership would provide direction that crimes like shoplifting were more important than social media, and so the emphasis would be placed on one over the other, even if it led to more policing in the rain.
Police and Crime Commissioners have failed to provide that leadership - where are they in responding to the wave of shoplifting? They should be abolished as pointless.
NEW THREAD
I confidently predict that if it ever happened in Britain you would pay more on your waste collection then you would save on a discount from your council tax. Plus you'd see a rise in fly-tipping.