What happened to the idea that all cabinet ministers should put any shareholdings into a blind trust. Dishy Rishy apparently did that. I wonder why others haven't. Seems a prudent step to ensure you can swat away the kind of smeary story about Hancock.
The 14 point gap seems about right for the week Johnson beat Covid, but the Tories have not moved and Labour have lost out to the LDs all seems a little strange. It's not like Ed Davey has suddenly found his voice.
I don't think the difference is an outlier for this week, but I would be surprised if it lasted.
The Cameron story also reminds some newer Conservative minded voters of the cosy Labour/Coalition/Remainer cabal of corruption before Johnson drained the swamp.
That is one of the feeblest attacks on a minister for a long time. Not only would it be entirely unremarkable and uncontroversial; for a document-shredding business to happen to have the NHS amongst its customers, in this case it was NHS Wales, which is nothing to do with Matt Hancock. And even if it were NHS England, does Labour really think that the Secretary of State knows anything at all about small contracts for document disposal, or that a minor shareholder has a list of all the company's customers?
They've completely lost their marbles. Smears as pathetic as that are counter-productive.
I think the phrase "catalogue of examples of sleaze" is well-chosen. On its own, this incident is unremarkable, but as example #4 or #5 on a list it helps to bulk out the perception of Sleazy Tories. If they can get a new story like this every few days for a few weeks, they'll collectively be very powerful and no-one will have enough time to figure out why every example individually doesn't matter.
Black Lives Matter supporters have graffitied a village pub named after a Tory MP's slaveowner ancestors.
The Drax Arms in Bere Regis, Dorset, was targeted last night by vandals who sprayed the words 'slaver' and 'BLM' on to the walls.
The Grade II-listed pub is named after the Drax family who own the nearby estate and whose forefathers ran plantations in Barbados and Jamaica in the 17th century.
But the family, including Conservative MP for South Dorset Richard Drax, no longer have any ties to the pub, which has been owned by brewery Hall and Woodhouse for a century.
What happened to the idea that all cabinet ministers should put any shareholdings into a blind trust. Dishy Rishy apparently did that. I wonder why others haven't. Seems a prudent step to ensure you can swat away the kind of smeary story about Hancock.
It's left to the individual minister to decide whether it is appropriate. I think it's a bit of a daft idea anyway; the minister knows what was in the portfolio before it was placed in the trust, and the most likely thing is that the trustees change little or nothing.
ONS say 11k new cases per day in England. That doesn't pass the sniff test for me.
Average of the number of new hospitalisations per day over last week is 215. If 1 in 50 (I'm guessing) of new infections result in hospitalisation then this implies roughly11,000 new infections per day.
The 14 point gap seems about right for the week Johnson beat Covid, but the Tories have not moved and Labour have lost out to the LDs all seems a little strange. It's not like Ed Davey has suddenly found his voice.
I don't think the difference is an outlier for this week, but I would be surprised if it lasted.
The Cameron story also reminds some newer Conservative minded voters of the cosy Labour/Coalition/Remainer cabal of corruption before Johnson drained the swamp.
The main movement from 2019 is Labour to Green, not Labour to LD, on that poll
What happened to the idea that all cabinet ministers should put any shareholdings into a blind trust. Dishy Rishy apparently did that. I wonder why others haven't. Seems a prudent step to ensure you can swat away the kind of smeary story about Hancock.
It's left to the individual minister to decide whether it is appropriate. I think it's a bit of a daft idea anyway; the minister knows what was in the portfolio before it was placed in the trust, and the most likely thing is that the trustees change little or nothing.
It is, but it gives political cover. Just as this particular story is a nothing burger, the use of a blind trust allows you to stand up and say I places all my investments in the hands of somebody else to manage them to avoid any appearance of a conflict of interest.
This is obviously pandemic bounce back, but it’s worth remembering China was the only major economy to grow LAST year. Whether the bug was deliberately created, accidentally leaked, or ‘spontaneously leapt from bat to pangolin to zebra to human in the middle of the city with the world’s only lab researching bat-pangolin-zebra-human Coronaviral zoonosis’, there is no doubt the bug has, relatively, benefited China
This decade will, therefore, be the decade when China comprehensively and definitively overtakes the USA as the world’s pre-eminent power
Not a great time for the USA to be led by a doddery old bloke, or be mired in culture wars around ridiculous Marxist woke-crap, but maybe they are symptoms of that same American decline, and therefore predictable, if not inevitable
The ridiculous woke crap includes treating minorities with respect, rather than subjecting them to genocide. I'd say that's a competitive advantage for the US.
There is a sweet midpoint between ‘stopping police from shooting black people all the time’ and ‘burning down Portland because we don’t need police at all’
Unfortunately, America seems determined to miss that sweet spot, and swing wildly and dangerously to the burning cities bit
(CNN)Major American cities saw a 33% increase in homicides last year as a pandemic swept across the country, millions of people joined protests against racial injustice and police brutality, and the economy collapsed under the weight of the pandemic — a crime surge that has continued into the first quarter of this year.
No one's arguing the US is perfect, least of all me. But I'm pretty clear which of the two countries smart immigrant engineers and scientists might see as the more attractive destination.
And the idea that China is a guaranteed global hegemon, as opposed to one of two world superpowers, is just silly.
I'm not convinced that Chinese genocide of Uighurs in Xinjiang is likely to deter promising non-Uighur scientists from moving to Beijing or Shanghai, which are thousands of miles away geographically, and even further in societal terms.
American police killing unarmed black people in Minneapolis is (arguably) as much of a deterrent to people moving to New York/LA.
Look at the list of authors on pretty well any US research publication, and compare with those on Chinese research papers. And look at what's happening in Hong Kong.
I think that's reasonable objective evidence for relative attractiveness.
That'a not to say that China doesn't have very good science, and a huge supply of domestic science graduates. The growing breadth and depth of their research efforts is extremely impressive.
But they have problems which the US does not - including a coming demographic crunch. (indeed it's not entirely inconceivable that the US population overtakes theirs in the next half century, should the US decide once again that immigration is rather a good idea...)
Another telling point is Westerners who have taken positions in Chinese Universities have started to leave over the last few years. (Two of my friends have). The restrictions on foreign nationals have become more & more cumbersome & irritating.
Chinese science has made excellent progress, but it is still well behind the US, UK, all of Western Europe, Russia, Japan, Korea and some parts of Eastern Europe in terms of consistent quality of research outputs (but perhaps not quantity).
There is also extensive political interference in academic appointments & funding for scientific projects.
A gifted Chinese scientist will almost always prefer a job in a good Western University even against the most prestigIous & wealthy Chinese university like Tsinghua. China are still losing their very best scientists.
And yet, weirdly, Chinese universities are ascending the global rankings.
‘Oxford has been named the world’s best university for the fifth consecutive year. But the latest rankings show that it’s China's universities that are the rising stars of global higher education.‘
I feel like a man on the balcony of a hotel in Phuket, pointing at a distant but incoming tsunami, while the rest of you are down in the bar having a chat about the day’s surfing
Being bullied and patronised by the USA has not always been a comfortable experience since WW2 but we have on the main been on the same page and pretended to believe the same things. A century where China is the dominant power will have us harkening after the good old days without a doubt. Basic freedoms and principles that we hold dear will be quashed as will countries who find themselves in China's way and there will be nothing we can do about it.
I think we should be starting to brace ourselves for such a world, that we should stop China buying up enterprise companies with IP in the west, restrict their access to our markets and go as far as we need to go to make sure that we are not beholden to them for things our society needs to operate. But we can't stop it. The pass was sold when they were given pretty much unrestricted access to our markets in the name of "free trade" which has proven to be nothing of the sort. They now have sufficient critical mass not to be vulnerable anymore.
Yes. They are invulnerable. And uncontainable. In a way the USSR never was. Because they are the biggest trader on earth. When they absorb Taiwan - as they shall - this supremacy will harden.
So, as you say, it’s too late. The best we can do is make sure we keep crucial tech, science, etc, in western hands (even if they have them too) so they cannot bully us. And we really need to ditch the worst of wokeness, even as we pray their curtailed liberties hinder them assuming total power
At the moment the trends aren’t great, there is too much basic denial. As we see here
We should also ditch the defeatism.
China's regime needs to keep convincing its burgeoning middle class that its way is better than the west's. That the new Chinese don't need all this democracy bullsh8t.
If, as in the past, the West's enormous powers of innovation allow it to pull ahead technically once again, the Chinese regime has a big problem.
That is why China has tried desperately to get its fingers into as much Western know-how as possible. It needs absolutely to cover all those bases.
It cannot afford to have Westerners trolling about in air cars, making use of fusion power and flying from London to Sydney in four hours while its citizens cannot.
That is the way to beat Xi.
It’s easy to sneer at its politicians, its guns, its culture wars. But America remains the most extraordinary boiling pot of innovation, collaboration and optimism that arguably humans have ever constructed.
And this, as Laloux states in his opening chapters, comes down to how its citizens can conceptualize their purpose and role in society, and hence how they are able to conceive of new ways of organizing.
For all those that decry the woke generation, they are in fact evolving those concepts and developing new approaches to organizing that we crusties hate because they make us uncomfortable. I, for one, do not despair with the coming generation, but see them as our hope to evolve away from the globe-destroying global corporate model to something more people, rather than product, oriented.
The next generation is, literally, stupider than us.
I guess every 20 or 30 years there must have been some nutter in Rome, during the Empire, who pointed to the East and screamed ‘the barbarians are coming!’
For 500 years he was wrong and everyone carried on, just ignoring him.
But then, one day, he was right.
I AM THAT SCREAMING NUTTER
Glad you've reached self-awareness.
I don't think any of us doubt that China will be the biggest power economically and militarily. The question is how dominant and for how long with their current blend of political and societal thinking.
For myself, I think they won't be the single hegemon, but the most powerful of 2 or 3 (US/West and India), and that they will not, unless they change their political and societal philosophy, achieve even leading group status on thought and culture. If they do change, then they won't be the beast to fear.
So I am reasonably confident the West will not be submerged under a Chinese political cultural wave, at least not in its current form.
Let’s hope you’re right
But consider this. What if it turns out state directed, high surveillance Asian capitalism is much more efficient, and enriching, than looser, western capitalism which obsesses about transphobic computers?
You don’t have to look far for an example. Covid 19. Yes the west has produced marvelous vaccines, it seems, but the East Asians don’t really need them, as they have managed the disease so much better than us. Their economies have barely shrunk. Ours have shriveled. They are better at this. Partly because they have applied technology in a cleverer but more imposing way.
If this trend continues and China becomes Singapore times a million, China will completely dominate, surrounded by hi tech Asian satellites, even as Philip Thompson is still wibbling on about multi-gender bogs
You can already see this Chinese leadership in developing countries. Does any African nation now look to the USA as an exemplar? The divided, violent USA which recently elected a madman, is riven with crime and drug addiction, and which endured an attempted coup about 5 minutes ago?
No, they do not. They look to China, which surges in strength and enriches its people. That’s the nation and the system they want to copy
There's much to like here but I think it's best if I pick out what isn't. And that's the inference that "we" in the democratic west are having our "moral fibre" - and thus our ability to compete with the totalitarian east - eroded by our overly precious concern for racial and gender equality and for the rights of sundry minorities to live their best authentic lives. This is tosh. Unpleasant tosh too, since it hints at a desire to big up and use the sino threat to turn the clock back on social progress.
‘WHY don't Labour supporters start a polling company, ask mostly Labour voters who they will vote for , throw in some balancing voters and see what the poll shows ?YOUGOV is Tory owned propaganda’
Black Lives Matter supporters have graffitied a village pub named after a Tory MP's slaveowner ancestors.
The Drax Arms in Bere Regis, Dorset, was targeted last night by vandals who sprayed the words 'slaver' and 'BLM' on to the walls.
The Grade II-listed pub is named after the Drax family who own the nearby estate and whose forefathers ran plantations in Barbados and Jamaica in the 17th century.
But the family, including Conservative MP for South Dorset Richard Drax, no longer have any ties to the pub, which has been owned by brewery Hall and Woodhouse for a century.
That is one of the feeblest attacks on a minister for a long time. Not only would it be entirely unremarkable and uncontroversial; for a document-shredding business to happen to have the NHS amongst its customers, in this case it was NHS Wales, which is nothing to do with Matt Hancock. And even if it were NHS England, does Labour really think that the Secretary of State knows anything at all about small contracts for document disposal, or that a minor shareholder has a list of all the company's customers?
They've completely lost their marbles. Smears as pathetic as that are counter-productive.
I think the phrase "catalogue of examples of sleaze" is well-chosen. On its own, this incident is unremarkable, but as example #4 or #5 on a list it helps to bulk out the perception of Sleazy Tories. If they can get a new story like this every few days for a few weeks, they'll collectively be very powerful and no-one will have enough time to figure out why every example individually doesn't matter.
That's obviously what they are trying to do, but feeble examples like this make it far too transparently party-political smearing and thus distract from any serious cases.
This is obviously pandemic bounce back, but it’s worth remembering China was the only major economy to grow LAST year. Whether the bug was deliberately created, accidentally leaked, or ‘spontaneously leapt from bat to pangolin to zebra to human in the middle of the city with the world’s only lab researching bat-pangolin-zebra-human Coronaviral zoonosis’, there is no doubt the bug has, relatively, benefited China
This decade will, therefore, be the decade when China comprehensively and definitively overtakes the USA as the world’s pre-eminent power
Not a great time for the USA to be led by a doddery old bloke, or be mired in culture wars around ridiculous Marxist woke-crap, but maybe they are symptoms of that same American decline, and therefore predictable, if not inevitable
The ridiculous woke crap includes treating minorities with respect, rather than subjecting them to genocide. I'd say that's a competitive advantage for the US.
There is a sweet midpoint between ‘stopping police from shooting black people all the time’ and ‘burning down Portland because we don’t need police at all’
Unfortunately, America seems determined to miss that sweet spot, and swing wildly and dangerously to the burning cities bit
(CNN)Major American cities saw a 33% increase in homicides last year as a pandemic swept across the country, millions of people joined protests against racial injustice and police brutality, and the economy collapsed under the weight of the pandemic — a crime surge that has continued into the first quarter of this year.
No one's arguing the US is perfect, least of all me. But I'm pretty clear which of the two countries smart immigrant engineers and scientists might see as the more attractive destination.
And the idea that China is a guaranteed global hegemon, as opposed to one of two world superpowers, is just silly.
I'm not convinced that Chinese genocide of Uighurs in Xinjiang is likely to deter promising non-Uighur scientists from moving to Beijing or Shanghai, which are thousands of miles away geographically, and even further in societal terms.
American police killing unarmed black people in Minneapolis is (arguably) as much of a deterrent to people moving to New York/LA.
Look at the list of authors on pretty well any US research publication, and compare with those on Chinese research papers. And look at what's happening in Hong Kong.
I think that's reasonable objective evidence for relative attractiveness.
That'a not to say that China doesn't have very good science, and a huge supply of domestic science graduates. The growing breadth and depth of their research efforts is extremely impressive.
But they have problems which the US does not - including a coming demographic crunch. (indeed it's not entirely inconceivable that the US population overtakes theirs in the next half century, should the US decide once again that immigration is rather a good idea...)
Another telling point is Westerners who have taken positions in Chinese Universities have started to leave over the last few years. (Two of my friends have). The restrictions on foreign nationals have become more & more cumbersome & irritating.
Chinese science has made excellent progress, but it is still well behind the US, UK, all of Western Europe, Russia, Japan, Korea and some parts of Eastern Europe in terms of consistent quality of research outputs (but perhaps not quantity).
There is also extensive political interference in academic appointments & funding for scientific projects.
A gifted Chinese scientist will almost always prefer a job in a good Western University even against the most prestigIous & wealthy Chinese university like Tsinghua. China are still losing their very best scientists.
And yet, weirdly, Chinese universities are ascending the global rankings.
‘Oxford has been named the world’s best university for the fifth consecutive year. But the latest rankings show that it’s China's universities that are the rising stars of global higher education.‘
I feel like a man on the balcony of a hotel in Phuket, pointing at a distant but incoming tsunami, while the rest of you are down in the bar having a chat about the day’s surfing
Being bullied and patronised by the USA has not always been a comfortable experience since WW2 but we have on the main been on the same page and pretended to believe the same things. A century where China is the dominant power will have us harkening after the good old days without a doubt. Basic freedoms and principles that we hold dear will be quashed as will countries who find themselves in China's way and there will be nothing we can do about it.
I think we should be starting to brace ourselves for such a world, that we should stop China buying up enterprise companies with IP in the west, restrict their access to our markets and go as far as we need to go to make sure that we are not beholden to them for things our society needs to operate. But we can't stop it. The pass was sold when they were given pretty much unrestricted access to our markets in the name of "free trade" which has proven to be nothing of the sort. They now have sufficient critical mass not to be vulnerable anymore.
Yes. They are invulnerable. And uncontainable. In a way the USSR never was. Because they are the biggest trader on earth. When they absorb Taiwan - as they shall - this supremacy will harden.
So, as you say, it’s too late. The best we can do is make sure we keep crucial tech, science, etc, in western hands (even if they have them too) so they cannot bully us. And we really need to ditch the worst of wokeness, even as we pray their curtailed liberties hinder them assuming total power
At the moment the trends aren’t great, there is too much basic denial. As we see here
We should also ditch the defeatism.
China's regime needs to keep convincing its burgeoning middle class that its way is better than the west's. That the new Chinese don't need all this democracy bullsh8t.
If, as in the past, the West's enormous powers of innovation allow it to pull ahead technically once again, the Chinese regime has a big problem.
That is why China has tried desperately to get its fingers into as much Western know-how as possible. It needs absolutely to cover all those bases.
It cannot afford to have Westerners trolling about in air cars, making use of fusion power and flying from London to Sydney in four hours while its citizens cannot.
That is the way to beat Xi.
It’s easy to sneer at its politicians, its guns, its culture wars. But America remains the most extraordinary boiling pot of innovation, collaboration and optimism that arguably humans have ever constructed.
And this, as Laloux states in his opening chapters, comes down to how its citizens can conceptualize their purpose and role in society, and hence how they are able to conceive of new ways of organizing.
For all those that decry the woke generation, they are in fact evolving those concepts and developing new approaches to organizing that we crusties hate because they make us uncomfortable. I, for one, do not despair with the coming generation, but see them as our hope to evolve away from the globe-destroying global corporate model to something more people, rather than product, oriented.
The next generation is, literally, stupider than us.
I guess every 20 or 30 years there must have been some nutter in Rome, during the Empire, who pointed to the East and screamed ‘the barbarians are coming!’
For 500 years he was wrong and everyone carried on, just ignoring him.
But then, one day, he was right.
I AM THAT SCREAMING NUTTER
Glad you've reached self-awareness.
I don't think any of us doubt that China will be the biggest power economically and militarily. The question is how dominant and for how long with their current blend of political and societal thinking.
For myself, I think they won't be the single hegemon, but the most powerful of 2 or 3 (US/West and India), and that they will not, unless they change their political and societal philosophy, achieve even leading group status on thought and culture. If they do change, then they won't be the beast to fear.
So I am reasonably confident the West will not be submerged under a Chinese political cultural wave, at least not in its current form.
Let’s hope you’re right
But consider this. What if it turns out state directed, high surveillance Asian capitalism is much more efficient, and enriching, than looser, western capitalism which obsesses about transphobic computers?
You don’t have to look far for an example. Covid 19. Yes the west has produced marvelous vaccines, it seems, but the East Asians don’t really need them, as they have managed the disease so much better than us. Their economies have barely shrunk. Ours have shriveled. They are better at this. Partly because they have applied technology in a cleverer but more imposing way.
If this trend continues and China becomes Singapore times a million, China will completely dominate, surrounded by hi tech Asian satellites, even as Philip Thompson is still wibbling on about multi-gender bogs
You can already see this Chinese leadership in developing countries. Does any African nation now look to the USA as an exemplar? The divided, violent USA which recently elected a madman, is riven with crime and drug addiction, and which endured an attempted coup about 5 minutes ago?
No, they do not. They look to China, which surges in strength and enriches its people. That’s the nation and the system they want to copy
There's much to like here but I think it's best if I pick out what isn't. And that's the inference that "we" in the democratic west are having our "moral fibre" - and thus our ability to compete with the totalitarian east - eroded by our overly precious concern for racial and gender equality and for the rights of sundry minorities to live their best authentic lives. This is tosh. Unpleasant tosh too, since it hints at a desire to big up and use the sino threat to turn the clock back on social progress.
And yet if you asked a random selection of the world's population: which country would you choose to live in, USA or China?, the answer would be overwhelmingly USA. If the future is Chinese it's a pretty bleak future and not one that most people would opt for.
There is plenty of incidents of government ministers being far too chummy with people who have ended up getting contracts, but I am struggling to see the issue with this particular one. He was gifted shares in a company, who got a contract with NHS Wales, who are under Labour control.
Have I missed something?
Merely that he hadn't previously declared an interest (his sister's) which arguably he ought to have done under the rules. It's hardly a resignation issue. There might, or might not be a catalogue of sleaze to get to the bottom of, but this is barely a footnote.
‘WHY don't Labour supporters start a polling company, ask mostly Labour voters who they will vote for , throw in some balancing voters and see what the poll shows ?YOUGOV is Tory owned propaganda’
Well Peter Kellner retired now, so obviously they are going to through away their whole reputation and business to business revenue generating abilities just to skew a few political polls that make them the square root of f##k all in terms of revenue in the grand scheme of things.
I presume the tw@tterati don't realise that YouGov makes its money from market research and data analytics.
This is obviously pandemic bounce back, but it’s worth remembering China was the only major economy to grow LAST year. Whether the bug was deliberately created, accidentally leaked, or ‘spontaneously leapt from bat to pangolin to zebra to human in the middle of the city with the world’s only lab researching bat-pangolin-zebra-human Coronaviral zoonosis’, there is no doubt the bug has, relatively, benefited China
This decade will, therefore, be the decade when China comprehensively and definitively overtakes the USA as the world’s pre-eminent power
Not a great time for the USA to be led by a doddery old bloke, or be mired in culture wars around ridiculous Marxist woke-crap, but maybe they are symptoms of that same American decline, and therefore predictable, if not inevitable
The ridiculous woke crap includes treating minorities with respect, rather than subjecting them to genocide. I'd say that's a competitive advantage for the US.
There is a sweet midpoint between ‘stopping police from shooting black people all the time’ and ‘burning down Portland because we don’t need police at all’
Unfortunately, America seems determined to miss that sweet spot, and swing wildly and dangerously to the burning cities bit
(CNN)Major American cities saw a 33% increase in homicides last year as a pandemic swept across the country, millions of people joined protests against racial injustice and police brutality, and the economy collapsed under the weight of the pandemic — a crime surge that has continued into the first quarter of this year.
No one's arguing the US is perfect, least of all me. But I'm pretty clear which of the two countries smart immigrant engineers and scientists might see as the more attractive destination.
And the idea that China is a guaranteed global hegemon, as opposed to one of two world superpowers, is just silly.
I'm not convinced that Chinese genocide of Uighurs in Xinjiang is likely to deter promising non-Uighur scientists from moving to Beijing or Shanghai, which are thousands of miles away geographically, and even further in societal terms.
American police killing unarmed black people in Minneapolis is (arguably) as much of a deterrent to people moving to New York/LA.
Look at the list of authors on pretty well any US research publication, and compare with those on Chinese research papers. And look at what's happening in Hong Kong.
I think that's reasonable objective evidence for relative attractiveness.
That'a not to say that China doesn't have very good science, and a huge supply of domestic science graduates. The growing breadth and depth of their research efforts is extremely impressive.
But they have problems which the US does not - including a coming demographic crunch. (indeed it's not entirely inconceivable that the US population overtakes theirs in the next half century, should the US decide once again that immigration is rather a good idea...)
Another telling point is Westerners who have taken positions in Chinese Universities have started to leave over the last few years. (Two of my friends have). The restrictions on foreign nationals have become more & more cumbersome & irritating.
Chinese science has made excellent progress, but it is still well behind the US, UK, all of Western Europe, Russia, Japan, Korea and some parts of Eastern Europe in terms of consistent quality of research outputs (but perhaps not quantity).
There is also extensive political interference in academic appointments & funding for scientific projects.
A gifted Chinese scientist will almost always prefer a job in a good Western University even against the most prestigIous & wealthy Chinese university like Tsinghua. China are still losing their very best scientists.
And yet, weirdly, Chinese universities are ascending the global rankings.
‘Oxford has been named the world’s best university for the fifth consecutive year. But the latest rankings show that it’s China's universities that are the rising stars of global higher education.‘
I feel like a man on the balcony of a hotel in Phuket, pointing at a distant but incoming tsunami, while the rest of you are down in the bar having a chat about the day’s surfing
Being bullied and patronised by the USA has not always been a comfortable experience since WW2 but we have on the main been on the same page and pretended to believe the same things. A century where China is the dominant power will have us harkening after the good old days without a doubt. Basic freedoms and principles that we hold dear will be quashed as will countries who find themselves in China's way and there will be nothing we can do about it.
I think we should be starting to brace ourselves for such a world, that we should stop China buying up enterprise companies with IP in the west, restrict their access to our markets and go as far as we need to go to make sure that we are not beholden to them for things our society needs to operate. But we can't stop it. The pass was sold when they were given pretty much unrestricted access to our markets in the name of "free trade" which has proven to be nothing of the sort. They now have sufficient critical mass not to be vulnerable anymore.
Yes. They are invulnerable. And uncontainable. In a way the USSR never was. Because they are the biggest trader on earth. When they absorb Taiwan - as they shall - this supremacy will harden.
So, as you say, it’s too late. The best we can do is make sure we keep crucial tech, science, etc, in western hands (even if they have them too) so they cannot bully us. And we really need to ditch the worst of wokeness, even as we pray their curtailed liberties hinder them assuming total power
At the moment the trends aren’t great, there is too much basic denial. As we see here
We should also ditch the defeatism.
China's regime needs to keep convincing its burgeoning middle class that its way is better than the west's. That the new Chinese don't need all this democracy bullsh8t.
If, as in the past, the West's enormous powers of innovation allow it to pull ahead technically once again, the Chinese regime has a big problem.
That is why China has tried desperately to get its fingers into as much Western know-how as possible. It needs absolutely to cover all those bases.
It cannot afford to have Westerners trolling about in air cars, making use of fusion power and flying from London to Sydney in four hours while its citizens cannot.
That is the way to beat Xi.
It’s easy to sneer at its politicians, its guns, its culture wars. But America remains the most extraordinary boiling pot of innovation, collaboration and optimism that arguably humans have ever constructed.
And this, as Laloux states in his opening chapters, comes down to how its citizens can conceptualize their purpose and role in society, and hence how they are able to conceive of new ways of organizing.
For all those that decry the woke generation, they are in fact evolving those concepts and developing new approaches to organizing that we crusties hate because they make us uncomfortable. I, for one, do not despair with the coming generation, but see them as our hope to evolve away from the globe-destroying global corporate model to something more people, rather than product, oriented.
The next generation is, literally, stupider than us.
I guess every 20 or 30 years there must have been some nutter in Rome, during the Empire, who pointed to the East and screamed ‘the barbarians are coming!’
For 500 years he was wrong and everyone carried on, just ignoring him.
But then, one day, he was right.
I AM THAT SCREAMING NUTTER
Glad you've reached self-awareness.
I don't think any of us doubt that China will be the biggest power economically and militarily. The question is how dominant and for how long with their current blend of political and societal thinking.
For myself, I think they won't be the single hegemon, but the most powerful of 2 or 3 (US/West and India), and that they will not, unless they change their political and societal philosophy, achieve even leading group status on thought and culture. If they do change, then they won't be the beast to fear.
So I am reasonably confident the West will not be submerged under a Chinese political cultural wave, at least not in its current form.
Let’s hope you’re right
But consider this. What if it turns out state directed, high surveillance Asian capitalism is much more efficient, and enriching, than looser, western capitalism which obsesses about transphobic computers?
You don’t have to look far for an example. Covid 19. Yes the west has produced marvelous vaccines, it seems, but the East Asians don’t really need them, as they have managed the disease so much better than us. Their economies have barely shrunk. Ours have shriveled. They are better at this. Partly because they have applied technology in a cleverer but more imposing way.
If this trend continues and China becomes Singapore times a million, China will completely dominate, surrounded by hi tech Asian satellites, even as Philip Thompson is still wibbling on about multi-gender bogs
You can already see this Chinese leadership in developing countries. Does any African nation now look to the USA as an exemplar? The divided, violent USA which recently elected a madman, is riven with crime and drug addiction, and which endured an attempted coup about 5 minutes ago?
No, they do not. They look to China, which surges in strength and enriches its people. That’s the nation and the system they want to copy
There's much to like here but I think it's best if I pick out what isn't. And that's the inference that "we" in the democratic west are having our "moral fibre" - and thus our ability to compete with the totalitarian east - eroded by our overly precious concern for racial and gender equality and for the rights of sundry minorities to live their best authentic lives. This is tosh. Unpleasant tosh too, since it hints at a desire to big up and use the sino threat to turn the clock back on social progress.
‘The rights of sundry minorities to lead their best, authentic lives’ has to be right up there in terms of patronising, sanctimonious, world-class bullshit. What does it even mean? What is a ‘best authentic life’ for a BAME person?
That is one of the feeblest attacks on a minister for a long time. Not only would it be entirely unremarkable and uncontroversial; for a document-shredding business to happen to have the NHS amongst its customers, in this case it was NHS Wales, which is nothing to do with Matt Hancock. And even if it were NHS England, does Labour really think that the Secretary of State knows anything at all about small contracts for document disposal, or that a minor shareholder has a list of all the company's customers?
They've completely lost their marbles. Smears as pathetic as that are counter-productive.
I think the phrase "catalogue of examples of sleaze" is well-chosen. On its own, this incident is unremarkable, but as example #4 or #5 on a list it helps to bulk out the perception of Sleazy Tories. If they can get a new story like this every few days for a few weeks, they'll collectively be very powerful and no-one will have enough time to figure out why every example individually doesn't matter.
That's obviously what they are trying to do, but feeble examples like this make it far too transparently party-political smearing and thus distract from any serious cases.
With the general public, or with the political classes? I can see this resonating with the former; it's clear with five minutes' research why this isn't a CoI but most people won't spend anywhere near that long on it.
What happened to the idea that all cabinet ministers should put any shareholdings into a blind trust. Dishy Rishy apparently did that. I wonder why others haven't. Seems a prudent step to ensure you can swat away the kind of smeary story about Hancock.
Black Lives Matter supporters have graffitied a village pub named after a Tory MP's slaveowner ancestors.
The Drax Arms in Bere Regis, Dorset, was targeted last night by vandals who sprayed the words 'slaver' and 'BLM' on to the walls.
The Grade II-listed pub is named after the Drax family who own the nearby estate and whose forefathers ran plantations in Barbados and Jamaica in the 17th century.
But the family, including Conservative MP for South Dorset Richard Drax, no longer have any ties to the pub, which has been owned by brewery Hall and Woodhouse for a century.
Hopefully they find the perpetrators and prosecute them
The Guardian reports that Ricahrd Drax recently inherited Drax Hall, the Jacobean pile on Barbados built by his ancestors. A plantation existed there from the 1640s.
This is obviously pandemic bounce back, but it’s worth remembering China was the only major economy to grow LAST year. Whether the bug was deliberately created, accidentally leaked, or ‘spontaneously leapt from bat to pangolin to zebra to human in the middle of the city with the world’s only lab researching bat-pangolin-zebra-human Coronaviral zoonosis’, there is no doubt the bug has, relatively, benefited China
This decade will, therefore, be the decade when China comprehensively and definitively overtakes the USA as the world’s pre-eminent power
Not a great time for the USA to be led by a doddery old bloke, or be mired in culture wars around ridiculous Marxist woke-crap, but maybe they are symptoms of that same American decline, and therefore predictable, if not inevitable
The ridiculous woke crap includes treating minorities with respect, rather than subjecting them to genocide. I'd say that's a competitive advantage for the US.
There is a sweet midpoint between ‘stopping police from shooting black people all the time’ and ‘burning down Portland because we don’t need police at all’
Unfortunately, America seems determined to miss that sweet spot, and swing wildly and dangerously to the burning cities bit
(CNN)Major American cities saw a 33% increase in homicides last year as a pandemic swept across the country, millions of people joined protests against racial injustice and police brutality, and the economy collapsed under the weight of the pandemic — a crime surge that has continued into the first quarter of this year.
No one's arguing the US is perfect, least of all me. But I'm pretty clear which of the two countries smart immigrant engineers and scientists might see as the more attractive destination.
And the idea that China is a guaranteed global hegemon, as opposed to one of two world superpowers, is just silly.
I'm not convinced that Chinese genocide of Uighurs in Xinjiang is likely to deter promising non-Uighur scientists from moving to Beijing or Shanghai, which are thousands of miles away geographically, and even further in societal terms.
American police killing unarmed black people in Minneapolis is (arguably) as much of a deterrent to people moving to New York/LA.
Look at the list of authors on pretty well any US research publication, and compare with those on Chinese research papers. And look at what's happening in Hong Kong.
I think that's reasonable objective evidence for relative attractiveness.
That'a not to say that China doesn't have very good science, and a huge supply of domestic science graduates. The growing breadth and depth of their research efforts is extremely impressive.
But they have problems which the US does not - including a coming demographic crunch. (indeed it's not entirely inconceivable that the US population overtakes theirs in the next half century, should the US decide once again that immigration is rather a good idea...)
Another telling point is Westerners who have taken positions in Chinese Universities have started to leave over the last few years. (Two of my friends have). The restrictions on foreign nationals have become more & more cumbersome & irritating.
Chinese science has made excellent progress, but it is still well behind the US, UK, all of Western Europe, Russia, Japan, Korea and some parts of Eastern Europe in terms of consistent quality of research outputs (but perhaps not quantity).
There is also extensive political interference in academic appointments & funding for scientific projects.
A gifted Chinese scientist will almost always prefer a job in a good Western University even against the most prestigIous & wealthy Chinese university like Tsinghua. China are still losing their very best scientists.
And yet, weirdly, Chinese universities are ascending the global rankings.
‘Oxford has been named the world’s best university for the fifth consecutive year. But the latest rankings show that it’s China's universities that are the rising stars of global higher education.‘
I feel like a man on the balcony of a hotel in Phuket, pointing at a distant but incoming tsunami, while the rest of you are down in the bar having a chat about the day’s surfing
Being bullied and patronised by the USA has not always been a comfortable experience since WW2 but we have on the main been on the same page and pretended to believe the same things. A century where China is the dominant power will have us harkening after the good old days without a doubt. Basic freedoms and principles that we hold dear will be quashed as will countries who find themselves in China's way and there will be nothing we can do about it.
I think we should be starting to brace ourselves for such a world, that we should stop China buying up enterprise companies with IP in the west, restrict their access to our markets and go as far as we need to go to make sure that we are not beholden to them for things our society needs to operate. But we can't stop it. The pass was sold when they were given pretty much unrestricted access to our markets in the name of "free trade" which has proven to be nothing of the sort. They now have sufficient critical mass not to be vulnerable anymore.
Yes. They are invulnerable. And uncontainable. In a way the USSR never was. Because they are the biggest trader on earth. When they absorb Taiwan - as they shall - this supremacy will harden.
So, as you say, it’s too late. The best we can do is make sure we keep crucial tech, science, etc, in western hands (even if they have them too) so they cannot bully us. And we really need to ditch the worst of wokeness, even as we pray their curtailed liberties hinder them assuming total power
At the moment the trends aren’t great, there is too much basic denial. As we see here
We should also ditch the defeatism.
China's regime needs to keep convincing its burgeoning middle class that its way is better than the west's. That the new Chinese don't need all this democracy bullsh8t.
If, as in the past, the West's enormous powers of innovation allow it to pull ahead technically once again, the Chinese regime has a big problem.
That is why China has tried desperately to get its fingers into as much Western know-how as possible. It needs absolutely to cover all those bases.
It cannot afford to have Westerners trolling about in air cars, making use of fusion power and flying from London to Sydney in four hours while its citizens cannot.
That is the way to beat Xi.
It’s easy to sneer at its politicians, its guns, its culture wars. But America remains the most extraordinary boiling pot of innovation, collaboration and optimism that arguably humans have ever constructed.
And this, as Laloux states in his opening chapters, comes down to how its citizens can conceptualize their purpose and role in society, and hence how they are able to conceive of new ways of organizing.
For all those that decry the woke generation, they are in fact evolving those concepts and developing new approaches to organizing that we crusties hate because they make us uncomfortable. I, for one, do not despair with the coming generation, but see them as our hope to evolve away from the globe-destroying global corporate model to something more people, rather than product, oriented.
The next generation is, literally, stupider than us.
I guess every 20 or 30 years there must have been some nutter in Rome, during the Empire, who pointed to the East and screamed ‘the barbarians are coming!’
For 500 years he was wrong and everyone carried on, just ignoring him.
But then, one day, he was right.
I AM THAT SCREAMING NUTTER
Glad you've reached self-awareness.
I don't think any of us doubt that China will be the biggest power economically and militarily. The question is how dominant and for how long with their current blend of political and societal thinking.
For myself, I think they won't be the single hegemon, but the most powerful of 2 or 3 (US/West and India), and that they will not, unless they change their political and societal philosophy, achieve even leading group status on thought and culture. If they do change, then they won't be the beast to fear.
So I am reasonably confident the West will not be submerged under a Chinese political cultural wave, at least not in its current form.
Let’s hope you’re right
But consider this. What if it turns out state directed, high surveillance Asian capitalism is much more efficient, and enriching, than looser, western capitalism which obsesses about transphobic computers?
You don’t have to look far for an example. Covid 19. Yes the west has produced marvelous vaccines, it seems, but the East Asians don’t really need them, as they have managed the disease so much better than us. Their economies have barely shrunk. Ours have shriveled. They are better at this. Partly because they have applied technology in a cleverer but more imposing way.
If this trend continues and China becomes Singapore times a million, China will completely dominate, surrounded by hi tech Asian satellites, even as Philip Thompson is still wibbling on about multi-gender bogs
You can already see this Chinese leadership in developing countries. Does any African nation now look to the USA as an exemplar? The divided, violent USA which recently elected a madman, is riven with crime and drug addiction, and which endured an attempted coup about 5 minutes ago?
No, they do not. They look to China, which surges in strength and enriches its people. That’s the nation and the system they want to copy
There's much to like here but I think it's best if I pick out what isn't. And that's the inference that "we" in the democratic west are having our "moral fibre" - and thus our ability to compete with the totalitarian east - eroded by our overly precious concern for racial and gender equality and for the rights of sundry minorities to live their best authentic lives. This is tosh. Unpleasant tosh too, since it hints at a desire to big up and use the sino threat to turn the clock back on social progress.
‘The rights of sundry minorities to lead their best, authentic lives’ has to be right up there in terms of patronising, sanctimonious, world-class bullshit. What does it even mean? What is a ‘best authentic life’ for a BAME person?
What valueless, meretricious nonsense
Indeed. It's why you'd be very hard-pressed to find a woke empire in the history of the world. Rising powers don't waste their time on this kind of self-debilitating nonsense.
Black Lives Matter supporters have graffitied a village pub named after a Tory MP's slaveowner ancestors.
The Drax Arms in Bere Regis, Dorset, was targeted last night by vandals who sprayed the words 'slaver' and 'BLM' on to the walls.
The Grade II-listed pub is named after the Drax family who own the nearby estate and whose forefathers ran plantations in Barbados and Jamaica in the 17th century.
But the family, including Conservative MP for South Dorset Richard Drax, no longer have any ties to the pub, which has been owned by brewery Hall and Woodhouse for a century.
This is obviously pandemic bounce back, but it’s worth remembering China was the only major economy to grow LAST year. Whether the bug was deliberately created, accidentally leaked, or ‘spontaneously leapt from bat to pangolin to zebra to human in the middle of the city with the world’s only lab researching bat-pangolin-zebra-human Coronaviral zoonosis’, there is no doubt the bug has, relatively, benefited China
This decade will, therefore, be the decade when China comprehensively and definitively overtakes the USA as the world’s pre-eminent power
Not a great time for the USA to be led by a doddery old bloke, or be mired in culture wars around ridiculous Marxist woke-crap, but maybe they are symptoms of that same American decline, and therefore predictable, if not inevitable
The ridiculous woke crap includes treating minorities with respect, rather than subjecting them to genocide. I'd say that's a competitive advantage for the US.
There is a sweet midpoint between ‘stopping police from shooting black people all the time’ and ‘burning down Portland because we don’t need police at all’
Unfortunately, America seems determined to miss that sweet spot, and swing wildly and dangerously to the burning cities bit
(CNN)Major American cities saw a 33% increase in homicides last year as a pandemic swept across the country, millions of people joined protests against racial injustice and police brutality, and the economy collapsed under the weight of the pandemic — a crime surge that has continued into the first quarter of this year.
No one's arguing the US is perfect, least of all me. But I'm pretty clear which of the two countries smart immigrant engineers and scientists might see as the more attractive destination.
And the idea that China is a guaranteed global hegemon, as opposed to one of two world superpowers, is just silly.
I'm not convinced that Chinese genocide of Uighurs in Xinjiang is likely to deter promising non-Uighur scientists from moving to Beijing or Shanghai, which are thousands of miles away geographically, and even further in societal terms.
American police killing unarmed black people in Minneapolis is (arguably) as much of a deterrent to people moving to New York/LA.
Look at the list of authors on pretty well any US research publication, and compare with those on Chinese research papers. And look at what's happening in Hong Kong.
I think that's reasonable objective evidence for relative attractiveness.
That'a not to say that China doesn't have very good science, and a huge supply of domestic science graduates. The growing breadth and depth of their research efforts is extremely impressive.
But they have problems which the US does not - including a coming demographic crunch. (indeed it's not entirely inconceivable that the US population overtakes theirs in the next half century, should the US decide once again that immigration is rather a good idea...)
Another telling point is Westerners who have taken positions in Chinese Universities have started to leave over the last few years. (Two of my friends have). The restrictions on foreign nationals have become more & more cumbersome & irritating.
Chinese science has made excellent progress, but it is still well behind the US, UK, all of Western Europe, Russia, Japan, Korea and some parts of Eastern Europe in terms of consistent quality of research outputs (but perhaps not quantity).
There is also extensive political interference in academic appointments & funding for scientific projects.
A gifted Chinese scientist will almost always prefer a job in a good Western University even against the most prestigIous & wealthy Chinese university like Tsinghua. China are still losing their very best scientists.
And yet, weirdly, Chinese universities are ascending the global rankings.
‘Oxford has been named the world’s best university for the fifth consecutive year. But the latest rankings show that it’s China's universities that are the rising stars of global higher education.‘
I feel like a man on the balcony of a hotel in Phuket, pointing at a distant but incoming tsunami, while the rest of you are down in the bar having a chat about the day’s surfing
Being bullied and patronised by the USA has not always been a comfortable experience since WW2 but we have on the main been on the same page and pretended to believe the same things. A century where China is the dominant power will have us harkening after the good old days without a doubt. Basic freedoms and principles that we hold dear will be quashed as will countries who find themselves in China's way and there will be nothing we can do about it.
I think we should be starting to brace ourselves for such a world, that we should stop China buying up enterprise companies with IP in the west, restrict their access to our markets and go as far as we need to go to make sure that we are not beholden to them for things our society needs to operate. But we can't stop it. The pass was sold when they were given pretty much unrestricted access to our markets in the name of "free trade" which has proven to be nothing of the sort. They now have sufficient critical mass not to be vulnerable anymore.
Yes. They are invulnerable. And uncontainable. In a way the USSR never was. Because they are the biggest trader on earth. When they absorb Taiwan - as they shall - this supremacy will harden.
So, as you say, it’s too late. The best we can do is make sure we keep crucial tech, science, etc, in western hands (even if they have them too) so they cannot bully us. And we really need to ditch the worst of wokeness, even as we pray their curtailed liberties hinder them assuming total power
At the moment the trends aren’t great, there is too much basic denial. As we see here
We should also ditch the defeatism.
China's regime needs to keep convincing its burgeoning middle class that its way is better than the west's. That the new Chinese don't need all this democracy bullsh8t.
If, as in the past, the West's enormous powers of innovation allow it to pull ahead technically once again, the Chinese regime has a big problem.
That is why China has tried desperately to get its fingers into as much Western know-how as possible. It needs absolutely to cover all those bases.
It cannot afford to have Westerners trolling about in air cars, making use of fusion power and flying from London to Sydney in four hours while its citizens cannot.
That is the way to beat Xi.
It’s easy to sneer at its politicians, its guns, its culture wars. But America remains the most extraordinary boiling pot of innovation, collaboration and optimism that arguably humans have ever constructed.
And this, as Laloux states in his opening chapters, comes down to how its citizens can conceptualize their purpose and role in society, and hence how they are able to conceive of new ways of organizing.
For all those that decry the woke generation, they are in fact evolving those concepts and developing new approaches to organizing that we crusties hate because they make us uncomfortable. I, for one, do not despair with the coming generation, but see them as our hope to evolve away from the globe-destroying global corporate model to something more people, rather than product, oriented.
The next generation is, literally, stupider than us.
I guess every 20 or 30 years there must have been some nutter in Rome, during the Empire, who pointed to the East and screamed ‘the barbarians are coming!’
For 500 years he was wrong and everyone carried on, just ignoring him.
But then, one day, he was right.
I AM THAT SCREAMING NUTTER
Glad you've reached self-awareness.
I don't think any of us doubt that China will be the biggest power economically and militarily. The question is how dominant and for how long with their current blend of political and societal thinking.
For myself, I think they won't be the single hegemon, but the most powerful of 2 or 3 (US/West and India), and that they will not, unless they change their political and societal philosophy, achieve even leading group status on thought and culture. If they do change, then they won't be the beast to fear.
So I am reasonably confident the West will not be submerged under a Chinese political cultural wave, at least not in its current form.
Let’s hope you’re right
But consider this. What if it turns out state directed, high surveillance Asian capitalism is much more efficient, and enriching, than looser, western capitalism which obsesses about transphobic computers?
You don’t have to look far for an example. Covid 19. Yes the west has produced marvelous vaccines, it seems, but the East Asians don’t really need them, as they have managed the disease so much better than us. Their economies have barely shrunk. Ours have shriveled. They are better at this. Partly because they have applied technology in a cleverer but more imposing way.
If this trend continues and China becomes Singapore times a million, China will completely dominate, surrounded by hi tech Asian satellites, even as Philip Thompson is still wibbling on about multi-gender bogs
You can already see this Chinese leadership in developing countries. Does any African nation now look to the USA as an exemplar? The divided, violent USA which recently elected a madman, is riven with crime and drug addiction, and which endured an attempted coup about 5 minutes ago?
No, they do not. They look to China, which surges in strength and enriches its people. That’s the nation and the system they want to copy
There's much to like here but I think it's best if I pick out what isn't. And that's the inference that "we" in the democratic west are having our "moral fibre" - and thus our ability to compete with the totalitarian east - eroded by our overly precious concern for racial and gender equality and for the rights of sundry minorities to live their best authentic lives. This is tosh. Unpleasant tosh too, since it hints at a desire to big up and use the sino threat to turn the clock back on social progress.
And yet if you asked a random selection of the world's population: which country would you choose to live in, USA or China?, the answer would be overwhelmingly USA. If the future is Chinese it's a pretty bleak future and not one that most people would opt for.
What a ridiculous hypothetical. America is rich, China isn’t, yet.
Would you rather live in Detroit or Singapore? That’s a more interesting and telling question. Fifty years ago, Detroit, for sure. Now no one would give that answer
What happened to the idea that all cabinet ministers should put any shareholdings into a blind trust. Dishy Rishy apparently did that. I wonder why others haven't. Seems a prudent step to ensure you can swat away the kind of smeary story about Hancock.
Black Lives Matter supporters have graffitied a village pub named after a Tory MP's slaveowner ancestors.
The Drax Arms in Bere Regis, Dorset, was targeted last night by vandals who sprayed the words 'slaver' and 'BLM' on to the walls.
The Grade II-listed pub is named after the Drax family who own the nearby estate and whose forefathers ran plantations in Barbados and Jamaica in the 17th century.
But the family, including Conservative MP for South Dorset Richard Drax, no longer have any ties to the pub, which has been owned by brewery Hall and Woodhouse for a century.
Black Lives Matter supporters have graffitied a village pub named after a Tory MP's slaveowner ancestors.
The Drax Arms in Bere Regis, Dorset, was targeted last night by vandals who sprayed the words 'slaver' and 'BLM' on to the walls.
The Grade II-listed pub is named after the Drax family who own the nearby estate and whose forefathers ran plantations in Barbados and Jamaica in the 17th century.
But the family, including Conservative MP for South Dorset Richard Drax, no longer have any ties to the pub, which has been owned by brewery Hall and Woodhouse for a century.
Hopefully they find the perpetrators and prosecute them
That seems unlikely, assuming you're referring to the 17th Century slave-owners.
Well, as the pub's landlady so correctly observed:
The Drax Arms is owned by local brewery Hall & Woodhouse and we are a small independent business trying to make ends meet. The majority of people can see there are no ties between us and what happened 300 years ago. I don't know what they expect to achieve from this. It's not going to make us able to change the past and scrawling graffiti on a pub doesn't bring about the consequences they want to. It doesn't really gain support for that movement, it has the opposite effect
But feel free to make light of vandalism by woke morons - perhaps that 14-point Tory lead isn't big enough for you yet.
As its big night approaches, the Academy is staring disaster in the face. As well as the fact that the Oscars’ TV ratings have been declining for years, the catastrophic audience figures for the Golden Globes last month disappointing viewer numbers for the Baftas last Sunday demonstrated that the Covid-era awards show has proved a dramatic turn-off. The televised Academy Awards show, due to air on 25 April, is likely to attract its smallest audience ever which could have a disastrous effect on the Oscars’ future.
Its like the audience doesn't like being lectured to by hypocritical actors for 2-3hrs.....while Disney+ has gone from 0 to 100 million subscribers in just over a year.
ONS say 11k new cases per day in England. That doesn't pass the sniff test for me.
Average of the number of new hospitalisations per day over last week is 215. If 1 in 50 (I'm guessing) of new infections result in hospitalisation then this implies roughly11,000 new infections per day.
This will be the data it is calculated from:
ONS survey Raw figures 2 week periods, 1 week between survey data
2 weeks ending 10th April 310/139,294 0.22% 2 weeks ending 3rd April 382/142,856 0.27% 2 weeks ending 27th March 388/144,316 0.27% 2 weeks ending 20th March 423 / 151,822 028%
Doesn’t look to me as though batting is too easy anywhere today, possibly due to the weather. Certainly it’s dark and cold at Taunton.
Wonderful sunny spring day here in Llandudno sitting on our patio drinking coffee and looking out the sun cream
I hate to be uncharacteristically pessimistic, but the warm sunny weather predicted for the rest of April, in london, at last - 17C and a southerly breeze - has suddenly reverted to cool, grey and cloudy. AGAIN
Get yourself into the country, boy. It’s warmer here; or at least it is, down by the sea.
Which town in the UK has the highest annual temperature in combination with low rainfall. I may move there. In Essex/Kent maybe?
As its big night approaches, the Academy is staring disaster in the face. As well as the fact that the Oscars’ TV ratings have been declining for years, the catastrophic audience figures for the Golden Globes last month disappointing viewer numbers for the Baftas last Sunday demonstrated that the Covid-era awards show has proved a dramatic turn-off. The televised Academy Awards show, due to air on 25 April, is likely to attract its smallest audience ever which could have a disastrous effect on the Oscars’ future.
Its like the audience doesn't like being lectured to by hypocritical actors for 2-3hrs.....while Disney+ has gone from 0 to 100 million subscribers in just over a year.
Black Lives Matter supporters have graffitied a village pub named after a Tory MP's slaveowner ancestors.
The Drax Arms in Bere Regis, Dorset, was targeted last night by vandals who sprayed the words 'slaver' and 'BLM' on to the walls.
The Grade II-listed pub is named after the Drax family who own the nearby estate and whose forefathers ran plantations in Barbados and Jamaica in the 17th century.
But the family, including Conservative MP for South Dorset Richard Drax, no longer have any ties to the pub, which has been owned by brewery Hall and Woodhouse for a century.
Hopefully they find the perpetrators and prosecute them
That seems unlikely, assuming you're referring to the 17th Century slave-owners.
Well, as the pub's landlady so correctly observed:
The Drax Arms is owned by local brewery Hall & Woodhouse and we are a small independent business trying to make ends meet. The majority of people can see there are no ties between us and what happened 300 years ago. I don't know what they expect to achieve from this. It's not going to make us able to change the past and scrawling graffiti on a pub doesn't bring about the consequences they want to. It doesn't really gain support for that movement, it has the opposite effect
But feel free to make light of vandalism by woke morons - perhaps that 14-point Tory lead isn't big enough for you yet.
This is obviously pandemic bounce back, but it’s worth remembering China was the only major economy to grow LAST year. Whether the bug was deliberately created, accidentally leaked, or ‘spontaneously leapt from bat to pangolin to zebra to human in the middle of the city with the world’s only lab researching bat-pangolin-zebra-human Coronaviral zoonosis’, there is no doubt the bug has, relatively, benefited China
This decade will, therefore, be the decade when China comprehensively and definitively overtakes the USA as the world’s pre-eminent power
Not a great time for the USA to be led by a doddery old bloke, or be mired in culture wars around ridiculous Marxist woke-crap, but maybe they are symptoms of that same American decline, and therefore predictable, if not inevitable
The ridiculous woke crap includes treating minorities with respect, rather than subjecting them to genocide. I'd say that's a competitive advantage for the US.
There is a sweet midpoint between ‘stopping police from shooting black people all the time’ and ‘burning down Portland because we don’t need police at all’
Unfortunately, America seems determined to miss that sweet spot, and swing wildly and dangerously to the burning cities bit
(CNN)Major American cities saw a 33% increase in homicides last year as a pandemic swept across the country, millions of people joined protests against racial injustice and police brutality, and the economy collapsed under the weight of the pandemic — a crime surge that has continued into the first quarter of this year.
No one's arguing the US is perfect, least of all me. But I'm pretty clear which of the two countries smart immigrant engineers and scientists might see as the more attractive destination.
And the idea that China is a guaranteed global hegemon, as opposed to one of two world superpowers, is just silly.
I'm not convinced that Chinese genocide of Uighurs in Xinjiang is likely to deter promising non-Uighur scientists from moving to Beijing or Shanghai, which are thousands of miles away geographically, and even further in societal terms.
American police killing unarmed black people in Minneapolis is (arguably) as much of a deterrent to people moving to New York/LA.
Look at the list of authors on pretty well any US research publication, and compare with those on Chinese research papers. And look at what's happening in Hong Kong.
I think that's reasonable objective evidence for relative attractiveness.
That'a not to say that China doesn't have very good science, and a huge supply of domestic science graduates. The growing breadth and depth of their research efforts is extremely impressive.
But they have problems which the US does not - including a coming demographic crunch. (indeed it's not entirely inconceivable that the US population overtakes theirs in the next half century, should the US decide once again that immigration is rather a good idea...)
Another telling point is Westerners who have taken positions in Chinese Universities have started to leave over the last few years. (Two of my friends have). The restrictions on foreign nationals have become more & more cumbersome & irritating.
Chinese science has made excellent progress, but it is still well behind the US, UK, all of Western Europe, Russia, Japan, Korea and some parts of Eastern Europe in terms of consistent quality of research outputs (but perhaps not quantity).
There is also extensive political interference in academic appointments & funding for scientific projects.
A gifted Chinese scientist will almost always prefer a job in a good Western University even against the most prestigIous & wealthy Chinese university like Tsinghua. China are still losing their very best scientists.
And yet, weirdly, Chinese universities are ascending the global rankings.
‘Oxford has been named the world’s best university for the fifth consecutive year. But the latest rankings show that it’s China's universities that are the rising stars of global higher education.‘
I feel like a man on the balcony of a hotel in Phuket, pointing at a distant but incoming tsunami, while the rest of you are down in the bar having a chat about the day’s surfing
Being bullied and patronised by the USA has not always been a comfortable experience since WW2 but we have on the main been on the same page and pretended to believe the same things. A century where China is the dominant power will have us harkening after the good old days without a doubt. Basic freedoms and principles that we hold dear will be quashed as will countries who find themselves in China's way and there will be nothing we can do about it.
I think we should be starting to brace ourselves for such a world, that we should stop China buying up enterprise companies with IP in the west, restrict their access to our markets and go as far as we need to go to make sure that we are not beholden to them for things our society needs to operate. But we can't stop it. The pass was sold when they were given pretty much unrestricted access to our markets in the name of "free trade" which has proven to be nothing of the sort. They now have sufficient critical mass not to be vulnerable anymore.
Yes. They are invulnerable. And uncontainable. In a way the USSR never was. Because they are the biggest trader on earth. When they absorb Taiwan - as they shall - this supremacy will harden.
So, as you say, it’s too late. The best we can do is make sure we keep crucial tech, science, etc, in western hands (even if they have them too) so they cannot bully us. And we really need to ditch the worst of wokeness, even as we pray their curtailed liberties hinder them assuming total power
At the moment the trends aren’t great, there is too much basic denial. As we see here
We should also ditch the defeatism.
China's regime needs to keep convincing its burgeoning middle class that its way is better than the west's. That the new Chinese don't need all this democracy bullsh8t.
If, as in the past, the West's enormous powers of innovation allow it to pull ahead technically once again, the Chinese regime has a big problem.
That is why China has tried desperately to get its fingers into as much Western know-how as possible. It needs absolutely to cover all those bases.
It cannot afford to have Westerners trolling about in air cars, making use of fusion power and flying from London to Sydney in four hours while its citizens cannot.
That is the way to beat Xi.
It’s easy to sneer at its politicians, its guns, its culture wars. But America remains the most extraordinary boiling pot of innovation, collaboration and optimism that arguably humans have ever constructed.
And this, as Laloux states in his opening chapters, comes down to how its citizens can conceptualize their purpose and role in society, and hence how they are able to conceive of new ways of organizing.
For all those that decry the woke generation, they are in fact evolving those concepts and developing new approaches to organizing that we crusties hate because they make us uncomfortable. I, for one, do not despair with the coming generation, but see them as our hope to evolve away from the globe-destroying global corporate model to something more people, rather than product, oriented.
The next generation is, literally, stupider than us.
I guess every 20 or 30 years there must have been some nutter in Rome, during the Empire, who pointed to the East and screamed ‘the barbarians are coming!’
For 500 years he was wrong and everyone carried on, just ignoring him.
But then, one day, he was right.
I AM THAT SCREAMING NUTTER
Glad you've reached self-awareness.
I don't think any of us doubt that China will be the biggest power economically and militarily. The question is how dominant and for how long with their current blend of political and societal thinking.
For myself, I think they won't be the single hegemon, but the most powerful of 2 or 3 (US/West and India), and that they will not, unless they change their political and societal philosophy, achieve even leading group status on thought and culture. If they do change, then they won't be the beast to fear.
So I am reasonably confident the West will not be submerged under a Chinese political cultural wave, at least not in its current form.
Let’s hope you’re right
But consider this. What if it turns out state directed, high surveillance Asian capitalism is much more efficient, and enriching, than looser, western capitalism which obsesses about transphobic computers?
You don’t have to look far for an example. Covid 19. Yes the west has produced marvelous vaccines, it seems, but the East Asians don’t really need them, as they have managed the disease so much better than us. Their economies have barely shrunk. Ours have shriveled. They are better at this. Partly because they have applied technology in a cleverer but more imposing way.
If this trend continues and China becomes Singapore times a million, China will completely dominate, surrounded by hi tech Asian satellites, even as Philip Thompson is still wibbling on about multi-gender bogs
You can already see this Chinese leadership in developing countries. Does any African nation now look to the USA as an exemplar? The divided, violent USA which recently elected a madman, is riven with crime and drug addiction, and which endured an attempted coup about 5 minutes ago?
No, they do not. They look to China, which surges in strength and enriches its people. That’s the nation and the system they want to copy
There's much to like here but I think it's best if I pick out what isn't. And that's the inference that "we" in the democratic west are having our "moral fibre" - and thus our ability to compete with the totalitarian east - eroded by our overly precious concern for racial and gender equality and for the rights of sundry minorities to live their best authentic lives. This is tosh. Unpleasant tosh too, since it hints at a desire to big up and use the sino threat to turn the clock back on social progress.
And yet if you asked a random selection of the world's population: which country would you choose to live in, USA or China?, the answer would be overwhelmingly USA. If the future is Chinese it's a pretty bleak future and not one that most people would opt for.
What a ridiculous hypothetical. America is rich, China isn’t, yet.
Would you rather live in Detroit or Singapore? That’s a more interesting and telling question. Fifty years ago, Detroit, for sure. Now no one would give that answer
Ditto Pittsburgh v Taipei, or Cleveland v Seoul
Maybe but Singapore, Taipei and Seoul are all democracies like the USA and unlike China, that is the point
Doesn’t look to me as though batting is too easy anywhere today, possibly due to the weather. Certainly it’s dark and cold at Taunton.
Wonderful sunny spring day here in Llandudno sitting on our patio drinking coffee and looking out the sun cream
I hate to be uncharacteristically pessimistic, but the warm sunny weather predicted for the rest of April, in london, at last - 17C and a southerly breeze - has suddenly reverted to cool, grey and cloudy. AGAIN
Get yourself into the country, boy. It’s warmer here; or at least it is, down by the sea.
Which town in the UK has the highest annual temperature in combination with low rainfall. I may move there. In Essex/Kent maybe?
Doesn’t look to me as though batting is too easy anywhere today, possibly due to the weather. Certainly it’s dark and cold at Taunton.
Wonderful sunny spring day here in Llandudno sitting on our patio drinking coffee and looking out the sun cream
I hate to be uncharacteristically pessimistic, but the warm sunny weather predicted for the rest of April, in london, at last - 17C and a southerly breeze - has suddenly reverted to cool, grey and cloudy. AGAIN
Get yourself into the country, boy. It’s warmer here; or at least it is, down by the sea.
Which town in the UK has the highest annual temperature in combination with low rainfall. I may move there. In Essex/Kent maybe?
Somewhere around Eastbourne, I think.
There’s a little sliver of the south coast which has a dry, sunny climate more like the Dordogne than the rest of the UK
For annual mildness you want southwest Cornwall. Around Falmouth? But lots of rain. For sunlight hours maybe eastern Essex or Kent. Mersea, maybe. But cold winds
This is obviously pandemic bounce back, but it’s worth remembering China was the only major economy to grow LAST year. Whether the bug was deliberately created, accidentally leaked, or ‘spontaneously leapt from bat to pangolin to zebra to human in the middle of the city with the world’s only lab researching bat-pangolin-zebra-human Coronaviral zoonosis’, there is no doubt the bug has, relatively, benefited China
This decade will, therefore, be the decade when China comprehensively and definitively overtakes the USA as the world’s pre-eminent power
Not a great time for the USA to be led by a doddery old bloke, or be mired in culture wars around ridiculous Marxist woke-crap, but maybe they are symptoms of that same American decline, and therefore predictable, if not inevitable
The ridiculous woke crap includes treating minorities with respect, rather than subjecting them to genocide. I'd say that's a competitive advantage for the US.
There is a sweet midpoint between ‘stopping police from shooting black people all the time’ and ‘burning down Portland because we don’t need police at all’
Unfortunately, America seems determined to miss that sweet spot, and swing wildly and dangerously to the burning cities bit
(CNN)Major American cities saw a 33% increase in homicides last year as a pandemic swept across the country, millions of people joined protests against racial injustice and police brutality, and the economy collapsed under the weight of the pandemic — a crime surge that has continued into the first quarter of this year.
No one's arguing the US is perfect, least of all me. But I'm pretty clear which of the two countries smart immigrant engineers and scientists might see as the more attractive destination.
And the idea that China is a guaranteed global hegemon, as opposed to one of two world superpowers, is just silly.
I'm not convinced that Chinese genocide of Uighurs in Xinjiang is likely to deter promising non-Uighur scientists from moving to Beijing or Shanghai, which are thousands of miles away geographically, and even further in societal terms.
American police killing unarmed black people in Minneapolis is (arguably) as much of a deterrent to people moving to New York/LA.
Look at the list of authors on pretty well any US research publication, and compare with those on Chinese research papers. And look at what's happening in Hong Kong.
I think that's reasonable objective evidence for relative attractiveness.
That'a not to say that China doesn't have very good science, and a huge supply of domestic science graduates. The growing breadth and depth of their research efforts is extremely impressive.
But they have problems which the US does not - including a coming demographic crunch. (indeed it's not entirely inconceivable that the US population overtakes theirs in the next half century, should the US decide once again that immigration is rather a good idea...)
Another telling point is Westerners who have taken positions in Chinese Universities have started to leave over the last few years. (Two of my friends have). The restrictions on foreign nationals have become more & more cumbersome & irritating.
Chinese science has made excellent progress, but it is still well behind the US, UK, all of Western Europe, Russia, Japan, Korea and some parts of Eastern Europe in terms of consistent quality of research outputs (but perhaps not quantity).
There is also extensive political interference in academic appointments & funding for scientific projects.
A gifted Chinese scientist will almost always prefer a job in a good Western University even against the most prestigIous & wealthy Chinese university like Tsinghua. China are still losing their very best scientists.
And yet, weirdly, Chinese universities are ascending the global rankings.
‘Oxford has been named the world’s best university for the fifth consecutive year. But the latest rankings show that it’s China's universities that are the rising stars of global higher education.‘
I feel like a man on the balcony of a hotel in Phuket, pointing at a distant but incoming tsunami, while the rest of you are down in the bar having a chat about the day’s surfing
Being bullied and patronised by the USA has not always been a comfortable experience since WW2 but we have on the main been on the same page and pretended to believe the same things. A century where China is the dominant power will have us harkening after the good old days without a doubt. Basic freedoms and principles that we hold dear will be quashed as will countries who find themselves in China's way and there will be nothing we can do about it.
I think we should be starting to brace ourselves for such a world, that we should stop China buying up enterprise companies with IP in the west, restrict their access to our markets and go as far as we need to go to make sure that we are not beholden to them for things our society needs to operate. But we can't stop it. The pass was sold when they were given pretty much unrestricted access to our markets in the name of "free trade" which has proven to be nothing of the sort. They now have sufficient critical mass not to be vulnerable anymore.
Yes. They are invulnerable. And uncontainable. In a way the USSR never was. Because they are the biggest trader on earth. When they absorb Taiwan - as they shall - this supremacy will harden.
So, as you say, it’s too late. The best we can do is make sure we keep crucial tech, science, etc, in western hands (even if they have them too) so they cannot bully us. And we really need to ditch the worst of wokeness, even as we pray their curtailed liberties hinder them assuming total power
At the moment the trends aren’t great, there is too much basic denial. As we see here
We should also ditch the defeatism.
China's regime needs to keep convincing its burgeoning middle class that its way is better than the west's. That the new Chinese don't need all this democracy bullsh8t.
If, as in the past, the West's enormous powers of innovation allow it to pull ahead technically once again, the Chinese regime has a big problem.
That is why China has tried desperately to get its fingers into as much Western know-how as possible. It needs absolutely to cover all those bases.
It cannot afford to have Westerners trolling about in air cars, making use of fusion power and flying from London to Sydney in four hours while its citizens cannot.
That is the way to beat Xi.
It’s easy to sneer at its politicians, its guns, its culture wars. But America remains the most extraordinary boiling pot of innovation, collaboration and optimism that arguably humans have ever constructed.
And this, as Laloux states in his opening chapters, comes down to how its citizens can conceptualize their purpose and role in society, and hence how they are able to conceive of new ways of organizing.
For all those that decry the woke generation, they are in fact evolving those concepts and developing new approaches to organizing that we crusties hate because they make us uncomfortable. I, for one, do not despair with the coming generation, but see them as our hope to evolve away from the globe-destroying global corporate model to something more people, rather than product, oriented.
The next generation is, literally, stupider than us.
I guess every 20 or 30 years there must have been some nutter in Rome, during the Empire, who pointed to the East and screamed ‘the barbarians are coming!’
For 500 years he was wrong and everyone carried on, just ignoring him.
But then, one day, he was right.
I AM THAT SCREAMING NUTTER
Glad you've reached self-awareness.
I don't think any of us doubt that China will be the biggest power economically and militarily. The question is how dominant and for how long with their current blend of political and societal thinking.
For myself, I think they won't be the single hegemon, but the most powerful of 2 or 3 (US/West and India), and that they will not, unless they change their political and societal philosophy, achieve even leading group status on thought and culture. If they do change, then they won't be the beast to fear.
So I am reasonably confident the West will not be submerged under a Chinese political cultural wave, at least not in its current form.
Let’s hope you’re right
But consider this. What if it turns out state directed, high surveillance Asian capitalism is much more efficient, and enriching, than looser, western capitalism which obsesses about transphobic computers?
You don’t have to look far for an example. Covid 19. Yes the west has produced marvelous vaccines, it seems, but the East Asians don’t really need them, as they have managed the disease so much better than us. Their economies have barely shrunk. Ours have shriveled. They are better at this. Partly because they have applied technology in a cleverer but more imposing way.
If this trend continues and China becomes Singapore times a million, China will completely dominate, surrounded by hi tech Asian satellites, even as Philip Thompson is still wibbling on about multi-gender bogs
You can already see this Chinese leadership in developing countries. Does any African nation now look to the USA as an exemplar? The divided, violent USA which recently elected a madman, is riven with crime and drug addiction, and which endured an attempted coup about 5 minutes ago?
No, they do not. They look to China, which surges in strength and enriches its people. That’s the nation and the system they want to copy
There's much to like here but I think it's best if I pick out what isn't. And that's the inference that "we" in the democratic west are having our "moral fibre" - and thus our ability to compete with the totalitarian east - eroded by our overly precious concern for racial and gender equality and for the rights of sundry minorities to live their best authentic lives. This is tosh. Unpleasant tosh too, since it hints at a desire to big up and use the sino threat to turn the clock back on social progress.
And yet if you asked a random selection of the world's population: which country would you choose to live in, USA or China?, the answer would be overwhelmingly USA. If the future is Chinese it's a pretty bleak future and not one that most people would opt for.
Exactly. There are things to learn from China but one of them is not how they are impervious to human rights as they strive to satisfy the economic needs of a billion people. The idea that if we stopped fretting about race and gender equality it would free up all this energy that could be poured into wealth creation and "manning up" to totalitarian bullies, just like we used to in the good old days, is the most frightful 'Freddie Forsyth' type nonsense. It's total revolving bow tie reactionary stuff. We need to see less of it.
Doesn’t look to me as though batting is too easy anywhere today, possibly due to the weather. Certainly it’s dark and cold at Taunton.
Wonderful sunny spring day here in Llandudno sitting on our patio drinking coffee and looking out the sun cream
I hate to be uncharacteristically pessimistic, but the warm sunny weather predicted for the rest of April, in london, at last - 17C and a southerly breeze - has suddenly reverted to cool, grey and cloudy. AGAIN
Get yourself into the country, boy. It’s warmer here; or at least it is, down by the sea.
Which town in the UK has the highest annual temperature in combination with low rainfall. I may move there. In Essex/Kent maybe?
Somewhere around Eastbourne, I think.
There’s a little sliver of the south coast which has a dry, sunny climate more like the Dordogne than the rest of the UK
For annual mildness you want southwest Cornwall. Around Falmouth? But lots of rain. For sunlight hours maybe eastern Essex or Kent. Mersea, maybe. But cold winds
Warmest overall temps, but not low rain, is St Mawes and the Roseland Peninsula, if you are to believe the local propaganda
The difference in lead is again down to the Labour score.
Now do we still believe in the old adage of take the worst Labour score across a range of polls or not? I have to say I think the other poll with Labour sub 30% was big outliers, Labour get 30% regardless of who or what.
As its big night approaches, the Academy is staring disaster in the face. As well as the fact that the Oscars’ TV ratings have been declining for years, the catastrophic audience figures for the Golden Globes last month disappointing viewer numbers for the Baftas last Sunday demonstrated that the Covid-era awards show has proved a dramatic turn-off. The televised Academy Awards show, due to air on 25 April, is likely to attract its smallest audience ever which could have a disastrous effect on the Oscars’ future.
Its like the audience doesn't like being lectured to by hypocritical actors for 2-3hrs.....while Disney+ has gone from 0 to 100 million subscribers in just over a year.
Touching to note that the guardian believes the Oscars can be saved by ‘more diversity’
Whenever I hear people complaining about TV or movies, it is usually a ‘lack of Wokeness’ that bothers them. ‘Why can’t we have more BAME news presenters’ is a phrase so often heard, it’s like a mantra.
I'm surprised All Souls College Oxford has got off so lightly considering the Rhodes business and its very, very dodgy connections with the slave trade, but I see they have been virtue signalling furiously in the past couple of years in advance of any aggro.
As its big night approaches, the Academy is staring disaster in the face. As well as the fact that the Oscars’ TV ratings have been declining for years, the catastrophic audience figures for the Golden Globes last month disappointing viewer numbers for the Baftas last Sunday demonstrated that the Covid-era awards show has proved a dramatic turn-off. The televised Academy Awards show, due to air on 25 April, is likely to attract its smallest audience ever which could have a disastrous effect on the Oscars’ future.
Its like the audience doesn't like being lectured to by hypocritical actors for 2-3hrs.....while Disney+ has gone from 0 to 100 million subscribers in just over a year.
Touching to note that the guardian believes the Oscars can be saved by ‘more diversity’
Whenever I hear people complaining about TV or movies, it is usually a ‘lack of Wokeness’ that bothers them. ‘Why can’t we have more BAME news presenters’ is a phrase so often heard, it’s like a mantra.
Its like the EU, the solution to every problem is more.
The difference in lead is again down to the Labour score.
Now do we still believe in the old adage of take the worst Labour score across a range of polls or not? I have to say I think the other poll with Labour sub 30% was big outliers, Labour get 30% regardless of who or what.
They didn’t under Brown.
But it’s hard to believe that still applies after 11 years in opposition.
Doesn’t look to me as though batting is too easy anywhere today, possibly due to the weather. Certainly it’s dark and cold at Taunton.
Wonderful sunny spring day here in Llandudno sitting on our patio drinking coffee and looking out the sun cream
I hate to be uncharacteristically pessimistic, but the warm sunny weather predicted for the rest of April, in london, at last - 17C and a southerly breeze - has suddenly reverted to cool, grey and cloudy. AGAIN
Get yourself into the country, boy. It’s warmer here; or at least it is, down by the sea.
Which town in the UK has the highest annual temperature in combination with low rainfall. I may move there. In Essex/Kent maybe?
Somewhere around Eastbourne, I think.
There’s a little sliver of the south coast which has a dry, sunny climate more like the Dordogne than the rest of the UK
For annual mildness you want southwest Cornwall. Around Falmouth? But lots of rain. For sunlight hours maybe eastern Essex or Kent. Mersea, maybe. But cold winds
Warmest overall temps, but not low rain, is St Mawes and the Roseland Peninsula, if you are to believe the local propaganda
I think Flushing, just across from St Mawes, takes the statistical biscuit
A lovely part of the world, to be sure. Sitting on the terrace of the Idle Rocks hotel, quaffing Helford oysters and English fizz on a sunny day, is one of the great pleasures of human life
This is obviously pandemic bounce back, but it’s worth remembering China was the only major economy to grow LAST year. Whether the bug was deliberately created, accidentally leaked, or ‘spontaneously leapt from bat to pangolin to zebra to human in the middle of the city with the world’s only lab researching bat-pangolin-zebra-human Coronaviral zoonosis’, there is no doubt the bug has, relatively, benefited China
This decade will, therefore, be the decade when China comprehensively and definitively overtakes the USA as the world’s pre-eminent power
Not a great time for the USA to be led by a doddery old bloke, or be mired in culture wars around ridiculous Marxist woke-crap, but maybe they are symptoms of that same American decline, and therefore predictable, if not inevitable
The ridiculous woke crap includes treating minorities with respect, rather than subjecting them to genocide. I'd say that's a competitive advantage for the US.
There is a sweet midpoint between ‘stopping police from shooting black people all the time’ and ‘burning down Portland because we don’t need police at all’
Unfortunately, America seems determined to miss that sweet spot, and swing wildly and dangerously to the burning cities bit
(CNN)Major American cities saw a 33% increase in homicides last year as a pandemic swept across the country, millions of people joined protests against racial injustice and police brutality, and the economy collapsed under the weight of the pandemic — a crime surge that has continued into the first quarter of this year.
No one's arguing the US is perfect, least of all me. But I'm pretty clear which of the two countries smart immigrant engineers and scientists might see as the more attractive destination.
And the idea that China is a guaranteed global hegemon, as opposed to one of two world superpowers, is just silly.
I'm not convinced that Chinese genocide of Uighurs in Xinjiang is likely to deter promising non-Uighur scientists from moving to Beijing or Shanghai, which are thousands of miles away geographically, and even further in societal terms.
American police killing unarmed black people in Minneapolis is (arguably) as much of a deterrent to people moving to New York/LA.
Look at the list of authors on pretty well any US research publication, and compare with those on Chinese research papers. And look at what's happening in Hong Kong.
I think that's reasonable objective evidence for relative attractiveness.
That'a not to say that China doesn't have very good science, and a huge supply of domestic science graduates. The growing breadth and depth of their research efforts is extremely impressive.
But they have problems which the US does not - including a coming demographic crunch. (indeed it's not entirely inconceivable that the US population overtakes theirs in the next half century, should the US decide once again that immigration is rather a good idea...)
Another telling point is Westerners who have taken positions in Chinese Universities have started to leave over the last few years. (Two of my friends have). The restrictions on foreign nationals have become more & more cumbersome & irritating.
Chinese science has made excellent progress, but it is still well behind the US, UK, all of Western Europe, Russia, Japan, Korea and some parts of Eastern Europe in terms of consistent quality of research outputs (but perhaps not quantity).
There is also extensive political interference in academic appointments & funding for scientific projects.
A gifted Chinese scientist will almost always prefer a job in a good Western University even against the most prestigIous & wealthy Chinese university like Tsinghua. China are still losing their very best scientists.
And yet, weirdly, Chinese universities are ascending the global rankings.
‘Oxford has been named the world’s best university for the fifth consecutive year. But the latest rankings show that it’s China's universities that are the rising stars of global higher education.‘
I feel like a man on the balcony of a hotel in Phuket, pointing at a distant but incoming tsunami, while the rest of you are down in the bar having a chat about the day’s surfing
Being bullied and patronised by the USA has not always been a comfortable experience since WW2 but we have on the main been on the same page and pretended to believe the same things. A century where China is the dominant power will have us harkening after the good old days without a doubt. Basic freedoms and principles that we hold dear will be quashed as will countries who find themselves in China's way and there will be nothing we can do about it.
I think we should be starting to brace ourselves for such a world, that we should stop China buying up enterprise companies with IP in the west, restrict their access to our markets and go as far as we need to go to make sure that we are not beholden to them for things our society needs to operate. But we can't stop it. The pass was sold when they were given pretty much unrestricted access to our markets in the name of "free trade" which has proven to be nothing of the sort. They now have sufficient critical mass not to be vulnerable anymore.
Yes. They are invulnerable. And uncontainable. In a way the USSR never was. Because they are the biggest trader on earth. When they absorb Taiwan - as they shall - this supremacy will harden.
So, as you say, it’s too late. The best we can do is make sure we keep crucial tech, science, etc, in western hands (even if they have them too) so they cannot bully us. And we really need to ditch the worst of wokeness, even as we pray their curtailed liberties hinder them assuming total power
At the moment the trends aren’t great, there is too much basic denial. As we see here
We should also ditch the defeatism.
China's regime needs to keep convincing its burgeoning middle class that its way is better than the west's. That the new Chinese don't need all this democracy bullsh8t.
If, as in the past, the West's enormous powers of innovation allow it to pull ahead technically once again, the Chinese regime has a big problem.
That is why China has tried desperately to get its fingers into as much Western know-how as possible. It needs absolutely to cover all those bases.
It cannot afford to have Westerners trolling about in air cars, making use of fusion power and flying from London to Sydney in four hours while its citizens cannot.
That is the way to beat Xi.
It’s easy to sneer at its politicians, its guns, its culture wars. But America remains the most extraordinary boiling pot of innovation, collaboration and optimism that arguably humans have ever constructed.
And this, as Laloux states in his opening chapters, comes down to how its citizens can conceptualize their purpose and role in society, and hence how they are able to conceive of new ways of organizing.
For all those that decry the woke generation, they are in fact evolving those concepts and developing new approaches to organizing that we crusties hate because they make us uncomfortable. I, for one, do not despair with the coming generation, but see them as our hope to evolve away from the globe-destroying global corporate model to something more people, rather than product, oriented.
The next generation is, literally, stupider than us.
I guess every 20 or 30 years there must have been some nutter in Rome, during the Empire, who pointed to the East and screamed ‘the barbarians are coming!’
For 500 years he was wrong and everyone carried on, just ignoring him.
But then, one day, he was right.
I AM THAT SCREAMING NUTTER
Glad you've reached self-awareness.
I don't think any of us doubt that China will be the biggest power economically and militarily. The question is how dominant and for how long with their current blend of political and societal thinking.
For myself, I think they won't be the single hegemon, but the most powerful of 2 or 3 (US/West and India), and that they will not, unless they change their political and societal philosophy, achieve even leading group status on thought and culture. If they do change, then they won't be the beast to fear.
So I am reasonably confident the West will not be submerged under a Chinese political cultural wave, at least not in its current form.
Let’s hope you’re right
But consider this. What if it turns out state directed, high surveillance Asian capitalism is much more efficient, and enriching, than looser, western capitalism which obsesses about transphobic computers?
You don’t have to look far for an example. Covid 19. Yes the west has produced marvelous vaccines, it seems, but the East Asians don’t really need them, as they have managed the disease so much better than us. Their economies have barely shrunk. Ours have shriveled. They are better at this. Partly because they have applied technology in a cleverer but more imposing way.
If this trend continues and China becomes Singapore times a million, China will completely dominate, surrounded by hi tech Asian satellites, even as Philip Thompson is still wibbling on about multi-gender bogs
You can already see this Chinese leadership in developing countries. Does any African nation now look to the USA as an exemplar? The divided, violent USA which recently elected a madman, is riven with crime and drug addiction, and which endured an attempted coup about 5 minutes ago?
No, they do not. They look to China, which surges in strength and enriches its people. That’s the nation and the system they want to copy
There's much to like here but I think it's best if I pick out what isn't. And that's the inference that "we" in the democratic west are having our "moral fibre" - and thus our ability to compete with the totalitarian east - eroded by our overly precious concern for racial and gender equality and for the rights of sundry minorities to live their best authentic lives. This is tosh. Unpleasant tosh too, since it hints at a desire to big up and use the sino threat to turn the clock back on social progress.
‘The rights of sundry minorities to lead their best, authentic lives’ has to be right up there in terms of patronising, sanctimonious, world-class bullshit. What does it even mean? What is a ‘best authentic life’ for a BAME person?
What valueless, meretricious nonsense
It was a perfectly good sentence. It means, for example, respecting transgender people instead of using them as a cheap hook to hang cheap points for a (you hope) cheap audience on.
That is one of the feeblest attacks on a minister for a long time. Not only would it be entirely unremarkable and uncontroversial; for a document-shredding business to happen to have the NHS amongst its customers, in this case it was NHS Wales, which is nothing to do with Matt Hancock. And even if it were NHS England, does Labour really think that the Secretary of State knows anything at all about small contracts for document disposal, or that a minor shareholder has a list of all the company's customers?
They've completely lost their marbles. Smears as pathetic as that are counter-productive.
Agreed. All it does is remind those business minded centrist folk such as myself that Labour still really doesn't understand/like business.
This is obviously pandemic bounce back, but it’s worth remembering China was the only major economy to grow LAST year. Whether the bug was deliberately created, accidentally leaked, or ‘spontaneously leapt from bat to pangolin to zebra to human in the middle of the city with the world’s only lab researching bat-pangolin-zebra-human Coronaviral zoonosis’, there is no doubt the bug has, relatively, benefited China
This decade will, therefore, be the decade when China comprehensively and definitively overtakes the USA as the world’s pre-eminent power
Not a great time for the USA to be led by a doddery old bloke, or be mired in culture wars around ridiculous Marxist woke-crap, but maybe they are symptoms of that same American decline, and therefore predictable, if not inevitable
The ridiculous woke crap includes treating minorities with respect, rather than subjecting them to genocide. I'd say that's a competitive advantage for the US.
There is a sweet midpoint between ‘stopping police from shooting black people all the time’ and ‘burning down Portland because we don’t need police at all’
Unfortunately, America seems determined to miss that sweet spot, and swing wildly and dangerously to the burning cities bit
(CNN)Major American cities saw a 33% increase in homicides last year as a pandemic swept across the country, millions of people joined protests against racial injustice and police brutality, and the economy collapsed under the weight of the pandemic — a crime surge that has continued into the first quarter of this year.
No one's arguing the US is perfect, least of all me. But I'm pretty clear which of the two countries smart immigrant engineers and scientists might see as the more attractive destination.
And the idea that China is a guaranteed global hegemon, as opposed to one of two world superpowers, is just silly.
I'm not convinced that Chinese genocide of Uighurs in Xinjiang is likely to deter promising non-Uighur scientists from moving to Beijing or Shanghai, which are thousands of miles away geographically, and even further in societal terms.
American police killing unarmed black people in Minneapolis is (arguably) as much of a deterrent to people moving to New York/LA.
Look at the list of authors on pretty well any US research publication, and compare with those on Chinese research papers. And look at what's happening in Hong Kong.
I think that's reasonable objective evidence for relative attractiveness.
That'a not to say that China doesn't have very good science, and a huge supply of domestic science graduates. The growing breadth and depth of their research efforts is extremely impressive.
But they have problems which the US does not - including a coming demographic crunch. (indeed it's not entirely inconceivable that the US population overtakes theirs in the next half century, should the US decide once again that immigration is rather a good idea...)
Another telling point is Westerners who have taken positions in Chinese Universities have started to leave over the last few years. (Two of my friends have). The restrictions on foreign nationals have become more & more cumbersome & irritating.
Chinese science has made excellent progress, but it is still well behind the US, UK, all of Western Europe, Russia, Japan, Korea and some parts of Eastern Europe in terms of consistent quality of research outputs (but perhaps not quantity).
There is also extensive political interference in academic appointments & funding for scientific projects.
A gifted Chinese scientist will almost always prefer a job in a good Western University even against the most prestigIous & wealthy Chinese university like Tsinghua. China are still losing their very best scientists.
And yet, weirdly, Chinese universities are ascending the global rankings.
‘Oxford has been named the world’s best university for the fifth consecutive year. But the latest rankings show that it’s China's universities that are the rising stars of global higher education.‘
I feel like a man on the balcony of a hotel in Phuket, pointing at a distant but incoming tsunami, while the rest of you are down in the bar having a chat about the day’s surfing
Being bullied and patronised by the USA has not always been a comfortable experience since WW2 but we have on the main been on the same page and pretended to believe the same things. A century where China is the dominant power will have us harkening after the good old days without a doubt. Basic freedoms and principles that we hold dear will be quashed as will countries who find themselves in China's way and there will be nothing we can do about it.
I think we should be starting to brace ourselves for such a world, that we should stop China buying up enterprise companies with IP in the west, restrict their access to our markets and go as far as we need to go to make sure that we are not beholden to them for things our society needs to operate. But we can't stop it. The pass was sold when they were given pretty much unrestricted access to our markets in the name of "free trade" which has proven to be nothing of the sort. They now have sufficient critical mass not to be vulnerable anymore.
Yes. They are invulnerable. And uncontainable. In a way the USSR never was. Because they are the biggest trader on earth. When they absorb Taiwan - as they shall - this supremacy will harden.
So, as you say, it’s too late. The best we can do is make sure we keep crucial tech, science, etc, in western hands (even if they have them too) so they cannot bully us. And we really need to ditch the worst of wokeness, even as we pray their curtailed liberties hinder them assuming total power
At the moment the trends aren’t great, there is too much basic denial. As we see here
We should also ditch the defeatism.
China's regime needs to keep convincing its burgeoning middle class that its way is better than the west's. That the new Chinese don't need all this democracy bullsh8t.
If, as in the past, the West's enormous powers of innovation allow it to pull ahead technically once again, the Chinese regime has a big problem.
That is why China has tried desperately to get its fingers into as much Western know-how as possible. It needs absolutely to cover all those bases.
It cannot afford to have Westerners trolling about in air cars, making use of fusion power and flying from London to Sydney in four hours while its citizens cannot.
That is the way to beat Xi.
It’s easy to sneer at its politicians, its guns, its culture wars. But America remains the most extraordinary boiling pot of innovation, collaboration and optimism that arguably humans have ever constructed.
And this, as Laloux states in his opening chapters, comes down to how its citizens can conceptualize their purpose and role in society, and hence how they are able to conceive of new ways of organizing.
For all those that decry the woke generation, they are in fact evolving those concepts and developing new approaches to organizing that we crusties hate because they make us uncomfortable. I, for one, do not despair with the coming generation, but see them as our hope to evolve away from the globe-destroying global corporate model to something more people, rather than product, oriented.
The next generation is, literally, stupider than us.
I guess every 20 or 30 years there must have been some nutter in Rome, during the Empire, who pointed to the East and screamed ‘the barbarians are coming!’
For 500 years he was wrong and everyone carried on, just ignoring him.
But then, one day, he was right.
I AM THAT SCREAMING NUTTER
Glad you've reached self-awareness.
I don't think any of us doubt that China will be the biggest power economically and militarily. The question is how dominant and for how long with their current blend of political and societal thinking.
For myself, I think they won't be the single hegemon, but the most powerful of 2 or 3 (US/West and India), and that they will not, unless they change their political and societal philosophy, achieve even leading group status on thought and culture. If they do change, then they won't be the beast to fear.
So I am reasonably confident the West will not be submerged under a Chinese political cultural wave, at least not in its current form.
Let’s hope you’re right
But consider this. What if it turns out state directed, high surveillance Asian capitalism is much more efficient, and enriching, than looser, western capitalism which obsesses about transphobic computers?
You don’t have to look far for an example. Covid 19. Yes the west has produced marvelous vaccines, it seems, but the East Asians don’t really need them, as they have managed the disease so much better than us. Their economies have barely shrunk. Ours have shriveled. They are better at this. Partly because they have applied technology in a cleverer but more imposing way.
If this trend continues and China becomes Singapore times a million, China will completely dominate, surrounded by hi tech Asian satellites, even as Philip Thompson is still wibbling on about multi-gender bogs
You can already see this Chinese leadership in developing countries. Does any African nation now look to the USA as an exemplar? The divided, violent USA which recently elected a madman, is riven with crime and drug addiction, and which endured an attempted coup about 5 minutes ago?
No, they do not. They look to China, which surges in strength and enriches its people. That’s the nation and the system they want to copy
There's much to like here but I think it's best if I pick out what isn't. And that's the inference that "we" in the democratic west are having our "moral fibre" - and thus our ability to compete with the totalitarian east - eroded by our overly precious concern for racial and gender equality and for the rights of sundry minorities to live their best authentic lives. This is tosh. Unpleasant tosh too, since it hints at a desire to big up and use the sino threat to turn the clock back on social progress.
‘The rights of sundry minorities to lead their best, authentic lives’ has to be right up there in terms of patronising, sanctimonious, world-class bullshit. What does it even mean? What is a ‘best authentic life’ for a BAME person?
What valueless, meretricious nonsense
It was a perfectly good sentence. It means, for example, respecting transgender people instead of using them as a cheap hook to hang cheap points for a (you hope) cheap audience on.
What does it mean, then? What is the ‘best authentic life’ for ‘sundry minorities’?
I emphasize the words in quotes are yours not mine. I find them valueless and borderline offensive. But you used them. So what do they mean?
As its big night approaches, the Academy is staring disaster in the face. As well as the fact that the Oscars’ TV ratings have been declining for years, the catastrophic audience figures for the Golden Globes last month disappointing viewer numbers for the Baftas last Sunday demonstrated that the Covid-era awards show has proved a dramatic turn-off. The televised Academy Awards show, due to air on 25 April, is likely to attract its smallest audience ever which could have a disastrous effect on the Oscars’ future.
Its like the audience doesn't like being lectured to by hypocritical actors for 2-3hrs.....while Disney+ has gone from 0 to 100 million subscribers in just over a year.
Disney+ is great and the amount they have on the platform since adding Star is stunningly good value for money.
As its big night approaches, the Academy is staring disaster in the face. As well as the fact that the Oscars’ TV ratings have been declining for years, the catastrophic audience figures for the Golden Globes last month disappointing viewer numbers for the Baftas last Sunday demonstrated that the Covid-era awards show has proved a dramatic turn-off. The televised Academy Awards show, due to air on 25 April, is likely to attract its smallest audience ever which could have a disastrous effect on the Oscars’ future.
Its like the audience doesn't like being lectured to by hypocritical actors for 2-3hrs.....while Disney+ has gone from 0 to 100 million subscribers in just over a year.
Disney+ is great and the amount they have on the platform since adding Star is stunningly good value for money.
Genuine question: what is so great about Disney+?
I’m running out of good drama to watch. Yesterday, after much hunting on Netflix, I was reduced to an OKish eight year old drama set in the Israeli orthodox Jewish community. Subtitled from the Hebrew
It was decent, but it was not Breaking Bad. If there is a new reservoir of great TV, I’m in
Witney, Maidenhead & Henley (Cameron, May, and Boris' ultra Tory heartland seats) require, on average the same swing (+-0.1%) to be Con losses as Middlesbrough South and Cleveland East, and Mansfield.
As its big night approaches, the Academy is staring disaster in the face. As well as the fact that the Oscars’ TV ratings have been declining for years, the catastrophic audience figures for the Golden Globes last month disappointing viewer numbers for the Baftas last Sunday demonstrated that the Covid-era awards show has proved a dramatic turn-off. The televised Academy Awards show, due to air on 25 April, is likely to attract its smallest audience ever which could have a disastrous effect on the Oscars’ future.
Its like the audience doesn't like being lectured to by hypocritical actors for 2-3hrs.....while Disney+ has gone from 0 to 100 million subscribers in just over a year.
Disney+ is great and the amount they have on the platform since adding Star is stunningly good value for money.
Genuine question: what is so great about Disney+?
I’m running out of good drama to watch. Yesterday, after much hunting on Netflix, I was reduced to an OKish eight year old drama set in the Israeli orthodox Jewish community. Subtitled from the Hebrew
It was decent, but it was not Breaking Bad. If there is a new reservoir of great TV, I’m in
Less obvious series which are excellent include: Rectify, Unbelievable, Godless, American Crime and My Brilliant Friend.
As its big night approaches, the Academy is staring disaster in the face. As well as the fact that the Oscars’ TV ratings have been declining for years, the catastrophic audience figures for the Golden Globes last month disappointing viewer numbers for the Baftas last Sunday demonstrated that the Covid-era awards show has proved a dramatic turn-off. The televised Academy Awards show, due to air on 25 April, is likely to attract its smallest audience ever which could have a disastrous effect on the Oscars’ future.
Its like the audience doesn't like being lectured to by hypocritical actors for 2-3hrs.....while Disney+ has gone from 0 to 100 million subscribers in just over a year.
Disney+ is great and the amount they have on the platform since adding Star is stunningly good value for money.
Genuine question: what is so great about Disney+?
I’m running out of good drama to watch. Yesterday, after much hunting on Netflix, I was reduced to an OKish eight year old drama set in the Israeli orthodox Jewish community. Subtitled from the Hebrew
It was decent, but it was not Breaking Bad. If there is a new reservoir of great TV, I’m in
As its big night approaches, the Academy is staring disaster in the face. As well as the fact that the Oscars’ TV ratings have been declining for years, the catastrophic audience figures for the Golden Globes last month disappointing viewer numbers for the Baftas last Sunday demonstrated that the Covid-era awards show has proved a dramatic turn-off. The televised Academy Awards show, due to air on 25 April, is likely to attract its smallest audience ever which could have a disastrous effect on the Oscars’ future.
Its like the audience doesn't like being lectured to by hypocritical actors for 2-3hrs.....while Disney+ has gone from 0 to 100 million subscribers in just over a year.
Disney+ is great and the amount they have on the platform since adding Star is stunningly good value for money.
Genuine question: what is so great about Disney+?
I’m running out of good drama to watch. Yesterday, after much hunting on Netflix, I was reduced to an OKish eight year old drama set in the Israeli orthodox Jewish community. Subtitled from the Hebrew
It was decent, but it was not Breaking Bad. If there is a new reservoir of great TV, I’m in
Less obvious series which are excellent include: Rectify, Unbelievable, Godless, American Crime and My Brilliant Friend.
Have you seen those?
Seen Godless. Pretty good. Not the others. Will check, ta
Witney, Maidenhead & Henley (Cameron, May, and Boris' ultra Tory heartland seats) require, on average the same swing (+-0.1%) to be Con losses as Middlesbrough South and Cleveland East, and Mansfield.
Was flabbergasted to learn Bolton West, for most of my life a key marginal, is now the safest Tory seat in Greater Manchester. Having powered past Altrincham and Sale West and Cheadle.
This is obviously pandemic bounce back, but it’s worth remembering China was the only major economy to grow LAST year. Whether the bug was deliberately created, accidentally leaked, or ‘spontaneously leapt from bat to pangolin to zebra to human in the middle of the city with the world’s only lab researching bat-pangolin-zebra-human Coronaviral zoonosis’, there is no doubt the bug has, relatively, benefited China
This decade will, therefore, be the decade when China comprehensively and definitively overtakes the USA as the world’s pre-eminent power
Not a great time for the USA to be led by a doddery old bloke, or be mired in culture wars around ridiculous Marxist woke-crap, but maybe they are symptoms of that same American decline, and therefore predictable, if not inevitable
The ridiculous woke crap includes treating minorities with respect, rather than subjecting them to genocide. I'd say that's a competitive advantage for the US.
There is a sweet midpoint between ‘stopping police from shooting black people all the time’ and ‘burning down Portland because we don’t need police at all’
Unfortunately, America seems determined to miss that sweet spot, and swing wildly and dangerously to the burning cities bit
(CNN)Major American cities saw a 33% increase in homicides last year as a pandemic swept across the country, millions of people joined protests against racial injustice and police brutality, and the economy collapsed under the weight of the pandemic — a crime surge that has continued into the first quarter of this year.
No one's arguing the US is perfect, least of all me. But I'm pretty clear which of the two countries smart immigrant engineers and scientists might see as the more attractive destination.
And the idea that China is a guaranteed global hegemon, as opposed to one of two world superpowers, is just silly.
I'm not convinced that Chinese genocide of Uighurs in Xinjiang is likely to deter promising non-Uighur scientists from moving to Beijing or Shanghai, which are thousands of miles away geographically, and even further in societal terms.
American police killing unarmed black people in Minneapolis is (arguably) as much of a deterrent to people moving to New York/LA.
Look at the list of authors on pretty well any US research publication, and compare with those on Chinese research papers. And look at what's happening in Hong Kong.
I think that's reasonable objective evidence for relative attractiveness.
That'a not to say that China doesn't have very good science, and a huge supply of domestic science graduates. The growing breadth and depth of their research efforts is extremely impressive.
But they have problems which the US does not - including a coming demographic crunch. (indeed it's not entirely inconceivable that the US population overtakes theirs in the next half century, should the US decide once again that immigration is rather a good idea...)
Another telling point is Westerners who have taken positions in Chinese Universities have started to leave over the last few years. (Two of my friends have). The restrictions on foreign nationals have become more & more cumbersome & irritating.
Chinese science has made excellent progress, but it is still well behind the US, UK, all of Western Europe, Russia, Japan, Korea and some parts of Eastern Europe in terms of consistent quality of research outputs (but perhaps not quantity).
There is also extensive political interference in academic appointments & funding for scientific projects.
A gifted Chinese scientist will almost always prefer a job in a good Western University even against the most prestigIous & wealthy Chinese university like Tsinghua. China are still losing their very best scientists.
And yet, weirdly, Chinese universities are ascending the global rankings.
‘Oxford has been named the world’s best university for the fifth consecutive year. But the latest rankings show that it’s China's universities that are the rising stars of global higher education.‘
I feel like a man on the balcony of a hotel in Phuket, pointing at a distant but incoming tsunami, while the rest of you are down in the bar having a chat about the day’s surfing
Being bullied and patronised by the USA has not always been a comfortable experience since WW2 but we have on the main been on the same page and pretended to believe the same things. A century where China is the dominant power will have us harkening after the good old days without a doubt. Basic freedoms and principles that we hold dear will be quashed as will countries who find themselves in China's way and there will be nothing we can do about it.
I think we should be starting to brace ourselves for such a world, that we should stop China buying up enterprise companies with IP in the west, restrict their access to our markets and go as far as we need to go to make sure that we are not beholden to them for things our society needs to operate. But we can't stop it. The pass was sold when they were given pretty much unrestricted access to our markets in the name of "free trade" which has proven to be nothing of the sort. They now have sufficient critical mass not to be vulnerable anymore.
Yes. They are invulnerable. And uncontainable. In a way the USSR never was. Because they are the biggest trader on earth. When they absorb Taiwan - as they shall - this supremacy will harden.
So, as you say, it’s too late. The best we can do is make sure we keep crucial tech, science, etc, in western hands (even if they have them too) so they cannot bully us. And we really need to ditch the worst of wokeness, even as we pray their curtailed liberties hinder them assuming total power
At the moment the trends aren’t great, there is too much basic denial. As we see here
We should also ditch the defeatism.
China's regime needs to keep convincing its burgeoning middle class that its way is better than the west's. That the new Chinese don't need all this democracy bullsh8t.
If, as in the past, the West's enormous powers of innovation allow it to pull ahead technically once again, the Chinese regime has a big problem.
That is why China has tried desperately to get its fingers into as much Western know-how as possible. It needs absolutely to cover all those bases.
It cannot afford to have Westerners trolling about in air cars, making use of fusion power and flying from London to Sydney in four hours while its citizens cannot.
That is the way to beat Xi.
It’s easy to sneer at its politicians, its guns, its culture wars. But America remains the most extraordinary boiling pot of innovation, collaboration and optimism that arguably humans have ever constructed.
And this, as Laloux states in his opening chapters, comes down to how its citizens can conceptualize their purpose and role in society, and hence how they are able to conceive of new ways of organizing.
For all those that decry the woke generation, they are in fact evolving those concepts and developing new approaches to organizing that we crusties hate because they make us uncomfortable. I, for one, do not despair with the coming generation, but see them as our hope to evolve away from the globe-destroying global corporate model to something more people, rather than product, oriented.
The next generation is, literally, stupider than us.
I guess every 20 or 30 years there must have been some nutter in Rome, during the Empire, who pointed to the East and screamed ‘the barbarians are coming!’
For 500 years he was wrong and everyone carried on, just ignoring him.
But then, one day, he was right.
I AM THAT SCREAMING NUTTER
Glad you've reached self-awareness.
I don't think any of us doubt that China will be the biggest power economically and militarily. The question is how dominant and for how long with their current blend of political and societal thinking.
For myself, I think they won't be the single hegemon, but the most powerful of 2 or 3 (US/West and India), and that they will not, unless they change their political and societal philosophy, achieve even leading group status on thought and culture. If they do change, then they won't be the beast to fear.
So I am reasonably confident the West will not be submerged under a Chinese political cultural wave, at least not in its current form.
Let’s hope you’re right
But consider this. What if it turns out state directed, high surveillance Asian capitalism is much more efficient, and enriching, than looser, western capitalism which obsesses about transphobic computers?
You don’t have to look far for an example. Covid 19. Yes the west has produced marvelous vaccines, it seems, but the East Asians don’t really need them, as they have managed the disease so much better than us. Their economies have barely shrunk. Ours have shriveled. They are better at this. Partly because they have applied technology in a cleverer but more imposing way.
If this trend continues and China becomes Singapore times a million, China will completely dominate, surrounded by hi tech Asian satellites, even as Philip Thompson is still wibbling on about multi-gender bogs
You can already see this Chinese leadership in developing countries. Does any African nation now look to the USA as an exemplar? The divided, violent USA which recently elected a madman, is riven with crime and drug addiction, and which endured an attempted coup about 5 minutes ago?
No, they do not. They look to China, which surges in strength and enriches its people. That’s the nation and the system they want to copy
There's much to like here but I think it's best if I pick out what isn't. And that's the inference that "we" in the democratic west are having our "moral fibre" - and thus our ability to compete with the totalitarian east - eroded by our overly precious concern for racial and gender equality and for the rights of sundry minorities to live their best authentic lives. This is tosh. Unpleasant tosh too, since it hints at a desire to big up and use the sino threat to turn the clock back on social progress.
‘The rights of sundry minorities to lead their best, authentic lives’ has to be right up there in terms of patronising, sanctimonious, world-class bullshit. What does it even mean? What is a ‘best authentic life’ for a BAME person?
What valueless, meretricious nonsense
It was a perfectly good sentence. It means, for example, respecting transgender people instead of using them as a cheap hook to hang cheap points for a (you hope) cheap audience on.
What does it mean, then? What is the ‘best authentic life’ for ‘sundry minorities’?
I emphasize the words in quotes are yours not mine. I find them valueless and borderline offensive. But you used them. So what do they mean?
Best = Realizing your potential. Authentic = Not having to hide your difference. Life = Self explanatory. Sundry = Various. Minorities = People who are different.
Further to "difference" and "different" - sharply other than the norm. For example, something you mention a lot, transgender people.
Living your best authentic life. Can't see the problem. Isn't this what everybody wants to do?
As its big night approaches, the Academy is staring disaster in the face. As well as the fact that the Oscars’ TV ratings have been declining for years, the catastrophic audience figures for the Golden Globes last month disappointing viewer numbers for the Baftas last Sunday demonstrated that the Covid-era awards show has proved a dramatic turn-off. The televised Academy Awards show, due to air on 25 April, is likely to attract its smallest audience ever which could have a disastrous effect on the Oscars’ future.
Its like the audience doesn't like being lectured to by hypocritical actors for 2-3hrs.....while Disney+ has gone from 0 to 100 million subscribers in just over a year.
Disney+ is great and the amount they have on the platform since adding Star is stunningly good value for money.
Worth a watch about how Disney is just crushing everybody....its much more than the Baby Yoda factor....
Witney, Maidenhead & Henley (Cameron, May, and Boris' ultra Tory heartland seats) require, on average the same swing (+-0.1%) to be Con losses as Middlesbrough South and Cleveland East, and Mansfield.
Was flabbergasted to learn Bolton West, for most of my life a key marginal, is now the safest Tory seat in Greater Manchester. Having powered past Altrincham and Sale West and Cheadle.
My Father and Grandfather were born in Bolton of working class families and they voted Conservative
Doesn’t look to me as though batting is too easy anywhere today, possibly due to the weather. Certainly it’s dark and cold at Taunton.
Wonderful sunny spring day here in Llandudno sitting on our patio drinking coffee and looking out the sun cream
I hate to be uncharacteristically pessimistic, but the warm sunny weather predicted for the rest of April, in london, at last - 17C and a southerly breeze - has suddenly reverted to cool, grey and cloudy. AGAIN
Get yourself into the country, boy. It’s warmer here; or at least it is, down by the sea.
Which town in the UK has the highest annual temperature in combination with low rainfall. I may move there. In Essex/Kent maybe?
Somewhere around Eastbourne, I think.
There’s a little sliver of the south coast which has a dry, sunny climate more like the Dordogne than the rest of the UK
For annual mildness you want southwest Cornwall. Around Falmouth? But lots of rain. For sunlight hours maybe eastern Essex or Kent. Mersea, maybe. But cold winds
Warmest overall temps, but not low rain, is St Mawes and the Roseland Peninsula, if you are to believe the local propaganda
The thing about average annual rainfall that gets me is that it's always calculated on amount - rather than time. But I don't really care *how much* rain somewhere gets, I care about how frequently I'm going to get wet if I go outside - so a short sharp shower is preferable to permanent drizzle, even if the amount of rain which falls is much higher. Other than taking 'sunshine hours' as a proxy I've never seen anything which breaks this out in this way.
As its big night approaches, the Academy is staring disaster in the face. As well as the fact that the Oscars’ TV ratings have been declining for years, the catastrophic audience figures for the Golden Globes last month disappointing viewer numbers for the Baftas last Sunday demonstrated that the Covid-era awards show has proved a dramatic turn-off. The televised Academy Awards show, due to air on 25 April, is likely to attract its smallest audience ever which could have a disastrous effect on the Oscars’ future.
Its like the audience doesn't like being lectured to by hypocritical actors for 2-3hrs.....while Disney+ has gone from 0 to 100 million subscribers in just over a year.
Disney+ is great and the amount they have on the platform since adding Star is stunningly good value for money.
Genuine question: what is so great about Disney+?
I’m running out of good drama to watch. Yesterday, after much hunting on Netflix, I was reduced to an OKish eight year old drama set in the Israeli orthodox Jewish community. Subtitled from the Hebrew
It was decent, but it was not Breaking Bad. If there is a new reservoir of great TV, I’m in
Disney have recently bought out lots of studios, so its not just their own stuff, Pixar and Marvel etc that they launched with but the back catalogue of Fox, ABC and more. Quite a lot of dramas and movies available - a lot of it certainly is not new though some stuff is.
The difference in lead is again down to the Labour score.
Now do we still believe in the old adage of take the worst Labour score across a range of polls or not? I have to say I think the other poll with Labour sub 30% was big outliers, Labour get 30% regardless of who or what.
I'm pessimistic on Labour's current popularity but 29% does sound too low.
As its big night approaches, the Academy is staring disaster in the face. As well as the fact that the Oscars’ TV ratings have been declining for years, the catastrophic audience figures for the Golden Globes last month disappointing viewer numbers for the Baftas last Sunday demonstrated that the Covid-era awards show has proved a dramatic turn-off. The televised Academy Awards show, due to air on 25 April, is likely to attract its smallest audience ever which could have a disastrous effect on the Oscars’ future.
Its like the audience doesn't like being lectured to by hypocritical actors for 2-3hrs.....while Disney+ has gone from 0 to 100 million subscribers in just over a year.
Disney+ is great and the amount they have on the platform since adding Star is stunningly good value for money.
Genuine question: what is so great about Disney+?
I’m running out of good drama to watch. Yesterday, after much hunting on Netflix, I was reduced to an OKish eight year old drama set in the Israeli orthodox Jewish community. Subtitled from the Hebrew
It was decent, but it was not Breaking Bad. If there is a new reservoir of great TV, I’m in
Watch the video I linked....they have the best streaming tech, a massive back catalogue, now own 100% of Hulu and making huge amounts of new content.
They also own ESPN, so in the US you buy the package of Disney, Hulu and ESPN, that kids, adults and sports all wrapped up. Hulu Live also has an add-on which is live tv channels OTT, so you can still get your local affiliate TV stations as well, all in one package.
If Disney decide to really go for global sports streaming, they could busto Sky.
As its big night approaches, the Academy is staring disaster in the face. As well as the fact that the Oscars’ TV ratings have been declining for years, the catastrophic audience figures for the Golden Globes last month disappointing viewer numbers for the Baftas last Sunday demonstrated that the Covid-era awards show has proved a dramatic turn-off. The televised Academy Awards show, due to air on 25 April, is likely to attract its smallest audience ever which could have a disastrous effect on the Oscars’ future.
Its like the audience doesn't like being lectured to by hypocritical actors for 2-3hrs.....while Disney+ has gone from 0 to 100 million subscribers in just over a year.
Disney+ is great and the amount they have on the platform since adding Star is stunningly good value for money.
Genuine question: what is so great about Disney+?
I’m running out of good drama to watch. Yesterday, after much hunting on Netflix, I was reduced to an OKish eight year old drama set in the Israeli orthodox Jewish community. Subtitled from the Hebrew
It was decent, but it was not Breaking Bad. If there is a new reservoir of great TV, I’m in
Less obvious series which are excellent include: Rectify, Unbelievable, Godless, American Crime and My Brilliant Friend.
Have you seen those?
Seen Godless. Pretty good. Not the others. Will check, ta
I highly recommend them all. American Crime has especially been overlooked IMO. Each series is a separate entity but Felicity Huffman and Timothy Hutton star in all of them, playing different characters. The acting is superb and the stories reveal moral dilemmas. Reflective stuff, you'll like it.
As its big night approaches, the Academy is staring disaster in the face. As well as the fact that the Oscars’ TV ratings have been declining for years, the catastrophic audience figures for the Golden Globes last month disappointing viewer numbers for the Baftas last Sunday demonstrated that the Covid-era awards show has proved a dramatic turn-off. The televised Academy Awards show, due to air on 25 April, is likely to attract its smallest audience ever which could have a disastrous effect on the Oscars’ future.
Its like the audience doesn't like being lectured to by hypocritical actors for 2-3hrs.....while Disney+ has gone from 0 to 100 million subscribers in just over a year.
Disney+ is great and the amount they have on the platform since adding Star is stunningly good value for money.
Genuine question: what is so great about Disney+?
I’m running out of good drama to watch. Yesterday, after much hunting on Netflix, I was reduced to an OKish eight year old drama set in the Israeli orthodox Jewish community. Subtitled from the Hebrew
It was decent, but it was not Breaking Bad. If there is a new reservoir of great TV, I’m in
Less obvious series which are excellent include: Rectify, Unbelievable, Godless, American Crime and My Brilliant Friend.
Have you seen those?
Seen Godless. Pretty good. Not the others. Will check, ta
I recommend MUBI, and possibly also BFI streaming player too. Both are much superior to Netflix, particularly Mubi, for my money.
The difference in lead is again down to the Labour score.
Now do we still believe in the old adage of take the worst Labour score across a range of polls or not? I have to say I think the other poll with Labour sub 30% was big outliers, Labour get 30% regardless of who or what.
They didn’t under Brown.
But it’s hard to believe that still applies after 11 years in opposition.
The key thing to note about today's YouGov is that, relative to the General Election result, it implies progressive churn - with a net leak of Lab & LD voters to the Greens. The Tories are holding on to the 2019 vote much more effectively, and to the extent that there is any movement they're picking up more backers from the Labour Party at roughly the same rate as they are losing them to Reform UK.
What's of most interest in all of this is the expansion of the Green vote, which is up amongst all age groups but particularly strong amongst the very young. Now, it doesn't do to read too much into that: the 18-24s are by far the smallest of the four age cohorts into which the poll splits its respondents by age, and Labour still retains a 25pt lead over the Tories amongst this group. However, Labour is a long way behind and can ill afford to bleed more support, especially when the Tories lead by 30pts amongst the 50-64 group and 43pts amongst pensioners, who presently constitute an entire third of the electorate when allowing for propensity actually to bother to turn out to vote.
Now, if all the extra Green voters simply traipse back to Labour at the next general election, because they calculate that to do anything else would be a waste, then this ultimately won't hurt Starmer; but if the Lab-Green defectors are mostly very upset leftists, who are so deeply disillusioned with Labour that they would rather vote with heart than head, then the Labour Party is in terrible trouble. A 43-29 GE result would yield a Conservative majority in three figures, and leave Labour, at a guess, on something like 160 seats. Rather like 1983 or 1987, but minus the Scottish bloc. Labour would quite likely be left with London and a few core cities, a handful of university towns, the South Wales valleys and nothing else: a rump.
Well, anyway, there might still be three years left until the next election - practically an eternity in which things can change - but it is well worth keeping an eye on the Green numbers. If they can creep up into double figures and supplant the Lib Dems as the third party by vote share, Labour will be sweating.
The difference in lead is again down to the Labour score.
Now do we still believe in the old adage of take the worst Labour score across a range of polls or not? I have to say I think the other poll with Labour sub 30% was big outliers, Labour get 30% regardless of who or what.
I'm pessimistic on Labour's current popularity but 29% does sound too low.
This is obviously pandemic bounce back, but it’s worth remembering China was the only major economy to grow LAST year. Whether the bug was deliberately created, accidentally leaked, or ‘spontaneously leapt from bat to pangolin to zebra to human in the middle of the city with the world’s only lab researching bat-pangolin-zebra-human Coronaviral zoonosis’, there is no doubt the bug has, relatively, benefited China
This decade will, therefore, be the decade when China comprehensively and definitively overtakes the USA as the world’s pre-eminent power
Not a great time for the USA to be led by a doddery old bloke, or be mired in culture wars around ridiculous Marxist woke-crap, but maybe they are symptoms of that same American decline, and therefore predictable, if not inevitable
The ridiculous woke crap includes treating minorities with respect, rather than subjecting them to genocide. I'd say that's a competitive advantage for the US.
There is a sweet midpoint between ‘stopping police from shooting black people all the time’ and ‘burning down Portland because we don’t need police at all’
Unfortunately, America seems determined to miss that sweet spot, and swing wildly and dangerously to the burning cities bit
(CNN)Major American cities saw a 33% increase in homicides last year as a pandemic swept across the country, millions of people joined protests against racial injustice and police brutality, and the economy collapsed under the weight of the pandemic — a crime surge that has continued into the first quarter of this year.
No one's arguing the US is perfect, least of all me. But I'm pretty clear which of the two countries smart immigrant engineers and scientists might see as the more attractive destination.
And the idea that China is a guaranteed global hegemon, as opposed to one of two world superpowers, is just silly.
I'm not convinced that Chinese genocide of Uighurs in Xinjiang is likely to deter promising non-Uighur scientists from moving to Beijing or Shanghai, which are thousands of miles away geographically, and even further in societal terms.
American police killing unarmed black people in Minneapolis is (arguably) as much of a deterrent to people moving to New York/LA.
Look at the list of authors on pretty well any US research publication, and compare with those on Chinese research papers. And look at what's happening in Hong Kong.
I think that's reasonable objective evidence for relative attractiveness.
That'a not to say that China doesn't have very good science, and a huge supply of domestic science graduates. The growing breadth and depth of their research efforts is extremely impressive.
But they have problems which the US does not - including a coming demographic crunch. (indeed it's not entirely inconceivable that the US population overtakes theirs in the next half century, should the US decide once again that immigration is rather a good idea...)
Another telling point is Westerners who have taken positions in Chinese Universities have started to leave over the last few years. (Two of my friends have). The restrictions on foreign nationals have become more & more cumbersome & irritating.
Chinese science has made excellent progress, but it is still well behind the US, UK, all of Western Europe, Russia, Japan, Korea and some parts of Eastern Europe in terms of consistent quality of research outputs (but perhaps not quantity).
There is also extensive political interference in academic appointments & funding for scientific projects.
A gifted Chinese scientist will almost always prefer a job in a good Western University even against the most prestigIous & wealthy Chinese university like Tsinghua. China are still losing their very best scientists.
And yet, weirdly, Chinese universities are ascending the global rankings.
‘Oxford has been named the world’s best university for the fifth consecutive year. But the latest rankings show that it’s China's universities that are the rising stars of global higher education.‘
I feel like a man on the balcony of a hotel in Phuket, pointing at a distant but incoming tsunami, while the rest of you are down in the bar having a chat about the day’s surfing
Being bullied and patronised by the USA has not always been a comfortable experience since WW2 but we have on the main been on the same page and pretended to believe the same things. A century where China is the dominant power will have us harkening after the good old days without a doubt. Basic freedoms and principles that we hold dear will be quashed as will countries who find themselves in China's way and there will be nothing we can do about it.
I think we should be starting to brace ourselves for such a world, that we should stop China buying up enterprise companies with IP in the west, restrict their access to our markets and go as far as we need to go to make sure that we are not beholden to them for things our society needs to operate. But we can't stop it. The pass was sold when they were given pretty much unrestricted access to our markets in the name of "free trade" which has proven to be nothing of the sort. They now have sufficient critical mass not to be vulnerable anymore.
Yes. They are invulnerable. And uncontainable. In a way the USSR never was. Because they are the biggest trader on earth. When they absorb Taiwan - as they shall - this supremacy will harden.
So, as you say, it’s too late. The best we can do is make sure we keep crucial tech, science, etc, in western hands (even if they have them too) so they cannot bully us. And we really need to ditch the worst of wokeness, even as we pray their curtailed liberties hinder them assuming total power
At the moment the trends aren’t great, there is too much basic denial. As we see here
We should also ditch the defeatism.
China's regime needs to keep convincing its burgeoning middle class that its way is better than the west's. That the new Chinese don't need all this democracy bullsh8t.
If, as in the past, the West's enormous powers of innovation allow it to pull ahead technically once again, the Chinese regime has a big problem.
That is why China has tried desperately to get its fingers into as much Western know-how as possible. It needs absolutely to cover all those bases.
It cannot afford to have Westerners trolling about in air cars, making use of fusion power and flying from London to Sydney in four hours while its citizens cannot.
That is the way to beat Xi.
It’s easy to sneer at its politicians, its guns, its culture wars. But America remains the most extraordinary boiling pot of innovation, collaboration and optimism that arguably humans have ever constructed.
And this, as Laloux states in his opening chapters, comes down to how its citizens can conceptualize their purpose and role in society, and hence how they are able to conceive of new ways of organizing.
For all those that decry the woke generation, they are in fact evolving those concepts and developing new approaches to organizing that we crusties hate because they make us uncomfortable. I, for one, do not despair with the coming generation, but see them as our hope to evolve away from the globe-destroying global corporate model to something more people, rather than product, oriented.
The next generation is, literally, stupider than us.
I guess every 20 or 30 years there must have been some nutter in Rome, during the Empire, who pointed to the East and screamed ‘the barbarians are coming!’
For 500 years he was wrong and everyone carried on, just ignoring him.
But then, one day, he was right.
I AM THAT SCREAMING NUTTER
Glad you've reached self-awareness.
I don't think any of us doubt that China will be the biggest power economically and militarily. The question is how dominant and for how long with their current blend of political and societal thinking.
For myself, I think they won't be the single hegemon, but the most powerful of 2 or 3 (US/West and India), and that they will not, unless they change their political and societal philosophy, achieve even leading group status on thought and culture. If they do change, then they won't be the beast to fear.
So I am reasonably confident the West will not be submerged under a Chinese political cultural wave, at least not in its current form.
Let’s hope you’re right
But consider this. What if it turns out state directed, high surveillance Asian capitalism is much more efficient, and enriching, than looser, western capitalism which obsesses about transphobic computers?
You don’t have to look far for an example. Covid 19. Yes the west has produced marvelous vaccines, it seems, but the East Asians don’t really need them, as they have managed the disease so much better than us. Their economies have barely shrunk. Ours have shriveled. They are better at this. Partly because they have applied technology in a cleverer but more imposing way.
If this trend continues and China becomes Singapore times a million, China will completely dominate, surrounded by hi tech Asian satellites, even as Philip Thompson is still wibbling on about multi-gender bogs
You can already see this Chinese leadership in developing countries. Does any African nation now look to the USA as an exemplar? The divided, violent USA which recently elected a madman, is riven with crime and drug addiction, and which endured an attempted coup about 5 minutes ago?
No, they do not. They look to China, which surges in strength and enriches its people. That’s the nation and the system they want to copy
There's much to like here but I think it's best if I pick out what isn't. And that's the inference that "we" in the democratic west are having our "moral fibre" - and thus our ability to compete with the totalitarian east - eroded by our overly precious concern for racial and gender equality and for the rights of sundry minorities to live their best authentic lives. This is tosh. Unpleasant tosh too, since it hints at a desire to big up and use the sino threat to turn the clock back on social progress.
‘The rights of sundry minorities to lead their best, authentic lives’ has to be right up there in terms of patronising, sanctimonious, world-class bullshit. What does it even mean? What is a ‘best authentic life’ for a BAME person?
What valueless, meretricious nonsense
It was a perfectly good sentence. It means, for example, respecting transgender people instead of using them as a cheap hook to hang cheap points for a (you hope) cheap audience on.
What does it mean, then? What is the ‘best authentic life’ for ‘sundry minorities’?
I emphasize the words in quotes are yours not mine. I find them valueless and borderline offensive. But you used them. So what do they mean?
Best = Realizing your potential. Authentic = Not having to hide your difference. Life = Self explanatory. Sundry = Various. Minorities = People who are different.
Further to "difference" and "different" - sharply other than the norm. For example, something you mention a lot, transgender people.
Living your best authentic life. Can't see the problem. Isn't this what everybody wants to do?
Again, offensive.
Minorities are ‘people who are different’, ‘sharply other than the norm’. Jesus. They’re not different. They’re us. Humans.
But you say everyone who isn’t white, straight (and male?) is ‘different’, and ‘sharply other than the norm’?
What a horrible world you want us to live in. Everyone hyper aware of ‘sharply other’ people
I'm surprised All Souls College Oxford has got off so lightly considering the Rhodes business and its very, very dodgy connections with the slave trade, but I see they have been virtue signalling furiously in the past couple of years in advance of any aggro.
As its big night approaches, the Academy is staring disaster in the face. As well as the fact that the Oscars’ TV ratings have been declining for years, the catastrophic audience figures for the Golden Globes last month disappointing viewer numbers for the Baftas last Sunday demonstrated that the Covid-era awards show has proved a dramatic turn-off. The televised Academy Awards show, due to air on 25 April, is likely to attract its smallest audience ever which could have a disastrous effect on the Oscars’ future.
Its like the audience doesn't like being lectured to by hypocritical actors for 2-3hrs.....while Disney+ has gone from 0 to 100 million subscribers in just over a year.
Disney+ is great and the amount they have on the platform since adding Star is stunningly good value for money.
Worth a watch about how Disney is just crushing everybody....its much more than the Baby Yoda factor....
Positive tests down Admissions down Deaths down Testing up
Total patient count still falling fairly rapidly, and approaching the 2,000 barrier. The low point after the first wave was just over 800 in early September (when ventilator cases were almost down to nothing and deaths were averaging in single figures per day.) So, we have a way to go, but things are heading in the right direction.
Of course, whether any of this will be good enough for the Government and the scientists remains to be seen.
I'm surprised All Souls College Oxford has got off so lightly considering the Rhodes business and its very, very dodgy connections with the slave trade, but I see they have been virtue signalling furiously in the past couple of years in advance of any aggro.
As its big night approaches, the Academy is staring disaster in the face. As well as the fact that the Oscars’ TV ratings have been declining for years, the catastrophic audience figures for the Golden Globes last month disappointing viewer numbers for the Baftas last Sunday demonstrated that the Covid-era awards show has proved a dramatic turn-off. The televised Academy Awards show, due to air on 25 April, is likely to attract its smallest audience ever which could have a disastrous effect on the Oscars’ future.
Its like the audience doesn't like being lectured to by hypocritical actors for 2-3hrs.....while Disney+ has gone from 0 to 100 million subscribers in just over a year.
Disney+ is great and the amount they have on the platform since adding Star is stunningly good value for money.
Worth a watch about how Disney is just crushing everybody....its much more than the Baby Yoda factor....
Disney+ has only been going a year. 0 to 100m subs in a year is stunning. Took Netflix something like 10 years when they switched from DVDs to streaming to get to that number.
As its big night approaches, the Academy is staring disaster in the face. As well as the fact that the Oscars’ TV ratings have been declining for years, the catastrophic audience figures for the Golden Globes last month disappointing viewer numbers for the Baftas last Sunday demonstrated that the Covid-era awards show has proved a dramatic turn-off. The televised Academy Awards show, due to air on 25 April, is likely to attract its smallest audience ever which could have a disastrous effect on the Oscars’ future.
Its like the audience doesn't like being lectured to by hypocritical actors for 2-3hrs.....while Disney+ has gone from 0 to 100 million subscribers in just over a year.
Disney+ is great and the amount they have on the platform since adding Star is stunningly good value for money.
Genuine question: what is so great about Disney+?
I’m running out of good drama to watch. Yesterday, after much hunting on Netflix, I was reduced to an OKish eight year old drama set in the Israeli orthodox Jewish community. Subtitled from the Hebrew
It was decent, but it was not Breaking Bad. If there is a new reservoir of great TV, I’m in
Less obvious series which are excellent include: Rectify, Unbelievable, Godless, American Crime and My Brilliant Friend.
Have you seen those?
I've got the opposite problem with tv drama. There's way too much good stuff for me to keep on top of. And I don't even have Netflix. I think I must be very slow getting through them compared to most. Either that or I'm seeing things as good that hardly anybody else does. Uncomfortable thought.
Positive tests down Admissions down Deaths down Testing up
Total patient count still falling fairly rapidly, and approaching the 2,000 barrier. The low point after the first wave was just over 800 in early September (when ventilator cases were almost down to nothing and deaths were averaging in single figures per day.) So, we have a way to go, but things are heading in the right direction.
Of course, whether any of this will be good enough for the Government and the scientists remains to be seen.
The September figure had the benefits of the summer months and no pesky variant.
MUBI has a big advantage over episodically-based streaming services in that respect. A whole range of obscure, cult, classic or documentary productions, to watch for an hour or two on one-off occasions, rather than needing to be tied to serials.
I'm surprised All Souls College Oxford has got off so lightly considering the Rhodes business and its very, very dodgy connections with the slave trade, but I see they have been virtue signalling furiously in the past couple of years in advance of any aggro.
It looks like it will end up as an age thing then: those institutions too young to have got money from slaveowners or imperialists (Rhodes after all was not a slave trader or owner) will be fine, the rest will be asked to... actually that is the thing I'm not sure about: what will they have to do?
Positive tests down Admissions down Deaths down Testing up
Total patient count still falling fairly rapidly, and approaching the 2,000 barrier. The low point after the first wave was just over 800 in early September (when ventilator cases were almost down to nothing and deaths were averaging in single figures per day.) So, we have a way to go, but things are heading in the right direction.
Of course, whether any of this will be good enough for the Government and the scientists remains to be seen.
The September figure had the benefits of the summer months and no pesky variant.
But not of over 30 million people having been vaccinated.
The difference in lead is again down to the Labour score.
Now do we still believe in the old adage of take the worst Labour score across a range of polls or not? I have to say I think the other poll with Labour sub 30% was big outliers, Labour get 30% regardless of who or what.
I'm pessimistic on Labour's current popularity but 29% does sound too low.
I agree
It's Michael Foot territory and that was with the SDP/Liberal Alliance scoring 25%.
25% and 23 seats. What a scandal that was, regardless of your politics.
As its big night approaches, the Academy is staring disaster in the face. As well as the fact that the Oscars’ TV ratings have been declining for years, the catastrophic audience figures for the Golden Globes last month disappointing viewer numbers for the Baftas last Sunday demonstrated that the Covid-era awards show has proved a dramatic turn-off. The televised Academy Awards show, due to air on 25 April, is likely to attract its smallest audience ever which could have a disastrous effect on the Oscars’ future.
Its like the audience doesn't like being lectured to by hypocritical actors for 2-3hrs.....while Disney+ has gone from 0 to 100 million subscribers in just over a year.
Disney+ is great and the amount they have on the platform since adding Star is stunningly good value for money.
Worth a watch about how Disney is just crushing everybody....its much more than the Baby Yoda factor....
Disney+ has only been going a year. 0 to 100m subs in a year is stunning. Took Netflix something like 10 years when they switched from DVDs to streaming to get to that number.
Sure. Commercially it’s a huge hit. I’m just going through their catalogue however, and I can’t find anything that makes me wanna subscribe
I’m sure that will change in time. They have so much money, they can’t fail
Positive tests down Admissions down Deaths down Testing up
Total patient count still falling fairly rapidly, and approaching the 2,000 barrier. The low point after the first wave was just over 800 in early September (when ventilator cases were almost down to nothing and deaths were averaging in single figures per day.) So, we have a way to go, but things are heading in the right direction.
Of course, whether any of this will be good enough for the Government and the scientists remains to be seen.
The September figure had the benefits of the summer months and no pesky variant.
But not of over 30 million people having been vaccinated.
True, though the benefits won't have fully fed through yet.
As its big night approaches, the Academy is staring disaster in the face. As well as the fact that the Oscars’ TV ratings have been declining for years, the catastrophic audience figures for the Golden Globes last month disappointing viewer numbers for the Baftas last Sunday demonstrated that the Covid-era awards show has proved a dramatic turn-off. The televised Academy Awards show, due to air on 25 April, is likely to attract its smallest audience ever which could have a disastrous effect on the Oscars’ future.
Its like the audience doesn't like being lectured to by hypocritical actors for 2-3hrs.....while Disney+ has gone from 0 to 100 million subscribers in just over a year.
Disney+ is great and the amount they have on the platform since adding Star is stunningly good value for money.
Worth a watch about how Disney is just crushing everybody....its much more than the Baby Yoda factor....
Disney+ has only been going a year. 0 to 100m subs in a year is stunning. Took Netflix something like 10 years when they switched from DVDs to streaming to get to that number.
Sure. Commercially it’s a huge hit. I’m just going through their catalogue however, and I can’t find anything that makes me wanna subscribe
I’m sure that will change in time. They have so much money, they can’t fail
Well also the proposition in the US, where the bulk of their subscribers are is very different. For one monthly fee you can all of a sudden cut your cable / sat tv, and just sub to Disney+, Hulu Live and ESPN+.
Netflix doesn't have the deals for live OTT tv or any live sports.
If I was Sky, I would be shitting it. Disney+ have deadly combo more money than god, the best streaming tech based on restreaming masses of MLB games all at the same time and long history of expertise in buying sports rights and production, (unlike say Amazon who are amateur hour at sports production), to genuinely just blow them out of the water.
I'm surprised All Souls College Oxford has got off so lightly considering the Rhodes business and its very, very dodgy connections with the slave trade, but I see they have been virtue signalling furiously in the past couple of years in advance of any aggro.
It looks like it will end up as an age thing then: those institutions too young to have got money from slaveowners or imperialists (Rhodes after all was not a slave trader or owner) will be fine, the rest will be asked to... actually that is the thing I'm not sure about: what will they have to do?
Well, that’s the daftness of these campaigns. They pull down statues but don’t actually deal with the reality of the legacies. Rhodes Must Fall, but the Rhodes scholars still take the money. Codrington’s statue and name may be removed, but nobody wants to close and sell off the library. A bunch of white anarchists in Bristol pull down Colston’s statue, but ignore the Wills building where their protest actually started even though it was built with money from tobacco plantations, founded with slave labour.
It’s almost as though they don’t understand what the hell they’re talking about or what to do to deal with the legacies of slavery and just want to look and sound cool and right-on.
The difference in lead is again down to the Labour score.
Now do we still believe in the old adage of take the worst Labour score across a range of polls or not? I have to say I think the other poll with Labour sub 30% was big outliers, Labour get 30% regardless of who or what.
They didn’t under Brown.
But it’s hard to believe that still applies after 11 years in opposition.
The key thing to note about today's YouGov is that, relative to the General Election result, it implies progressive churn - with a net leak of Lab & LD voters to the Greens. The Tories are holding on to the 2019 vote much more effectively, and to the extent that there is any movement they're picking up more backers from the Labour Party at roughly the same rate as they are losing them to Reform UK.
What's of most interest in all of this is the expansion of the Green vote, which is up amongst all age groups but particularly strong amongst the very young. Now, it doesn't do to read too much into that: the 18-24s are by far the smallest of the four age cohorts into which the poll splits its respondents by age, and Labour still retains a 25pt lead over the Tories amongst this group. However, Labour is a long way behind and can ill afford to bleed more support, especially when the Tories lead by 30pts amongst the 50-64 group and 43pts amongst pensioners, who presently constitute an entire third of the electorate when allowing for propensity actually to bother to turn out to vote.
Now, if all the extra Green voters simply traipse back to Labour at the next general election, because they calculate that to do anything else would be a waste, then this ultimately won't hurt Starmer; but if the Lab-Green defectors are mostly very upset leftists, who are so deeply disillusioned with Labour that they would rather vote with heart than head, then the Labour Party is in terrible trouble. A 43-29 GE result would yield a Conservative majority in three figures, and leave Labour, at a guess, on something like 160 seats. Rather like 1983 or 1987, but minus the Scottish bloc. Labour would quite likely be left with London and a few core cities, a handful of university towns, the South Wales valleys and nothing else: a rump.
Well, anyway, there might still be three years left until the next election - practically an eternity in which things can change - but it is well worth keeping an eye on the Green numbers. If they can creep up into double figures and supplant the Lib Dems as the third party by vote share, Labour will be sweating.
If the Greens somehow creep into double figures, they'll have quadrupled their share since 2019 somehow, and tripled their 2015 high water mark. In which case, I don't think it's clear that it will be Labour seats that will be affected - possibly it'll be mostly votes in wealthy Southern safe Tory seats.
The effect of Corbyn's consolidation of the left-wing vote in 2017 was to take two points out of the Greens, of which he gave one point back in 2019 (all else being equal, which it wasn't). i would expect Starmer to give back the other point in 2024 - ie, he'll be viewed as of roughly similar (political) attractiveness to Miliband - and the effect on seats is likely to be minimal.
The difference in lead is again down to the Labour score.
Now do we still believe in the old adage of take the worst Labour score across a range of polls or not? I have to say I think the other poll with Labour sub 30% was big outliers, Labour get 30% regardless of who or what.
I'm pessimistic on Labour's current popularity but 29% does sound too low.
I agree
It's Michael Foot territory and that was with the SDP/Liberal Alliance scoring 25%.
25% and 23 seats. What a scandal that was, regardless of your politics.
I'd take an eight point deficit at the moment. It seems about right. However I also believe Boris opening shops and pubs might explain the YouGov. It could be a post release Stockholm syndrome.
Positive tests down Admissions down Deaths down Testing up
Total patient count still falling fairly rapidly, and approaching the 2,000 barrier. The low point after the first wave was just over 800 in early September (when ventilator cases were almost down to nothing and deaths were averaging in single figures per day.) So, we have a way to go, but things are heading in the right direction.
Of course, whether any of this will be good enough for the Government and the scientists remains to be seen.
Why even bother publishing the data if the roadmap is set in stone? A waste of everyone's time - we might as well just sit here and count the days.
I have Disney+, I've watched a couple of episodes of The Mandalorian on it but nothing else really appeals. Lots of kids' superheroes stuff.
I'm not sure why some PBers rate it so highly. Netflix, Prime and iPlayer all carry better content.
When Disney launched Star that changed it from something we bought for the kids (and was good value just as that) to being great for the whole family.
Interesting to read FrancisUrquhart's comments about them having the best back end to the streaming service but its true. We're using Disney more than Netflix in our household now but what's interesting is that Netflix will from time to time hang for a moment as it buffers or say its struggling to connect, not often but it happens. I don't think I've ever had that even once on Disney except for if its my side.
I could certainly imagine them being able to cope with the Premier League if the House of Mouse were to choose to go down that road then the app certainly seems like it could handle that.
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Ben Stokes set to miss New Zealand Tests with broken finger
https://www.espncricinfo.com/story/england-vs-nz-2021-ben-stokes-set-to-miss-new-zealand-tests-with-broken-finger-1259265
Buttler and the Curran brothers also appear to be unavailable.
Good news for Craig Overton and Ben Foakes?
I don't think the difference is an outlier for this week, but I would be surprised if it lasted.
The Cameron story also reminds some newer Conservative minded voters of the cosy Labour/Coalition/Remainer cabal of corruption before Johnson drained the swamp.
The Drax Arms in Bere Regis, Dorset, was targeted last night by vandals who sprayed the words 'slaver' and 'BLM' on to the walls.
The Grade II-listed pub is named after the Drax family who own the nearby estate and whose forefathers ran plantations in Barbados and Jamaica in the 17th century.
But the family, including Conservative MP for South Dorset Richard Drax, no longer have any ties to the pub, which has been owned by brewery Hall and Woodhouse for a century.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9478349/BLM-activists-spray-paint-slaver-walls-Grade-II-listed-pub.html
One of the best:
‘WHY don't Labour supporters start a polling company, ask mostly Labour voters who they will vote for , throw in some balancing voters and see what the poll shows ?YOUGOV is Tory owned propaganda’
It's hardly a resignation issue. There might, or might not be a catalogue of sleaze to get to the bottom of, but this is barely a footnote.
I presume the tw@tterati don't realise that YouGov makes its money from market research and data analytics.
What valueless, meretricious nonsense
What does it mean?
Would you rather live in Detroit or Singapore? That’s a more interesting and telling question. Fifty years ago, Detroit, for sure. Now no one would give that answer
Ditto Pittsburgh v Taipei, or Cleveland v Seoul
The Drax Arms is owned by local brewery Hall & Woodhouse and we are a small independent business trying to make ends meet.
The majority of people can see there are no ties between us and what happened 300 years ago.
I don't know what they expect to achieve from this. It's not going to make us able to change the past and scrawling graffiti on a pub doesn't bring about the consequences they want to.
It doesn't really gain support for that movement, it has the opposite effect
But feel free to make light of vandalism by woke morons - perhaps that 14-point Tory lead isn't big enough for you yet.
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2021/apr/16/oscars-tv-ratings-disaster-academy-awards
Its like the audience doesn't like being lectured to by hypocritical actors for 2-3hrs.....while Disney+ has gone from 0 to 100 million subscribers in just over a year.
ONS survey
Raw figures 2 week periods, 1 week between survey data
2 weeks ending 10th April 310/139,294 0.22%
2 weeks ending 3rd April 382/142,856 0.27%
2 weeks ending 27th March 388/144,316 0.27%
2 weeks ending 20th March 423 / 151,822 028%
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sR6UeVptzRg
There’s a little sliver of the south coast which has a dry, sunny climate more like the Dordogne than the rest of the UK
For annual mildness you want southwest Cornwall. Around Falmouth? But lots of rain. For sunlight hours maybe eastern Essex or Kent. Mersea, maybe. But cold winds
CON 43% (-)
LAB 35% (+2)
LD 8% (-1)
GRN 4% (-1)
SNP 3% (-2)
RUK <1% (-)
OTH 6% (+1)
https://www.survation.com/survation-political-polling-april-2021/
1,009 respondents, fieldwork 8-10 April 2021. Changes w/ 9-10 March. https://twitter.com/Survation/status/1383070772537794562/photo/1
Boris Johnson46% (+1)
Keir Starmer 32% (+1)
Don't know 22% (-2)
995 respondents, fieldwork 8-10 April 2021. Changes w/ 9-10 March. https://twitter.com/Survation/status/1383070789189111812/photo/1
LAB 35% (+2)
LD 8% (-1)
GRN 4% (-1)
SNP 3% (-2)
RUK <1% (-)
OTH 6% (+1)
The difference in lead is again down to the Labour score.
Now do we still believe in the old adage of take the worst Labour score across a range of polls or not? I have to say I think the other poll with Labour sub 30% was big outliers, Labour get 30% regardless of who or what.
Whenever I hear people complaining about TV or movies, it is usually a ‘lack of Wokeness’ that bothers them. ‘Why can’t we have more BAME news presenters’ is a phrase so often heard, it’s like a mantra.
Most likely Yougov is overrating the Greens
But it’s hard to believe that still applies after 11 years in opposition.
A lovely part of the world, to be sure. Sitting on the terrace of the Idle Rocks hotel, quaffing Helford oysters and English fizz on a sunny day, is one of the great pleasures of human life
I emphasize the words in quotes are yours not mine. I find them valueless and borderline offensive. But you used them. So what do they mean?
I’m running out of good drama to watch. Yesterday, after much hunting on Netflix, I was reduced to an OKish eight year old drama set in the Israeli orthodox Jewish community. Subtitled from the Hebrew
It was decent, but it was not Breaking Bad. If there is a new reservoir of great TV, I’m in
Witney, Maidenhead & Henley (Cameron, May, and Boris' ultra Tory heartland seats) require, on average the same swing (+-0.1%) to be Con losses as Middlesbrough South and Cleveland East, and Mansfield.
Have you seen those?
Having powered past Altrincham and Sale West and Cheadle.
Authentic = Not having to hide your difference.
Life = Self explanatory.
Sundry = Various.
Minorities = People who are different.
Further to "difference" and "different" - sharply other than the norm. For example, something you mention a lot, transgender people.
Living your best authentic life. Can't see the problem. Isn't this what everybody wants to do?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lP3d8O2xipg
@JohnRentoul
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58m
What a turn-around – most Labour Party members now have a favourable view of Tony Blair
https://twitter.com/JohnRentoul?ref_src=twsrc^google|twcamp^serp|twgr^author
Are they starting to realise how bloody hard it is to win as Labour?
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9477097/Facebook-blocks-users-sharing-DailyMail-com-story-BLM-founders-property-empire.html
https://www.politico.eu/coronavirus-in-europe/
They also own ESPN, so in the US you buy the package of Disney, Hulu and ESPN, that kids, adults and sports all wrapped up. Hulu Live also has an add-on which is live tv channels OTT, so you can still get your local affiliate TV stations as well, all in one package.
If Disney decide to really go for global sports streaming, they could busto Sky.
Admissions down
Deaths down
Testing up
What's of most interest in all of this is the expansion of the Green vote, which is up amongst all age groups but particularly strong amongst the very young. Now, it doesn't do to read too much into that: the 18-24s are by far the smallest of the four age cohorts into which the poll splits its respondents by age, and Labour still retains a 25pt lead over the Tories amongst this group. However, Labour is a long way behind and can ill afford to bleed more support, especially when the Tories lead by 30pts amongst the 50-64 group and 43pts amongst pensioners, who presently constitute an entire third of the electorate when allowing for propensity actually to bother to turn out to vote.
Now, if all the extra Green voters simply traipse back to Labour at the next general election, because they calculate that to do anything else would be a waste, then this ultimately won't hurt Starmer; but if the Lab-Green defectors are mostly very upset leftists, who are so deeply disillusioned with Labour that they would rather vote with heart than head, then the Labour Party is in terrible trouble. A 43-29 GE result would yield a Conservative majority in three figures, and leave Labour, at a guess, on something like 160 seats. Rather like 1983 or 1987, but minus the Scottish bloc. Labour would quite likely be left with London and a few core cities, a handful of university towns, the South Wales valleys and nothing else: a rump.
Well, anyway, there might still be three years left until the next election - practically an eternity in which things can change - but it is well worth keeping an eye on the Green numbers. If they can creep up into double figures and supplant the Lib Dems as the third party by vote share, Labour will be sweating.
Good to see.
Minorities are ‘people who are different’, ‘sharply other than the norm’. Jesus. They’re not different. They’re us. Humans.
But you say everyone who isn’t white, straight (and male?) is ‘different’, and ‘sharply other than the norm’?
What a horrible world you want us to live in. Everyone hyper aware of ‘sharply other’ people
@FraserNelson
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3h
Did Sweden really get Covid wrong?
Delighted that the Telegraph has made my column free to read:
https://twitter.com/FraserNelson/status/1383022030015057920
I'm not sure why some PBers rate it so highly. Netflix, Prime and iPlayer all carry better content.
I’m amazed to see British bake-off is such an American hit
https://www.businessinsider.com/most-watched-movies-shows-2020-on-netflix-disney-plus-nielsen-2021-1
Of course, whether any of this will be good enough for the Government and the scientists remains to be seen.
https://www.theguardian.com/education/2020/jun/18/campaign-doesnt-end-with-rhodes-statue-says-oxford-group
25% and 23 seats. What a scandal that was, regardless of your politics.
I’m sure that will change in time. They have so much money, they can’t fail
Netflix doesn't have the deals for live OTT tv or any live sports.
If I was Sky, I would be shitting it. Disney+ have deadly combo more money than god, the best streaming tech based on restreaming masses of MLB games all at the same time and long history of expertise in buying sports rights and production, (unlike say Amazon who are amateur hour at sports production), to genuinely just blow them out of the water.
It’s almost as though they don’t understand what the hell they’re talking about or what to do to deal with the legacies of slavery and just want to look and sound cool and right-on.
Can we call YouGov an outlier yet?
The effect of Corbyn's consolidation of the left-wing vote in 2017 was to take two points out of the Greens, of which he gave one point back in 2019 (all else being equal, which it wasn't). i would expect Starmer to give back the other point in 2024 - ie, he'll be viewed as of roughly similar (political) attractiveness to Miliband - and the effect on seats is likely to be minimal.
The right call.
Interesting to read FrancisUrquhart's comments about them having the best back end to the streaming service but its true. We're using Disney more than Netflix in our household now but what's interesting is that Netflix will from time to time hang for a moment as it buffers or say its struggling to connect, not often but it happens. I don't think I've ever had that even once on Disney except for if its my side.
I could certainly imagine them being able to cope with the Premier League if the House of Mouse were to choose to go down that road then the app certainly seems like it could handle that.