The range of the Labour / Green polling numbers is the interesting bit across all the pollsters. Some Labour aren't doing that bad all things considered, others they are in danger of single digits if the budget goes badly.
"If the Budget goes badly" - it seems very likely it will go badly.
Putting up taxes is always unpopular - but the normal excuse is obviously we didn't have a choice, position is much worse than we thought etc.
But this time, the Government is going to choose to abolish the 2 child benefit cap.
However keeping the 2 child benefit cap is massively popular - Support 60%, Oppose 24%, Don't Know 16%.
Now very few journalists have cottoned on to this - but Times Radio picked up on it yesterday. And everyone is going to pick up on it very quickly on Budget Day.
Got to say, announcing changes like that alongside massive tax rises is going to send their polling even further into the basement.
Yes it’s probably needed to keep Labour MPs happy but they have a majority of 169, allow thr 50 or so that make up the awkward squad to leave
It has also been picked up by the LOTO - mentioned at PMQs yesterday.
The headline summarises it - "chances to prevent murder ‘lost to racial sensitivities’".
An appalling case. No-one did what they ought because they feared causing offence or being branded as racist. And so a young girl - Sara Sharif - was brutally abused and killed. 96 separate injuries on her body. Her back had been broken 10 times. Unimaginable suffering in a short life.
25 years ago - 25 years - similar reasons ("cultural reasons" they were called - the murderers then were black Africans not people from Pakistan) led to no-one taking action to prevent the abuse and murder of a young girl of a similar age - Victoria Climbie. Her murder led to a public inquiry and lots of new legislation.
Yet here we are - despite all that - reading the same horrific story and wondering when in God's name those charged with caring for our children realise that putting children with men who are known to be violent is a fucking stupid idea and that worrying about being called racist simply should not be a consideration when a child's safety is at stake and that if abusing a child is part of a "culture" (and not a pathetic excuse for violence and cruelty) then we should be calling that culture what it is - barbaric - and refusing to accept it as a defence or excuse for barbarism instead of running scared of its sensitivities.
The range of the Labour / Green polling numbers is the interesting bit across all the pollsters. Some Labour aren't doing that bad all things considered, others they are in danger of single digits if the budget goes badly.
"If the Budget goes badly" - it seems very likely it will go badly.
Putting up taxes is always unpopular - but the normal excuse is obviously we didn't have a choice, position is much worse than we thought etc.
But this time, the Government is going to choose to abolish the 2 child benefit cap.
However keeping the 2 child benefit cap is massively popular - Support 60%, Oppose 24%, Don't Know 16%.
Now very few journalists have cottoned on to this - but Times Radio picked up on it yesterday. And everyone is going to pick up on it very quickly on Budget Day.
Got to say, announcing changes like that alongside massive tax rises is going to send their polling even further into the basement.
Yes it’s probably needed to keep Labour MPs happy but they have a majority of 169, allow thr 50 or so that make up the awkward squad to leave
It's a massive kick in the face for those of us who must pay more taxes for this.
The range of the Labour / Green polling numbers is the interesting bit across all the pollsters. Some Labour aren't doing that bad all things considered, others they are in danger of single digits if the budget goes badly.
"If the Budget goes badly" - it seems very likely it will go badly.
Putting up taxes is always unpopular - but the normal excuse is obviously we didn't have a choice, position is much worse than we thought etc.
But this time, the Government is going to choose to abolish the 2 child benefit cap.
However keeping the 2 child benefit cap is massively popular - Support 60%, Oppose 24%, Don't Know 16%.
Now very few journalists have cottoned on to this - but Times Radio picked up on it yesterday. And everyone is going to pick up on it very quickly on Budget Day.
Got to say, announcing changes like that alongside massive tax rises is going to send their polling even further into the basement.
Yes it’s probably needed to keep Labour MPs happy but they have a majority of 169, allow thr 50 or so that make up the awkward squad to leave
The evidence of the defeat over welfare reforms is that the awkward squad is larger than the majority.
I think the government could lose a vote on the 2 child benefit cap quite easily.
My only gripe with this is you need to overlay it with a earnings distribution curve. Median salary is currently £33,000 (including part time earners), so a large majority of the UK earners are taxed at marginal rates of 30%, and this kind of graph overstates the issue. It's for that reason that sorting out the bumps and complications from £50k - £80k are a more pressing issue than, say, the £100k - simply because you have so many more people on that kind of salary.
There is also UC. Figure 5 here for UC claimants: https://ifs.org.uk/publications/universal-credit-incomes-incentives-and-remaining-roll-out. It would be a good achievement if the Treasury could hard cap effective marginal tax rates at something like 60% for the whole population, even if that means a higher overall rate for people earning the kind of salary I am on.
The range of the Labour / Green polling numbers is the interesting bit across all the pollsters. Some Labour aren't doing that bad all things considered, others they are in danger of single digits if the budget goes badly.
"If the Budget goes badly" - it seems very likely it will go badly.
Putting up taxes is always unpopular - but the normal excuse is obviously we didn't have a choice, position is much worse than we thought etc.
But this time, the Government is going to choose to abolish the 2 child benefit cap.
However keeping the 2 child benefit cap is massively popular - Support 60%, Oppose 24%, Don't Know 16%.
Now very few journalists have cottoned on to this - but Times Radio picked up on it yesterday. And everyone is going to pick up on it very quickly on Budget Day.
Got to say, announcing changes like that alongside massive tax rises is going to send their polling even further into the basement.
Yes it’s probably needed to keep Labour MPs happy but they have a majority of 169, allow thr 50 or so that make up the awkward squad to leave
It could be a huge political own goal.
It will be a huge political own goal if the Conservatives make sure it is front and centre of everyone's attention - but who knows whether they've got the intelligence and ability to do that.
It's a strange one - because 99% of the time the public likes money being spent (putting to one side the need to pay for it).
But this is a very unusual example whereby the public actively does not want money to be spent.
"When asked about the single attribute that make someone English, YouGov found that only 10% of white Britons believe being white is a requirement — compared with 24% of ethnic-minority Britons. Just 9% of white respondents said both family heritage and whiteness are necessary, while more than twice as many ethnic-minority Britons (21%) agreed. And when Englishness was framed as a mix of whiteness, family heritage and Christian values, only 4% of white Britons born in the UK endorsed that view, along with 5% of ethnic-minority Britons born in the UK."
The range of the Labour / Green polling numbers is the interesting bit across all the pollsters. Some Labour aren't doing that bad all things considered, others they are in danger of single digits if the budget goes badly.
"If the Budget goes badly" - it seems very likely it will go badly.
Putting up taxes is always unpopular - but the normal excuse is obviously we didn't have a choice, position is much worse than we thought etc.
But this time, the Government is going to choose to abolish the 2 child benefit cap.
However keeping the 2 child benefit cap is massively popular - Support 60%, Oppose 24%, Don't Know 16%.
Now very few journalists have cottoned on to this - but Times Radio picked up on it yesterday. And everyone is going to pick up on it very quickly on Budget Day.
Got to say, announcing changes like that alongside massive tax rises is going to send their polling even further into the basement.
Yes it’s probably needed to keep Labour MPs happy but they have a majority of 169, allow thr 50 or so that make up the awkward squad to leave
Sometimes you should make choices because they are the right thing to do. Removing the two children cap would take about half a million children out of poverty according to the Institute of Fiscal Studies. It would mean half a million children's lives transformed. It would cost around £3 billion a year, not a trivial cost but good value in the overall scheme. For comparison winter fuel payments cost a similar amount.
A general complaint I have against this government is they don't make choices on their own merits, because they think they are the right choice. I would respect them more even if I disagreed with some of those choices.
The range of the Labour / Green polling numbers is the interesting bit across all the pollsters. Some Labour aren't doing that bad all things considered, others they are in danger of single digits if the budget goes badly.
"If the Budget goes badly" - it seems very likely it will go badly.
Putting up taxes is always unpopular - but the normal excuse is obviously we didn't have a choice, position is much worse than we thought etc.
But this time, the Government is going to choose to abolish the 2 child benefit cap.
However keeping the 2 child benefit cap is massively popular - Support 60%, Oppose 24%, Don't Know 16%.
Now very few journalists have cottoned on to this - but Times Radio picked up on it yesterday. And everyone is going to pick up on it very quickly on Budget Day.
Got to say, announcing changes like that alongside massive tax rises is going to send their polling even further into the basement.
Yes it’s probably needed to keep Labour MPs happy but they have a majority of 169, allow thr 50 or so that make up the awkward squad to leave
Sometimes you should make choices because they are the right thing to do. Removing the two children cap would take about half a million children out of poverty according to the Institute of Fiscal Studies. It would mean half a million children's lives transformed. It would cost around £3 billion a year, not a trivial cost but good value in the overall scheme. For comparison winter fuel payments cost a similar amount.
A general complaint I have against this government is they don't make choices on their own merits, because they think they are the right choice. I would respect them more even if I disagreed with some of those choices.
Agree with all that, and would only add that opinion polling shouldn't really come into it. It's hardly surprising that most of the public are opposed to lifting the 2-child cap as there's nothing directly in it for them except slightly higher taxes. Not many families have 3 or more kids these days.
The range of the Labour / Green polling numbers is the interesting bit across all the pollsters. Some Labour aren't doing that bad all things considered, others they are in danger of single digits if the budget goes badly.
"If the Budget goes badly" - it seems very likely it will go badly.
Putting up taxes is always unpopular - but the normal excuse is obviously we didn't have a choice, position is much worse than we thought etc.
But this time, the Government is going to choose to abolish the 2 child benefit cap.
However keeping the 2 child benefit cap is massively popular - Support 60%, Oppose 24%, Don't Know 16%.
Now very few journalists have cottoned on to this - but Times Radio picked up on it yesterday. And everyone is going to pick up on it very quickly on Budget Day.
Got to say, announcing changes like that alongside massive tax rises is going to send their polling even further into the basement.
Yes it’s probably needed to keep Labour MPs happy but they have a majority of 169, allow thr 50 or so that make up the awkward squad to leave
Sometimes you should make choices because they are the right thing to do. Removing the two children cap would take about half a million children out of poverty according to the Institute of Fiscal Studies. It would mean half a million children's lives transformed. It would cost around £3 billion a year, not a trivial cost but good value in the overall scheme. For comparison winter fuel payments cost a similar amount.
A general complaint I have against this government is they don't make choices on their own merits, because they think they are the right choice. I would respect them more even if I disagreed with some of those choices.
And even if you disapprove of "people having more children than they can afford", even if you ignore the possibility that families' circumstances can change over fifteen years...
is it really right to harm children who happen to be born into a family that is insufficiently prudent/lucky?
Really?
Sometimes the wisdom of crowds elides into the cruelty of mobs. I've got sympathy for the need to balance our finances, but the two child cap was always the wrong way to do it, and largely about signalling virtue to curtain-twichers.
The range of the Labour / Green polling numbers is the interesting bit across all the pollsters. Some Labour aren't doing that bad all things considered, others they are in danger of single digits if the budget goes badly.
"If the Budget goes badly" - it seems very likely it will go badly.
Putting up taxes is always unpopular - but the normal excuse is obviously we didn't have a choice, position is much worse than we thought etc.
But this time, the Government is going to choose to abolish the 2 child benefit cap.
However keeping the 2 child benefit cap is massively popular - Support 60%, Oppose 24%, Don't Know 16%.
Now very few journalists have cottoned on to this - but Times Radio picked up on it yesterday. And everyone is going to pick up on it very quickly on Budget Day.
Got to say, announcing changes like that alongside massive tax rises is going to send their polling even further into the basement.
Yes it’s probably needed to keep Labour MPs happy but they have a majority of 169, allow thr 50 or so that make up the awkward squad to leave
One thing you read time and time again about their actions last year was this idea that they raised NI to afford the payoffs to the public sector. That’s not been a good narrative for them.
If the narrative this year takes hold that they’re raising taxes on people to pay for more welfare/benefits (as seems likely), then I agree - it’s going to go down terribly.
The range of the Labour / Green polling numbers is the interesting bit across all the pollsters. Some Labour aren't doing that bad all things considered, others they are in danger of single digits if the budget goes badly.
"If the Budget goes badly" - it seems very likely it will go badly.
Putting up taxes is always unpopular - but the normal excuse is obviously we didn't have a choice, position is much worse than we thought etc.
But this time, the Government is going to choose to abolish the 2 child benefit cap.
However keeping the 2 child benefit cap is massively popular - Support 60%, Oppose 24%, Don't Know 16%.
Now very few journalists have cottoned on to this - but Times Radio picked up on it yesterday. And everyone is going to pick up on it very quickly on Budget Day.
Got to say, announcing changes like that alongside massive tax rises is going to send their polling even further into the basement.
Yes it’s probably needed to keep Labour MPs happy but they have a majority of 169, allow thr 50 or so that make up the awkward squad to leave
Sometimes you should make choices because they are the right thing to do. Removing the two children cap would take about half a million children out of poverty according to the Institute of Fiscal Studies. It would mean half a million children's lives transformed. It would cost around £3 billion a year, not a trivial cost but good value in the overall scheme. For comparison winter fuel payments cost a similar amount.
A general complaint I have against this government is they don't make choices on their own merits, because they think they are the right choice. I would respect them more even if I disagreed with some of those choices.
...and the thing about not making choices on their merits or having consistent guiding principles is that people are less inclined to believe you ever do do something on principle. Take this one: are the government planning to scrap the two child limit because they think it's important to tackle child poverty, or are they merely doing it because they don't think they could control their parliamentary party sufficiently to hold to the existing policy?
Megyn Kelly: "I know somebody very close to this case…Jeffrey Epstein, in this person's view, was not a pedophile…He was into the barely legal type, like he liked 15 year old girls…He wasn't into like 8 year olds…There's a difference between a 15 year old and a 5 year old."
Not really. The word peadophile is often wrongly used. They're not the same thing. Even the thing that has brought Prince Andrew down was about a 17yr old, totally legal. Of course if you want to raise the age of consent, then advocate for doing so.
I don't know. I hate to say this, but it might actually be pure bullshit. An AI-generated tweet issued by a SPAD who's never had a job with a yearly assessment to preserve a Prime Minister who hasn't got a clue about anything without somebody telling him first and is just counting the days when he can bugger off abroad so he can mix with Important People and think Important Thoughts with people who aren't British.
AIGZ = special designated area basically, with the right power supply etc. Been in the water all year.
According to the government, AI Growth Zones are designated sites that are well-suited to housing AI-enabled datacentres and their supporting infrastructure. Ideally, these zones should have “enhanced access” to power supplies of at least 500MW and sympathetic planning support. This is because datacentres are notoriously power-hungry entities, and siting them in areas where energy is in short-supply could slow down the time it takes to bring one of these new AI server farms online."
Targeting, in part, poor areas eg deinustralised ones, which are less likely to complain planning wise. Not sure how much it will do for long term employment of the actual locals, or their leccy bills once regional pricing comes in, though (which may be one reason Labour don't like the latter).
In terms of locals long term employment from AI. The announcement today will be "generating power by the mid 2030s." So lets call it 2040....we will be on our 2nd or 3rd AI bubble bursting by then.
These announcements remind me a bit of HS2 was always sold as speed, when it should have been capacity. The nuclear power as part of securing future energy supplies particularly with much more renewables in the mix, absolutely, going to be loads of local AI jobs, bullshit. Even if datacentres are constructed nearby in 2035, they require about 5 mole people to operate.
I had the (tbh fairly obvious) revelation about the nature of the AI bubble this week in the Bay Area. Everywhere you look are billboards advertising AI this and AI that. As numerous as the billboards advertising personal injury attorneys in Houston.
Dig deeper though, and you realise AI is just a new word for tech. These are all largely standard tech companies most of which would have been doing 98% of the same stuff 5 years ago when Gen AI wasn’t a thing, and calling it something else. Back then the fashionable things were cloud, and blockchain. Same billboards but just substitute the word AI.
We do need to invest in tech infrastructure. If that requires us to use the AI word to drum up excitement then fair enough.
You find me a blockchain solution that can go to an API docs site, interpret it, write an API call, write a lambda function and push the output into S3 then add the new S3 folder to the warehousing script and I'll accept your comparison.
Previously a custom pipeline would take a data engineer 2-3 days to code, test and merge. Now it's half a day to review, test and merge. LLMs are the real deal, but their success rates will depend hugely on what kind of jobs they are being applied to. Anyone working a desk job in front of a monitor should start making plans to not have the same career in five years.
Keen to hear more anecdotes like this. Ive heard Claude is the best coding AI assistant.
There was that paper out which suggested it actually takes people longer to fix/check the code and so ai is actually killing productivity without people realising.
I guess the key test will be if people start letting coders go or stop hiring.
Speaking seriously, AI really kicks in when it comes to help me code in languages which I don't have a depth of experience in. I don't have an AI account but I use the one that my employer provides (CoPilot) or are free (Perplexity.ai). Although I am keen to hear of the experience of others, I am reluctant to use AIs that need to be paid for and/or require an account.
You are missing out if you are only using CoPilot or free tiers. The models behind the paywall from Google, OpenAI and Claude as significantly better. You don't need the $200 a month tiers though.
There are of course ones that are reasonably capable that are open weights and run locally (with a good mahcine). But Claude is miles ahead of them in terms of coding ability.
Google AI Premium plan. Cost: $19.99 per month
Google AI Ultra plan. Cost: $249.99 per month
Open AI plan: priced per token, not per month
Claude AI Pro plan. Cost: $20 per month
Claude AI Max plan. Cost: "from" $100 per month
The lower paid tier is affordable, the one above that is not something I would stretch to without a very good reason. As of this moment, Claude AI Pro is unnecessary but I will genuinely bear it in mind. Which languages do you use it to code in?
Not sure why people arent just using Perplexity it drags all this into a single app and seem to be multiple opportunities for a free year of usage.
The range of the Labour / Green polling numbers is the interesting bit across all the pollsters. Some Labour aren't doing that bad all things considered, others they are in danger of single digits if the budget goes badly.
"If the Budget goes badly" - it seems very likely it will go badly.
Putting up taxes is always unpopular - but the normal excuse is obviously we didn't have a choice, position is much worse than we thought etc.
But this time, the Government is going to choose to abolish the 2 child benefit cap.
However keeping the 2 child benefit cap is massively popular - Support 60%, Oppose 24%, Don't Know 16%.
Now very few journalists have cottoned on to this - but Times Radio picked up on it yesterday. And everyone is going to pick up on it very quickly on Budget Day.
Got to say, announcing changes like that alongside massive tax rises is going to send their polling even further into the basement.
Yes it’s probably needed to keep Labour MPs happy but they have a majority of 169, allow thr 50 or so that make up the awkward squad to leave
Sometimes you should make choices because they are the right thing to do. Removing the two children cap would take about half a million children out of poverty according to the Institute of Fiscal Studies. It would mean half a million children's lives transformed. It would cost around £3 billion a year, not a trivial cost but good value in the overall scheme. For comparison winter fuel payments cost a similar amount.
A general complaint I have against this government is they don't make choices on their own merits, because they think they are the right choice. I would respect them more even if I disagreed with some of those choices.
...and the thing about not making choices on their merits or having consistent guiding principles is that people are less inclined to believe you ever do do something on principle. Take this one: are the government planning to scrap the two child limit because they think it's important to tackle child poverty, or are they merely doing it because they don't think they could control their parliamentary party sufficiently to hold to the existing policy?
See Dave, TMexPM, even Boris on the long march to the Brexit arrangements we ended up with.
Megyn Kelly: "I know somebody very close to this case…Jeffrey Epstein, in this person's view, was not a pedophile…He was into the barely legal type, like he liked 15 year old girls…He wasn't into like 8 year olds…There's a difference between a 15 year old and a 5 year old."
Not really. The word peadophile is often wrongly used. They're not the same thing. Even the thing that has brought Prince Andrew down was about a 17yr old, totally legal. Of course if you want to raise the age of consent, then advocate for doing so.
She was paid. Prostitution of a minor is not legal.
The range of the Labour / Green polling numbers is the interesting bit across all the pollsters. Some Labour aren't doing that bad all things considered, others they are in danger of single digits if the budget goes badly.
"If the Budget goes badly" - it seems very likely it will go badly.
Putting up taxes is always unpopular - but the normal excuse is obviously we didn't have a choice, position is much worse than we thought etc.
But this time, the Government is going to choose to abolish the 2 child benefit cap.
However keeping the 2 child benefit cap is massively popular - Support 60%, Oppose 24%, Don't Know 16%.
Now very few journalists have cottoned on to this - but Times Radio picked up on it yesterday. And everyone is going to pick up on it very quickly on Budget Day.
Got to say, announcing changes like that alongside massive tax rises is going to send their polling even further into the basement.
Yes it’s probably needed to keep Labour MPs happy but they have a majority of 169, allow thr 50 or so that make up the awkward squad to leave
Sometimes you should make choices because they are the right thing to do. Removing the two children cap would take about half a million children out of poverty according to the Institute of Fiscal Studies. It would mean half a million children's lives transformed. It would cost around £3 billion a year, not a trivial cost but good value in the overall scheme. For comparison winter fuel payments cost a similar amount.
A general complaint I have against this government is they don't make choices on their own merits, because they think they are the right choice. I would respect them more even if I disagreed with some of those choices.
And even if you disapprove of "people having more children than they can afford", even if you ignore the possibility that families' circumstances can change over fifteen years...
is it really right to harm children who happen to be born into a family that is insufficiently prudent/lucky?
Really?
Sometimes the wisdom of crowds elides into the cruelty of mobs. I've got sympathy for the need to balance our finances, but the two child cap was always the wrong way to do it, and largely about signalling virtue to curtain-twichers.
There is an issue here though. Essentially people who decide they can only afford 1 or 2 kids are being ordered to pay more tax so that others can afford 3 or more kids. It is unsurprising that grates with a significant minority.
I think a decreasing phased approach is far better than either a strict cut off at 2, or applying it without any cap. I wouldn't be surprised if that is what Labour go for. I also wouldn't be particularly surprised if that pissed off both sides of the debate and Labour made no coherent defence of such a policy.
It's hard to imagine anybody pays $200 a month for autocomplete but I guess that's how hype bubbles work...
The scary bit is $200/month is not enough for the likes of OpenAI to make a profit.
Google ended up designing its own value engineered hardware to cut costs. OpenAI might have to go the same way - with all the implications for Nvidia that would entail.
Google started TPU development when they estimated that early "AI" applications — mainly things like recommendation systems and speech recognition, and some image classification/matching — would require them to double their server fleet to meet the anticipated demand.
People sometimes compare Google TPUs to GPUs and other accerlerators, and then declare that Google's TPUs are inferior. But Google doesn't design their TPUs to win machine learning benchmarks, they target Google's key workloads, and they can make domain specific optimisations that an off-the-shelf acclerator might lack entirely. Judging by the many generations of hardware Google has now produced and the huge investment in hardware deployed it must work for them, even if from the outside people still wonder why.
OpenAI are working with Broadcom on acclerators now, so they are on the same path that Google's been treading for about a decade now.
The range of the Labour / Green polling numbers is the interesting bit across all the pollsters. Some Labour aren't doing that bad all things considered, others they are in danger of single digits if the budget goes badly.
"If the Budget goes badly" - it seems very likely it will go badly.
Putting up taxes is always unpopular - but the normal excuse is obviously we didn't have a choice, position is much worse than we thought etc.
But this time, the Government is going to choose to abolish the 2 child benefit cap.
However keeping the 2 child benefit cap is massively popular - Support 60%, Oppose 24%, Don't Know 16%.
Now very few journalists have cottoned on to this - but Times Radio picked up on it yesterday. And everyone is going to pick up on it very quickly on Budget Day.
Got to say, announcing changes like that alongside massive tax rises is going to send their polling even further into the basement.
Yes it’s probably needed to keep Labour MPs happy but they have a majority of 169, allow thr 50 or so that make up the awkward squad to leave
Sometimes you should make choices because they are the right thing to do. Removing the two children cap would take about half a million children out of poverty according to the Institute of Fiscal Studies. It would mean half a million children's lives transformed. It would cost around £3 billion a year, not a trivial cost but good value in the overall scheme. For comparison winter fuel payments cost a similar amount.
A general complaint I have against this government is they don't make choices on their own merits, because they think they are the right choice. I would respect them more even if I disagreed with some of those choices.
And even if you disapprove of "people having more children than they can afford", even if you ignore the possibility that families' circumstances can change over fifteen years...
is it really right to harm children who happen to be born into a family that is insufficiently prudent/lucky?
Really?
Sometimes the wisdom of crowds elides into the cruelty of mobs. I've got sympathy for the need to balance our finances, but the two child cap was always the wrong way to do it, and largely about signalling virtue to curtain-twichers.
There is an issue here though. Essentially people who decide they can only afford 1 or 2 kids are being ordered to pay more tax so that others can afford 3 or more kids. It is unsurprising that grates with a significant minority.
I think a decreasing phased approach is far better than either a strict cut off at 2, or applying it without any cap. I wouldn't be surprised if that is what Labour go for. I also wouldn't be particularly surprised if that pissed off both sides of the debate and Labour made no coherent defence of such a policy.
Add to that, that its migrant groups who have vastly disproportionally larger families. It's a calamity waiting to happen.
The range of the Labour / Green polling numbers is the interesting bit across all the pollsters. Some Labour aren't doing that bad all things considered, others they are in danger of single digits if the budget goes badly.
"If the Budget goes badly" - it seems very likely it will go badly.
Putting up taxes is always unpopular - but the normal excuse is obviously we didn't have a choice, position is much worse than we thought etc.
But this time, the Government is going to choose to abolish the 2 child benefit cap.
However keeping the 2 child benefit cap is massively popular - Support 60%, Oppose 24%, Don't Know 16%.
Now very few journalists have cottoned on to this - but Times Radio picked up on it yesterday. And everyone is going to pick up on it very quickly on Budget Day.
Got to say, announcing changes like that alongside massive tax rises is going to send their polling even further into the basement.
Yes it’s probably needed to keep Labour MPs happy but they have a majority of 169, allow thr 50 or so that make up the awkward squad to leave
Sometimes you should make choices because they are the right thing to do. Removing the two children cap would take about half a million children out of poverty according to the Institute of Fiscal Studies. It would mean half a million children's lives transformed. It would cost around £3 billion a year, not a trivial cost but good value in the overall scheme. For comparison winter fuel payments cost a similar amount.
A general complaint I have against this government is they don't make choices on their own merits, because they think they are the right choice. I would respect them more even if I disagreed with some of those choices.
And even if you disapprove of "people having more children than they can afford", even if you ignore the possibility that families' circumstances can change over fifteen years...
is it really right to harm children who happen to be born into a family that is insufficiently prudent/lucky?
Really?
Sometimes the wisdom of crowds elides into the cruelty of mobs. I've got sympathy for the need to balance our finances, but the two child cap was always the wrong way to do it, and largely about signalling virtue to curtain-twichers.
It was another example of Osborne being good at politics but bad at governance.
If you see him as exactly the same as Reform and Nigel, same gig, just a different audience.
Probably more of a overlap in audience than either would like to admit.
"Some scapegoat should lose out so I should gain" tends to be a winning formula, and the only difference between Zak and Nigel is who they plan to make the scapegoat.
It's hard to imagine anybody pays $200 a month for autocomplete but I guess that's how hype bubbles work...
The scary bit is $200/month is not enough for the likes of OpenAI to make a profit.
Google ended up designing its own value engineered hardware to cut costs. OpenAI might have to go the same way - with all the implications for Nvidia that would entail.
Google started TPU development when they estimated that early "AI" applications — mainly things like recommendation systems and speech recognition, and some image classification/matching — would require them to double their server fleet to meet the anticipated demand.
People sometimes compare Google TPUs to GPUs and other accerlerators, and then declare that Google's TPUs are inferior. But Google doesn't design their TPUs to win machine learning benchmarks, they target Google's key workloads, and they can make domain specific optimisations that an off-the-shelf acclerator might lack entirely. Judging by the many generations of hardware Google has now produced and the huge investment in hardware deployed it must work for them, even if from the outside people still wonder why.
OpenAI are working with Broadcom on acclerators now, so they are on the same path that Google's been treading for about a decade now.
On top of TPUs being used across their tech stack, on the ML front, they built their a ML framework from the ground up that worked with TPUs, called JAX, which at the time people didn't really understand what the point was when they had TensorFlow and there is the defacto standard PyTorch that came out of Meta.
However, JAX has a number of advantages over PyTorch but for things like LLMs, the genius is you can write code for one device, change 1-2 lines of code and instantly deploy it to 1000s of TPUs / GPUs. It is now the standard ML framework for training LLMs and other models that require training across masses of GPUs.
Although JAX is open source, internally Google / Deepmind have a load of JAX tools that they won't share.
It's hard to imagine anybody pays $200 a month for autocomplete but I guess that's how hype bubbles work...
The scary bit is $200/month is not enough for the likes of OpenAI to make a profit.
Google ended up designing its own value engineered hardware to cut costs. OpenAI might have to go the same way - with all the implications for Nvidia that would entail.
Google has the advantage of already possessing semiconductor design teams, OpenAI would need to start from scratch and that's not easy. Their deal with AMD suggests they will try to play AMD and NVidia off against each other.
But in the short to medium term all the AI providers are going to have to burn even more money, given how the costs of DRAM and flash memory have started to skyrocket.
Google works with companies like Marvell, Broadcom, Intel, MediaTek and probably others to design their TPUs, DPUs, VCUs etc. Farming out the backend work, and then manufacturing, test, and packaging.
Looks like the cycle-to-work scheme is heading to the bin. Meanwhile the cuts to fuel duty have cost us over £100 billion.
Surely you appreciate that if that £100bn had been extracted from the economy in fuel duty we would have had a recession so deep we might not have found the bottom of it? The idea is to pluck the goose with the minimum amount of hissing, not wrench its bloodied head off.
(My bold)
I wanted to pick this up not to have a go at DavidL, whom I respect, but because I think it highlights a common misconception.
Whether you think £100bn in additional fuel duty would be the right thing to do or not, it most certainly would not be 'extracted from the economy' unless it were used entirely to reduce the deficit (which would have its own but different benefits).
In fact all the available evidence suggests that every £1 of taxation results in additional spending of £1.05* and that spending gets spent... in the economy.
More prosaically, spending targeted at those just struggling to get by gets pumped straight back into the economy whereas taxation left with the wealthy often gets pumped offshore, or inflates property values which add nothing to real growth.
I know many of you will say additional fuel duty will hit the poorest too (not entirely true, lots don't run cars but instead use public transport) but even to the extent that it is true, it's extracting and supplying to the same sector, not purely 'extracting'.
My overall point is that taxation is not 'extracted' from the economy and won't in itself lead to a recession.
(*Since spending seems to run at 105% of taxation.)
Megyn Kelly: "I know somebody very close to this case…Jeffrey Epstein, in this person's view, was not a pedophile…He was into the barely legal type, like he liked 15 year old girls…He wasn't into like 8 year olds…There's a difference between a 15 year old and a 5 year old."
Not really. The word peadophile is often wrongly used. They're not the same thing. Even the thing that has brought Prince Andrew down was about a 17yr old, totally legal. Of course if you want to raise the age of consent, then advocate for doing so.
Its only legal for regular sex between consenting individuals.
Looks like the cycle-to-work scheme is heading to the bin. Meanwhile the cuts to fuel duty have cost us over £100 billion.
Surely you appreciate that if that £100bn had been extracted from the economy in fuel duty we would have had a recession so deep we might not have found the bottom of it? The idea is to pluck the goose with the minimum amount of hissing, not wrench its bloodied head off.
(My bold)
I wanted to pick this up not to have a go at DavidL, whom I respect, but because I think it highlights a common misconception.
Whether you think £100bn in additional fuel duty would be the right thing to do or not, it most certainly would not be 'extracted from the economy' unless it were used entirely to reduce the deficit (which would have its own but different benefits).
In fact all the available evidence suggests that every £1 of taxation results in additional spending of £1.05* and that spending gets spent... in the economy.
More prosaically, spending targeted at those just struggling to get by gets pumped straight back into the economy whereas taxation left with the wealthy often gets pumped offshore, or inflates property values which add nothing to real growth.
I know many of you will say additional fuel duty will hit the poorest too (not entirely true, lots don't run cars but instead use public transport) but even to the extent that it is true, it's extracting and supplying to the same sector, not purely 'extracting'.
My overall point is that taxation is not 'extracted' from the economy and won't in itself lead to a recession.
(*Since spending seems to run at 105% of taxation.)
So we could increase the spending power of taxation by borrowing even more massively?
If you see him as exactly the same as Reform and Nigel, same gig, just a different audience.
Probably more of a overlap in audience than either would like to admit.
"Some scapegoat should lose out so I should gain" tends to be a winning formula, and the only difference between Zak and Nigel is who they plan to make the scapegoat.
Same could be said for those that agitated for Communism and Fascism..
Looks like the cycle-to-work scheme is heading to the bin. Meanwhile the cuts to fuel duty have cost us over £100 billion.
Surely you appreciate that if that £100bn had been extracted from the economy in fuel duty we would have had a recession so deep we might not have found the bottom of it? The idea is to pluck the goose with the minimum amount of hissing, not wrench its bloodied head off.
(My bold)
I wanted to pick this up not to have a go at DavidL, whom I respect, but because I think it highlights a common misconception.
Whether you think £100bn in additional fuel duty would be the right thing to do or not, it most certainly would not be 'extracted from the economy' unless it were used entirely to reduce the deficit (which would have its own but different benefits).
In fact all the available evidence suggests that every £1 of taxation results in additional spending of £1.05* and that spending gets spent... in the economy.
More prosaically, spending targeted at those just struggling to get by gets pumped straight back into the economy whereas taxation left with the wealthy often gets pumped offshore, or inflates property values which add nothing to real growth.
I know many of you will say additional fuel duty will hit the poorest too (not entirely true, lots don't run cars but instead use public transport) but even to the extent that it is true, it's extracting and supplying to the same sector, not purely 'extracting'.
My overall point is that taxation is not 'extracted' from the economy and won't in itself lead to a recession.
(*Since spending seems to run at 105% of taxation.)
So we could increase the spending power of taxation by borrowing even more massively?
Hah that was meant to be slightly tongue-in-cheek. Though since government after government have been prepared to borrow at c.5% of taxation the rule does kind of stand the test of history.
However, I personally would much prefer we were reducing debt. But even if taxation were 5% more than spending £100bn in extra fuel duty would not be 'extracted from the economy' - £95bn of it would be pumped straight back in.
Megyn Kelly: "I know somebody very close to this case…Jeffrey Epstein, in this person's view, was not a pedophile…He was into the barely legal type, like he liked 15 year old girls…He wasn't into like 8 year olds…There's a difference between a 15 year old and a 5 year old."
Not really. The word peadophile is often wrongly used. They're not the same thing. Even the thing that has brought Prince Andrew down was about a 17yr old, totally legal. Of course if you want to raise the age of consent, then advocate for doing so.
Its only legal for regular sex between consenting individuals.
If money is involved, then 18 is the age.
Illegal.
Why does it need to be be regular - I don't see why the number of times should make any difference.
Looks like the cycle-to-work scheme is heading to the bin. Meanwhile the cuts to fuel duty have cost us over £100 billion.
Surely you appreciate that if that £100bn had been extracted from the economy in fuel duty we would have had a recession so deep we might not have found the bottom of it? The idea is to pluck the goose with the minimum amount of hissing, not wrench its bloodied head off.
(My bold)
I wanted to pick this up not to have a go at DavidL, whom I respect, but because I think it highlights a common misconception.
Whether you think £100bn in additional fuel duty would be the right thing to do or not, it most certainly would not be 'extracted from the economy' unless it were used entirely to reduce the deficit (which would have its own but different benefits).
In fact all the available evidence suggests that every £1 of taxation results in additional spending of £1.05* and that spending gets spent... in the economy.
More prosaically, spending targeted at those just struggling to get by gets pumped straight back into the economy whereas taxation left with the wealthy often gets pumped offshore, or inflates property values which add nothing to real growth.
I know many of you will say additional fuel duty will hit the poorest too (not entirely true, lots don't run cars but instead use public transport) but even to the extent that it is true, it's extracting and supplying to the same sector, not purely 'extracting'.
My overall point is that taxation is not 'extracted' from the economy and won't in itself lead to a recession.
(*Since spending seems to run at 105% of taxation.)
Two things. Firstly, the reason that spending is 105% of taxation is because we run deficits and overspend. That is not a good thing. Secondly, there is an opportunity cost in additional taxation because it reduces non government demand. It is entirely possible that that £100bn would have increased GDP more and thereby increased the future taxation base.
My view is that all forms of taxation have negative aspects as well as the positive of funding essential services. We need to choose taxes that minimise those negative aspects. Fuel duty, which directly impacts on the cost of delivery of goods, the cost of getting to work, the cost of going out is particularly adverse. If you are an eco loon like Miliband you might believe those costs are worth it. I don't.
I have to say, if there's a single British person in the entire history of humanity that could wear any darn medal he chooses, it was Mr Churchill.
He could and he did.
It's quite a fun video. It's a Mark Felton, well observed and only slightly overblown.
Six WW2 campaign medals with no entitlement. He also got his Pilot's Wings never having soloed.
It's a bit BoJo.
I think we can allow Churchill some honorary medals. The issue would come if they were awarded by the PM himself; if they were awarded by independent military committees who had licence to do so, then surely that's fine?
Megyn Kelly: "I know somebody very close to this case…Jeffrey Epstein, in this person's view, was not a pedophile…He was into the barely legal type, like he liked 15 year old girls…He wasn't into like 8 year olds…There's a difference between a 15 year old and a 5 year old."
Not really. The word peadophile is often wrongly used. They're not the same thing. Even the thing that has brought Prince Andrew down was about a 17yr old, totally legal. Of course if you want to raise the age of consent, then advocate for doing so.
Its only legal for regular sex between consenting individuals.
If money is involved, then 18 is the age.
Illegal.
Why does it need to be be regular - I don't see why the number of times should make any difference.
I think Bart means normal sex, as in not paid-for sex, with his use of the word regular.
Looks like the cycle-to-work scheme is heading to the bin. Meanwhile the cuts to fuel duty have cost us over £100 billion.
Surely you appreciate that if that £100bn had been extracted from the economy in fuel duty we would have had a recession so deep we might not have found the bottom of it? The idea is to pluck the goose with the minimum amount of hissing, not wrench its bloodied head off.
(My bold)
I wanted to pick this up not to have a go at DavidL, whom I respect, but because I think it highlights a common misconception.
Whether you think £100bn in additional fuel duty would be the right thing to do or not, it most certainly would not be 'extracted from the economy' unless it were used entirely to reduce the deficit (which would have its own but different benefits).
In fact all the available evidence suggests that every £1 of taxation results in additional spending of £1.05* and that spending gets spent... in the economy.
More prosaically, spending targeted at those just struggling to get by gets pumped straight back into the economy whereas taxation left with the wealthy often gets pumped offshore, or inflates property values which add nothing to real growth.
I know many of you will say additional fuel duty will hit the poorest too (not entirely true, lots don't run cars but instead use public transport) but even to the extent that it is true, it's extracting and supplying to the same sector, not purely 'extracting'.
My overall point is that taxation is not 'extracted' from the economy and won't in itself lead to a recession.
(*Since spending seems to run at 105% of taxation.)
The top income quintile drive 3x as much as the bottom. The poorest people in the UK typically get around by bus or by foot.
Fuel duty is potentially economically damaging because it is a cost on people and goods moving around. However, something needs to be taxed, and economists typically put it towards the top of the list because it's 1) simple 2) not as distortive as other taxes (also why VAT is typically seen as a "good" tax). It also happens to be a Pigou tax in some cases, particularly in urban areas.
I'm not a fan of the constant cuts because that £100 billion has to be found elsewhere - NICs? Often these taxes are worse. I also think it's completely mad to cut it while public transport costs go up AND the government is trying to encourage a switch to EVs.
The range of the Labour / Green polling numbers is the interesting bit across all the pollsters. Some Labour aren't doing that bad all things considered, others they are in danger of single digits if the budget goes badly.
"If the Budget goes badly" - it seems very likely it will go badly.
Putting up taxes is always unpopular - but the normal excuse is obviously we didn't have a choice, position is much worse than we thought etc.
But this time, the Government is going to choose to abolish the 2 child benefit cap.
However keeping the 2 child benefit cap is massively popular - Support 60%, Oppose 24%, Don't Know 16%.
Now very few journalists have cottoned on to this - but Times Radio picked up on it yesterday. And everyone is going to pick up on it very quickly on Budget Day.
Got to say, announcing changes like that alongside massive tax rises is going to send their polling even further into the basement.
Yes it’s probably needed to keep Labour MPs happy but they have a majority of 169, allow thr 50 or so that make up the awkward squad to leave
One thing you read time and time again about their actions last year was this idea that they raised NI to afford the payoffs to the public sector. That’s not been a good narrative for them.
If the narrative this year takes hold that they’re raising taxes on people to pay for more welfare/benefits (as seems likely), then I agree - it’s going to go down terribly.
As I've pointed out multiple times - the fix last year was to increase income tax by 2% or 3%, keep winter fuel allowance as a bribe for OAPs and just state that Hunt's NI tax cuts were unaffordable as he well knew...
The range of the Labour / Green polling numbers is the interesting bit across all the pollsters. Some Labour aren't doing that bad all things considered, others they are in danger of single digits if the budget goes badly.
"If the Budget goes badly" - it seems very likely it will go badly.
Putting up taxes is always unpopular - but the normal excuse is obviously we didn't have a choice, position is much worse than we thought etc.
But this time, the Government is going to choose to abolish the 2 child benefit cap.
However keeping the 2 child benefit cap is massively popular - Support 60%, Oppose 24%, Don't Know 16%.
Now very few journalists have cottoned on to this - but Times Radio picked up on it yesterday. And everyone is going to pick up on it very quickly on Budget Day.
Got to say, announcing changes like that alongside massive tax rises is going to send their polling even further into the basement.
Yes it’s probably needed to keep Labour MPs happy but they have a majority of 169, allow thr 50 or so that make up the awkward squad to leave
Sometimes you should make choices because they are the right thing to do. Removing the two children cap would take about half a million children out of poverty according to the Institute of Fiscal Studies. It would mean half a million children's lives transformed. It would cost around £3 billion a year, not a trivial cost but good value in the overall scheme. For comparison winter fuel payments cost a similar amount.
A general complaint I have against this government is they don't make choices on their own merits, because they think they are the right choice. I would respect them more even if I disagreed with some of those choices.
How do you get from moving kids from one side of an arbitrary line to the other side to “transforming their lives”?
Labour would probably be better with Streeting and has the right skills to be a successful PM: he's shameless, ruthless, and somewhat in touch with reality.
Megyn Kelly: "I know somebody very close to this case…Jeffrey Epstein, in this person's view, was not a pedophile…He was into the barely legal type, like he liked 15 year old girls…He wasn't into like 8 year olds…There's a difference between a 15 year old and a 5 year old."
Not really. The word peadophile is often wrongly used. They're not the same thing. Even the thing that has brought Prince Andrew down was about a 17yr old, totally legal. Of course if you want to raise the age of consent, then advocate for doing so.
Sex with a trafficked 17 year old is definitely illegal.
Good afternoon @Barnsian and @FrancisUrquhart. Thank you for your recommendations regarding AI experts. @Barnesian nominated Geoffrey Hinton and @FrancisUrquhart nominated Andrej Karpathy. I have no idea which one is better but I look forward to listening to their lectures, links to which are below.
Looks like the cycle-to-work scheme is heading to the bin. Meanwhile the cuts to fuel duty have cost us over £100 billion.
Surely you appreciate that if that £100bn had been extracted from the economy in fuel duty we would have had a recession so deep we might not have found the bottom of it? The idea is to pluck the goose with the minimum amount of hissing, not wrench its bloodied head off.
(My bold)
I wanted to pick this up not to have a go at DavidL, whom I respect, but because I think it highlights a common misconception.
Whether you think £100bn in additional fuel duty would be the right thing to do or not, it most certainly would not be 'extracted from the economy' unless it were used entirely to reduce the deficit (which would have its own but different benefits).
In fact all the available evidence suggests that every £1 of taxation results in additional spending of £1.05* and that spending gets spent... in the economy.
More prosaically, spending targeted at those just struggling to get by gets pumped straight back into the economy whereas taxation left with the wealthy often gets pumped offshore, or inflates property values which add nothing to real growth.
I know many of you will say additional fuel duty will hit the poorest too (not entirely true, lots don't run cars but instead use public transport) but even to the extent that it is true, it's extracting and supplying to the same sector, not purely 'extracting'.
My overall point is that taxation is not 'extracted' from the economy and won't in itself lead to a recession.
(*Since spending seems to run at 105% of taxation.)
Two things. Firstly, the reason that spending is 105% of taxation is because we run deficits and overspend. That is not a good thing. Secondly, there is an opportunity cost in additional taxation because it reduces non government demand. It is entirely possible that that £100bn would have increased GDP more and thereby increased the future taxation base.
My view is that all forms of taxation have negative aspects as well as the positive of funding essential services. We need to choose taxes that minimise those negative aspects. Fuel duty, which directly impacts on the cost of delivery of goods, the cost of getting to work, the cost of going out is particularly adverse. If you are an eco loon like Miliband you might believe those costs are worth it. I don't.
My point is the money would go straight back into the economy as spending thus it is not 'extracted from the economy'. I hope you can at least see that.
I fully accept that you might think it would be better left as cheaper fuel rather than say, more nurses or increased Universal Credit but those latter would undoubtedly cycle the money straight into more spending, more demand. Whereas leaving me with more money because I'm paying less to fill up my car means I will likely save a bit more, probably in my global stocks fund, which won't do much for the UK economy.
"We had some chat on here yesterday about why our judges are respected. This judgment is long, very long, but there is the same clarity of thought and reasoning in it that we saw in the trans case. Lord Reed is about to retire. His ability to explain complicated things reasonably, clearly and straightforwardly will be sadly missed."
I hesitate to correct @DavidL and I am sure Lord Reed will be sadly missed. But the judgment in the For Women Scotland case (it was about women's rights and the definition of women - not about trans rights and their definition. Honestly you'd think women were wearing a Harry Potter Invisibility Cloak the way men find it impossible to see or hear us or even name us in a case brought and won by women about the rights of women) was written by the two women judges - Lady Simler and Lady Rose and Lord Hodge, who will be retiring shortly.
Megyn Kelly: "I know somebody very close to this case…Jeffrey Epstein, in this person's view, was not a pedophile…He was into the barely legal type, like he liked 15 year old girls…He wasn't into like 8 year olds…There's a difference between a 15 year old and a 5 year old."
Not really. The word peadophile is often wrongly used. They're not the same thing. Even the thing that has brought Prince Andrew down was about a 17yr old, totally legal. Of course if you want to raise the age of consent, then advocate for doing so.
Its only legal for regular sex between consenting individuals.
If money is involved, then 18 is the age.
Illegal.
Why does it need to be be regular - I don't see why the number of times should make any difference.
I think Bart means normal sex, as in not paid-for sex, with his use of the word regular.
I have to say, if there's a single British person in the entire history of humanity that could wear any darn medal he chooses, it was Mr Churchill.
He could and he did.
It's quite a fun video. It's a Mark Felton, well observed and only slightly overblown.
Six WW2 campaign medals with no entitlement. He also got his Pilot's Wings never having soloed.
It's a bit BoJo.
I think we can allow Churchill some honorary medals. The issue would come if they were awarded by the PM himself; if they were awarded by independent military committees who had licence to do so, then surely that's fine?
More likely: "Please, Your Majesty, would you tell them to give me...".
The King did the same thing, but he would have awarded them to himself. QEII and KCIII did not.
Yes, replacing Starmer is not a panacea for Labour. Note more 2024 Labour and LD voters want him to remain Labour leader than stand down. Until that changes he likely stays. Most Conservative and Reform voters want him to stand down but Labour is highly unlikely to win them if they voted Conservative or Reform even when Labour won a landslide nationally. Burnham might give Labour a small bounce but he is not even an MP
Megyn Kelly: "I know somebody very close to this case…Jeffrey Epstein, in this person's view, was not a pedophile…He was into the barely legal type, like he liked 15 year old girls…He wasn't into like 8 year olds…There's a difference between a 15 year old and a 5 year old."
Not really. The word peadophile is often wrongly used. They're not the same thing. Even the thing that has brought Prince Andrew down was about a 17yr old, totally legal. Of course if you want to raise the age of consent, then advocate for doing so.
Its only legal for regular sex between consenting individuals.
If money is involved, then 18 is the age.
Illegal.
Even if he didn’t know money was involved? I can quite believe Andrew M-W believing he was irresistible to her
Megyn Kelly: "I know somebody very close to this case…Jeffrey Epstein, in this person's view, was not a pedophile…He was into the barely legal type, like he liked 15 year old girls…He wasn't into like 8 year olds…There's a difference between a 15 year old and a 5 year old."
Not really. The word peadophile is often wrongly used. They're not the same thing. Even the thing that has brought Prince Andrew down was about a 17yr old, totally legal. Of course if you want to raise the age of consent, then advocate for doing so.
Its only legal for regular sex between consenting individuals.
If money is involved, then 18 is the age.
Illegal.
Why does it need to be be regular - I don't see why the number of times should make any difference.
I think Bart means normal sex, as in not paid-for sex, with his use of the word regular.
I suspect Lucky knew that.
He doesn't seem to know that regular doesn't mean frequent
Megyn Kelly: "I know somebody very close to this case…Jeffrey Epstein, in this person's view, was not a pedophile…He was into the barely legal type, like he liked 15 year old girls…He wasn't into like 8 year olds…There's a difference between a 15 year old and a 5 year old."
Not really. The word peadophile is often wrongly used. They're not the same thing. Even the thing that has brought Prince Andrew down was about a 17yr old, totally legal. Of course if you want to raise the age of consent, then advocate for doing so.
Its only legal for regular sex between consenting individuals.
If money is involved, then 18 is the age.
Illegal.
Even if he didn’t know money was involved? I can quite believe Andrew M-W believing he was irresistible to her
If Epstein was involved money will be there somewhere - even if it was just an investment in his "funds"
Megyn Kelly: "I know somebody very close to this case…Jeffrey Epstein, in this person's view, was not a pedophile…He was into the barely legal type, like he liked 15 year old girls…He wasn't into like 8 year olds…There's a difference between a 15 year old and a 5 year old."
Not really. The word peadophile is often wrongly used. They're not the same thing. Even the thing that has brought Prince Andrew down was about a 17yr old, totally legal. Of course if you want to raise the age of consent, then advocate for doing so.
Its only legal for regular sex between consenting individuals.
If money is involved, then 18 is the age.
Illegal.
Why does it need to be be regular - I don't see why the number of times should make any difference.
I think Bart means normal sex, as in not paid-for sex, with his use of the word regular.
I suspect Lucky knew that.
He doesn't seem to know that regular doesn't mean frequent
My father used to be a regular churchgoer. He went every Christmas Eve
Megyn Kelly: "I know somebody very close to this case…Jeffrey Epstein, in this person's view, was not a pedophile…He was into the barely legal type, like he liked 15 year old girls…He wasn't into like 8 year olds…There's a difference between a 15 year old and a 5 year old."
Not really. The word peadophile is often wrongly used. They're not the same thing. Even the thing that has brought Prince Andrew down was about a 17yr old, totally legal. Of course if you want to raise the age of consent, then advocate for doing so.
Its only legal for regular sex between consenting individuals.
If money is involved, then 18 is the age.
Illegal.
Even if he didn’t know money was involved? I can quite believe Andrew M-W believing he was irresistible to her
If Epstein was involved money will be there somewhere - even if it was just an investment in his "funds"
I believe Guiffre was paid $15k a time.
But my question was if Andrew M-W didn’t *know* that or suspect it, can he be held guilty?
Megyn Kelly: "I know somebody very close to this case…Jeffrey Epstein, in this person's view, was not a pedophile…He was into the barely legal type, like he liked 15 year old girls…He wasn't into like 8 year olds…There's a difference between a 15 year old and a 5 year old."
Not really. The word peadophile is often wrongly used. They're not the same thing. Even the thing that has brought Prince Andrew down was about a 17yr old, totally legal. Of course if you want to raise the age of consent, then advocate for doing so.
Its only legal for regular sex between consenting individuals.
If money is involved, then 18 is the age.
Illegal.
Even if he didn’t know money was involved? I can quite believe Andrew M-W believing he was irresistible to her
If Epstein was involved money will be there somewhere - even if it was just an investment in his "funds"
I believe Guiffre was paid $15k a time.
But my question was if Andrew M-W didn’t *know* that or suspect it, can he be held guilty?
Megyn Kelly: "I know somebody very close to this case…Jeffrey Epstein, in this person's view, was not a pedophile…He was into the barely legal type, like he liked 15 year old girls…He wasn't into like 8 year olds…There's a difference between a 15 year old and a 5 year old."
Not really. The word peadophile is often wrongly used. They're not the same thing. Even the thing that has brought Prince Andrew down was about a 17yr old, totally legal. Of course if you want to raise the age of consent, then advocate for doing so.
Its only legal for regular sex between consenting individuals.
If money is involved, then 18 is the age.
Illegal.
Even if he didn’t know money was involved? I can quite believe Andrew M-W believing he was irresistible to her
If Epstein was involved money will be there somewhere - even if it was just an investment in his "funds"
I believe Guiffre was paid $15k a time.
But my question was if Andrew M-W didn’t *know* that or suspect it, can he be held guilty?
Wouldn't that require him to be massively stupid and entitled and driven by the urgings of his willy...
Looks like the cycle-to-work scheme is heading to the bin. Meanwhile the cuts to fuel duty have cost us over £100 billion.
Surely you appreciate that if that £100bn had been extracted from the economy in fuel duty we would have had a recession so deep we might not have found the bottom of it? The idea is to pluck the goose with the minimum amount of hissing, not wrench its bloodied head off.
(My bold)
I wanted to pick this up not to have a go at DavidL, whom I respect, but because I think it highlights a common misconception.
Whether you think £100bn in additional fuel duty would be the right thing to do or not, it most certainly would not be 'extracted from the economy' unless it were used entirely to reduce the deficit (which would have its own but different benefits).
In fact all the available evidence suggests that every £1 of taxation results in additional spending of £1.05* and that spending gets spent... in the economy.
More prosaically, spending targeted at those just struggling to get by gets pumped straight back into the economy whereas taxation left with the wealthy often gets pumped offshore, or inflates property values which add nothing to real growth.
I know many of you will say additional fuel duty will hit the poorest too (not entirely true, lots don't run cars but instead use public transport) but even to the extent that it is true, it's extracting and supplying to the same sector, not purely 'extracting'.
My overall point is that taxation is not 'extracted' from the economy and won't in itself lead to a recession.
(*Since spending seems to run at 105% of taxation.)
So we could increase the spending power of taxation by borrowing even more massively?
Well in theory yes. If you can borrowing costs are less than the growth you will engender, borrow away. In practice the amoubt of borrowing which goes on things which generate growth is inconsistent. Borrowing to, for example, pay Mauritius to give British territory to the Chinese is not particularly growth-generating. And borrowing also drives up the cost of borrowing.
Edit: in fairness, AI can be useful in finding stuff - but I never, ever accept what it says without actual verification.
The use in speeding up boilerplate stuff is interesting, though. Sounds more likely.
Ai has uses - the problem is that in its current form it’s probably an $x0bn industry and not the $x000bn it’s being hyped up to be.
Won't somebody think of the airport thriller writers...
The problem could be that decision makers leap on AI, lay off / stop recruiting humans, then when AI doesn't perform devote the resources to fixing AI rather than reemploying humans. AI doesn't have to be better than what is currently done to replace it, it just has to be fashionable.
One thing that I think is definite concern is these LLMs are very good at coding, they are better than a grad straight out of uni. So you don't hire many of them, the senior devs get productivity boost by using them (and not having to "waste" time coaching juniors), all good, oh wait they have left to a different company or are retiring, we don't have any juniors trained up to their skill levels.....its a bit like political parties at the moment.
The West is already doing that with overseas workers. Management really likes the idea of a Indonesian or Malaysian with 2-3 years of experience for less than a new Western grad.
And they wonder why the likes of Farage, Trump, Mamdani, Polanski, Le Pen and Bardella, the AfD, Meloni, One Nation and Melenchon are surging in western polls! AI and imported migrants replacing well paid jobs just leads to Fascism or Socialism
In text messages from 2017, Jeffrey Epstein seemingly represented himself as positioned to pass information from the Trump White House to Bill Gates through an intermediary.
Because the POS wanted to overturn the official result of the 2020 election?
Because they didn't libel him.
And a serious broadcaster resists bring shaken down by a grifter, not just on principle, but because it would give him something of a veto on any of their future news broadcasting or commentary.
Never explain, never apologise. The BBC should simply have ignored Trump's threat or simply have sent a "thank you for your letter the contents of which have been noted" letter in return.
Megyn Kelly: "I know somebody very close to this case…Jeffrey Epstein, in this person's view, was not a pedophile…He was into the barely legal type, like he liked 15 year old girls…He wasn't into like 8 year olds…There's a difference between a 15 year old and a 5 year old."
Not really. The word peadophile is often wrongly used. They're not the same thing. Even the thing that has brought Prince Andrew down was about a 17yr old, totally legal. Of course if you want to raise the age of consent, then advocate for doing so.
Its only legal for regular sex between consenting individuals.
If money is involved, then 18 is the age.
Illegal.
Even if he didn’t know money was involved? I can quite believe Andrew M-W believing he was irresistible to her
"She seemed enraptured by my stories of the Woking Pizza Express"
Good afternoon @Barnsian and @FrancisUrquhart. Thank you for your recommendations regarding AI experts. @Barnesian nominated Geoffrey Hinton and @FrancisUrquhart nominated Andrej Karpathy. I have no idea which one is better but I look forward to listening to their lectures, links to which are below.
Never explain, never apologise. The BBC should simply have ignored Trump's threat or simply have sent a "thank you for your letter the contents of which have been noted" letter in return.
Never explain, never apologise. The BBC should simply have ignored Trump's threat or simply have sent a "thank you for your letter the contents of which have been noted" letter in return.
Good afternoon @Barnsian and @FrancisUrquhart. Thank you for your recommendations regarding AI experts. @Barnesian nominated Geoffrey Hinton and @FrancisUrquhart nominated Andrej Karpathy. I have no idea which one is better but I look forward to listening to their lectures, links to which are below.
Labour would probably be better with Streeting and has the right skills to be a successful PM: he's shameless, ruthless, and somewhat in touch with reality.
I have a degree of sympathy for my MP, Luke Akehurst, all that time and effort put in to save the Labour movement from Corbyn (along with others) and what have they ended up with. A total shambles.
Never explain, never apologise. The BBC should simply have ignored Trump's threat or simply have sent a "thank you for your letter the contents of which have been noted" letter in return.
Much as I dislike Sir Keir, I find Westminster gossip undermining, or potentially bringing down, a PM a bit silly.
That said, if he is replaced, I think there should be a GE. I thought this when the Tories kept swapping PM’s as well. It may be true that we elect governments, not Presidents, but changing leader is a pretty sure sign that what we voted for hasn’t worked. If the party in charge are admitting that, the country should choose the replacement
Much as I dislike Sir Keir, I find Westminster gossip undermining, or potentially bringing down, a PM a bit silly.
That said, if he is replaced, I think there should be a GE. I thought this when the Tories kept swapping PM’s as well. It may be true that we elect governments, not Presidents, but changing leader is a pretty sure sign that what we voted for hasn’t worked. If the party in charge are admitting that, the country should choose the replacement
If that were the case then PMs simply wouldn't resign and parties would hold onto unpopular lame duck PMs for years until the next election.
Much as I dislike Sir Keir, I find Westminster gossip undermining, or potentially bringing down, a PM a bit silly.
That said, if he is replaced, I think there should be a GE. I thought this when the Tories kept swapping PM’s as well. It may be true that we elect governments, not Presidents, but changing leader is a pretty sure sign that what we voted for hasn’t worked. If the party in charge are admitting that, the country should choose the replacement
I agree. There should be a law passed to state that on a change of PM a new general election must be held within 6 months.
I bet Starmer* wishes he'd passed such a law soon after his GE victory.
Smart move from the BBC as you'd expect. Put the ball back into Trump's court and do nothing else (including hopefully taking Katie Razzle off the case)
Comments
I think the government could lose a vote on the 2 child benefit cap quite easily.
My only gripe with this is you need to overlay it with a earnings distribution curve. Median salary is currently £33,000 (including part time earners), so a large majority of the UK earners are taxed at marginal rates of 30%, and this kind of graph overstates the issue. It's for that reason that sorting out the bumps and complications from £50k - £80k are a more pressing issue than, say, the £100k - simply because you have so many more people on that kind of salary.
There is also UC. Figure 5 here for UC claimants: https://ifs.org.uk/publications/universal-credit-incomes-incentives-and-remaining-roll-out. It would be a good achievement if the Treasury could hard cap effective marginal tax rates at something like 60% for the whole population, even if that means a higher overall rate for people earning the kind of salary I am on.
It will be a huge political own goal if the Conservatives make sure it is front and centre of everyone's attention - but who knows whether they've got the intelligence and ability to do that.
It's a strange one - because 99% of the time the public likes money being spent (putting to one side the need to pay for it).
But this is a very unusual example whereby the public actively does not want money to be spent.
smokevape filled pub...it sounds like loads of people saw all those involved.Starmer will be gone in the new year and Labour will be 'looking death in the face'
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O3026X_xAJk
She said, "no, I just assumed.."
Harsh, but not wrong.
At other times its a quick response punfest of course.
https://ifs.org.uk/articles/should-labour-scrap-two-child-limit
A general complaint I have against this government is they don't make choices on their own merits, because they think they are the right choice. I would respect them more even if I disagreed with some of those choices.
My new hero and your next Prime Minister.....
I give you Zak Polanski!
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DQ_YbjCiom0/
Just sent this by the BBC, asking us to make sure we credit BBC Newscast if we use their story about Sky “shoddy journalism”. This of all weeks…
https://x.com/SamCoatesSky/status/1989021275512016897?s=20
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s1VCnnCQP3E
is it really right to harm children who happen to be born into a family that is insufficiently prudent/lucky?
Really?
Sometimes the wisdom of crowds elides into the cruelty of mobs. I've got sympathy for the need to balance our finances, but the two child cap was always the wrong way to do it, and largely about signalling virtue to curtain-twichers.
If the narrative this year takes hold that they’re raising taxes on people to pay for more welfare/benefits (as seems likely), then I agree - it’s going to go down terribly.
Matt Gaetz, who is now alleged of sexually assaulting a homeless minor, was Donald Trump's top pick for Attorney General.
There are no coincidences.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cr5e9erpnzlo
Apparently he has done it before
I think a decreasing phased approach is far better than either a strict cut off at 2, or applying it without any cap. I wouldn't be surprised if that is what Labour go for. I also wouldn't be particularly surprised if that pissed off both sides of the debate and Labour made no coherent defence of such a policy.
People sometimes compare Google TPUs to GPUs and other accerlerators, and then declare that Google's TPUs are inferior. But Google doesn't design their TPUs to win machine learning benchmarks, they target Google's key workloads, and they can make domain specific optimisations that an off-the-shelf acclerator might lack entirely. Judging by the many generations of hardware Google has now produced and the huge investment in hardware deployed it must work for them, even if from the outside people still wonder why.
OpenAI are working with Broadcom on acclerators now, so they are on the same path that Google's been treading for about a decade now.
"Some scapegoat should lose out so I should gain" tends to be a winning formula, and the only difference between Zak and Nigel is who they plan to make the scapegoat.
However, JAX has a number of advantages over PyTorch but for things like LLMs, the genius is you can write code for one device, change 1-2 lines of code and instantly deploy it to 1000s of TPUs / GPUs. It is now the standard ML framework for training LLMs and other models that require training across masses of GPUs.
Although JAX is open source, internally Google / Deepmind have a load of JAX tools that they won't share.
It's quite a fun video. It's a Mark Felton, well observed and only slightly overblown.
Six WW2 campaign medals with no entitlement. He also got his Pilot's Wings never having soloed.
It's a bit BoJo.
I wanted to pick this up not to have a go at DavidL, whom I respect, but because I think it highlights a common misconception.
Whether you think £100bn in additional fuel duty would be the right thing to do or not, it most certainly would not be 'extracted from the economy' unless it were used entirely to reduce the deficit (which would have its own but different benefits).
In fact all the available evidence suggests that every £1 of taxation results in additional spending of £1.05* and that spending gets spent... in the economy.
More prosaically, spending targeted at those just struggling to get by gets pumped straight back into the economy whereas taxation left with the wealthy often gets pumped offshore, or inflates property values which add nothing to real growth.
I know many of you will say additional fuel duty will hit the poorest too (not entirely true, lots don't run cars but instead use public transport) but even to the extent that it is true, it's extracting and supplying to the same sector, not purely 'extracting'.
My overall point is that taxation is not 'extracted' from the economy and won't in itself lead to a recession.
(*Since spending seems to run at 105% of taxation.)
If money is involved, then 18 is the age.
Illegal.
"Why Apple Just Gave Up on AI", https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ul6_QPfoVHg , (13mins)
However, I personally would much prefer we were reducing debt. But even if taxation were 5% more than spending £100bn in extra fuel duty would not be 'extracted from the economy' - £95bn of it would be pumped straight back in.
My view is that all forms of taxation have negative aspects as well as the positive of funding essential services. We need to choose taxes that minimise those negative aspects. Fuel duty, which directly impacts on the cost of delivery of goods, the cost of getting to work, the cost of going out is particularly adverse. If you are an eco loon like Miliband you might believe those costs are worth it. I don't.
Fuel duty is potentially economically damaging because it is a cost on people and goods moving around. However, something needs to be taxed, and economists typically put it towards the top of the list because it's 1) simple 2) not as distortive as other taxes (also why VAT is typically seen as a "good" tax). It also happens to be a Pigou tax in some cases, particularly in urban areas.
I'm not a fan of the constant cuts because that £100 billion has to be found elsewhere - NICs? Often these taxes are worse. I also think it's completely mad to cut it while public transport costs go up AND the government is trying to encourage a switch to EVs.
Geoffrey Hinton
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IkdziSLYzHw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y7nrAOmUtRs
Andrej Karpathy
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LCEmiRjPEtQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zjkBMFhNj_g
I fully accept that you might think it would be better left as cheaper fuel rather than say, more nurses or increased Universal Credit but those latter would undoubtedly cycle the money straight into more spending, more demand. Whereas leaving me with more money because I'm paying less to fill up my car means I will likely save a bit more, probably in my global stocks fund, which won't do much for the UK economy.
"We had some chat on here yesterday about why our judges are respected. This judgment is long, very long, but there is the same clarity of thought and reasoning in it that we saw in the trans case. Lord Reed is about to retire. His ability to explain complicated things reasonably, clearly and straightforwardly will be sadly missed."
I hesitate to correct @DavidL and I am sure Lord Reed will be sadly missed. But the judgment in the For Women Scotland case (it was about women's rights and the definition of women - not about trans rights and their definition. Honestly you'd think women were wearing a Harry Potter Invisibility Cloak the way men find it impossible to see or hear us or even name us in a case brought and won by women about the rights of women) was written by the two women judges - Lady Simler and Lady Rose and Lord Hodge, who will be retiring shortly.
The King did the same thing, but he would have awarded them to himself. QEII and KCIII did not.
Maybe they could squeeze him in instead of George Weah?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S5n0DLYbYqc
But my question was if Andrew M-W didn’t *know* that or suspect it, can he be held guilty?
... oh, I see what you mean.
In practice the amoubt of borrowing which goes on things which generate growth is inconsistent. Borrowing to, for example, pay Mauritius to give British territory to the Chinese is not particularly growth-generating. And borrowing also drives up the cost of borrowing.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c874nw4g2zzo
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/11/12/mother-three-becomes-first-woman-deported-albania/?
B@st@rds!
In text messages from 2017, Jeffrey Epstein seemingly represented himself as positioned to pass information from the Trump White House to Bill Gates through an intermediary.
https://bsky.app/profile/wired.com/post/3m5jyjqwawr2l
And a serious broadcaster resists bring shaken down by a grifter, not just on principle, but because it would give him something of a veto on any of their future news broadcasting or commentary.
Fuck that.
https://karpathy.bearblog.dev/
https://karpathy.medium.com/
https://karpathy.github.io/
The BearBlog one is his latest and contains an entry which I agree with wholeheartedly.
https://karpathy.bearblog.dev/i-love-calculator/
That said, if he is replaced, I think there should be a GE. I thought this when the Tories kept swapping PM’s as well. It may be true that we elect governments, not Presidents, but changing leader is a pretty sure sign that what we voted for hasn’t worked. If the party in charge are admitting that, the country should choose the replacement
A formal party process - hard as we know.
Mass resignations à la Boris? Perhaps.
Formal failure of a budget? Unlikely with that majority.
Abdication? Does he have it in him?
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/fKC4y386fUM
I bet Starmer* wishes he'd passed such a law soon after his GE victory.
(*Johnson, May also)