Covid cases rising again today, over 40K. Hospital admissions also rising slightly in the last few days. Deaths I guess we will have to wait till tomorrow/Wed.
Am I the only person feeling somewhat anxious that this disease isn't over with yet? Should I just relax?
From your user name I can't say what the mood is there, but in London as noted earlier, everyone is relaxing.
Indeed, just about to go and see James Bond. Very excited after such a long break since the last one. Lots of positive reports from people who have already seen it too that didn't like Spectre very much.
On thread - what this tells me is that the proportion of climate sceptics probably doesn't vary all that much by constituency (though it would be interesting to see polling to confirm). We jump through considerable hoops to ensure that the ethnic identities of our representatives are broadly in proportion to the population at large - it doesn't seem unreasonable to me that it should be desirable that the views of MPs are roughly in proportion to the population at large. Which implies a voice for minority opinions such as climate scepticism, albeit a minority one. Which by accident or design appears to be what we have.
Climate sceptics puzzle me. I am not a scientist but the whole thing seems pretty open and shut to me and there appears to be a broad consensus across scientific opinion. So I wonder, what do climate sceptics really think? That the climate isn't warming? I can see it with my own eyes, and measurements of temperature seem to back up this impression very convincingly. Do they think that this is all lies? That the climate is warming but it's nothing to do with human activity? This seems even less plausible. The planet seems to be warming up at unprecedented speed and at a time that correlates perfectly with human activity that models predict should be having this effect. That the greenhouse gases theory isn't correct? The story seems highly plausible, whether conceptually or if you put it through a complex climate model. That scientists don't understand their own models and instruments? It's possible, but seems implausible that some random uninformed punter understands them better. That scientists are engaged in a vast conspiracy? Unlikely if you understand how science operates. If anyone was going to fund a conspiracy here, fossil fuel interests seem most plausible - they have deep pockets and strong vested interests. That the whole thing is real but there's no point doing anything to stop it? This is the craziest take of all, if you actually think about what life on earth would be like with say a 3 or 4 degree temperature increase. So, like I say, these people are a mystery to me. People are entitled to their own opinions of course, but not their own facts.
The thing that gets me is that most sceptics seem to just flatly deny a link between CO2 (etc) and heating, even though the mechanism is very well understood and demonstrable in a lab, or indeed pretty much anywhere with a source of CO2. Energy comes in from the sun, the earth warms up, the earth radiates energy according to its temperature (which happens to mean in the infra-red). CO2 (etc) are efficient absorbers of radiation those energies and then re-emit in all directions. Much else in the atmosphere is pretty transparent to infrared. So more CO2 (etc) means more of the IR radiaton which would go off into space taking energy with it is absorbed in the atmosphere and then re-radiated in random directions, including back down to the surface.
Now, you can get into all the feedback loops, albedo (changing due to heating - more/less ice, more/fewer clouds, different take up of CO2 depending on temperature etc), arguments about how all those mechanisms work (and that is the source of much uncertainty). But instead your average sceptic just denies the link and starts chatting on about solar cycles and sunspots. It's odd.
Indeed. CO2 rich Venus is hotter than Mercury despite being further away from the sun, and all the solar flares long beloved of the anti global warming crew.
Sure, it’s hard to tease out exact impacts to Earth’s complex weather patterns and biosphere with marginally different CO2 concentrations. But the general thrust that CO2 warms planets is 8-year old level science and I’ve never really understood how people have got away with denying that.
The biggest question is how much do feedback loops contribute. Climate is not simple, despite the simple idea of more CO2 equals warmer planet. Take water - in itself water vapour is a greenhouse gas, but clouds can also act to screen solar radiation from warming the planet. So a warmer world, with more clouds, may actually cool... As I say, its complicated. Too often past predictions have tended to be too forceful, and we are not well served by scare story media. I don't believe that warming a few degrees means the end of human civilisation, we live across so many different climate zones for that to make any sense, but we should do all we can to avoid habitat loss for worlds plants and animals. Its not their fault we are a greedy, successful, rapacious species.
I expect everyone has already seen this (it's well known) but one of my favourite cartoons:
There is a lot we don't know, but there are a lot of good reasons to change the way we generate energy.
That's it for me, really. Like @turbotubbs , I'm a lukewarmist. I think we're warming, and I think it's due to carbon, but we're also emphasising the worst case scenarios and a lot of the science which backs it is dodgy. The tone of the warmists is religious, which - despite me believing in warming - naturally makes me suspicious. But set aside whether we're warming or not: am I in favour of cleaner air? Absolutely. Am I in favour of not being dependent on Russia and the Middle East for energy? Wildly. Am I in favour of designing a world where non-drivers are not excluded from travel? Of course. The rewards for decarbonising seem to me so clear that whether or not warming is real doesn't really matter.
And I'd agree if there were practical and remotely affordable plans to decarbonise. The problem is that there aren't. When reality hits God knows what will happen politically.
A combination of complacency, lethargy and Woke crap - ‘omg GPT3 might be racist’ - means the west has handed the race to AI to China, and it may already be too late to catch up.
If China dominates AI it dominates the world like no power before it
You should have learnt by now that most people aren’t interested in the really big stories.
We’ve been directly told in the last year that there is definitely ultra tech in our skies and oceans, which either belongs to adversaries of the West or non human intelligence / life forms. And everyone shrugged.
People aren’t going to listen too hard to a senior Pentagon official if he says the US has surrendered technological dominance to China and that a point will be reached (or may already have been reached) when their lead will be insurmountable. Forever.
Cognitive dissonance innit. Much more comfortable to talk about IDS’s majority instead.
Some people are INCREDIBLY resistant to the idea of artificial general intelligence. I have an extremely smart brother who is always open to new ideas but he just won't accept that this - machine intelligence - can ever happen, let alone that it is actually happening right now
Existentially, it frightens him
I think some people assume that events from science fiction are made up and can’t ever happen because they are fiction, particularly the bad events. Scifi writers really are just futurists and as a group have a pretty reasonable track record.
It's not just scifi writers being futurists; scientists feed off scifi, and scifi feeds off science. I've got a good book on this somewhere, going into how fiction from HG Wells onwards fed into science, just as they devoured science in turn.
An example is the humble iPad. Back in 1972, computer scientist came up with the concept of the Dynabook (*) - a computer for education. For decades, computer professionals have used it as an objective, and endpoint. Steve Jobs was apparently one of them. A vision that has taken four decades to come anywhere near fulfilment.
Alan Key doesn't think we've reached the endpoint yet.
(*) Not the laptop line
Imagine describing a smartphone to someone living in 1930 or even 1960.
"Everyone will own a device with which they can immediately communicate with almost anyone else on the planet, by voice or on screen. Also it will have instant access to all of human knowledge. And it will summon vehicles, take photos, play a near infinite variety of music, do sums, translate languages, record voices, make automatic payments, access your bank, access all media from TV to newspapers, tell you the weather, entertain you with games, show you live football, store all your personal data and let you argue about politics all day with strangers"
"My God, how big will this device be? Size of a house???"
On topic, if anything’s going to get Johnson this year or next, it’s going to be rising utility and fuel bills, to pay for what David Cameron ended up describing as the “Green Crap”.
Those who live in Wokingham might not care too much about the bills, but those in Warrington and Workington certainly do.
I grew up in Wokingham. It is not the town it once was. For the last 10 or more years there has been mass house building making the town much bigger than it ever used to be. As a result there are many new people living there with different political views. In my view Redwood kept his seat at the last election due to fear of Corbyn. Redwood is not popular in Wokingham. I wouldn't be the least surprised if Wokingham went LD at the next election.
I grew up in Yateley, 25 years ago. Wokingham used to be a good night out, that was just about walkable back home. Been living abroad for the last decade though, so not been there in a long time.
That's quite some walk back home - must be well over 5 miles!
Covid cases rising again today, over 40K. Hospital admissions also rising slightly in the last few days. Deaths I guess we will have to wait till tomorrow/Wed.
Am I the only person feeling somewhat anxious that this disease isn't over with yet? Should I just relax?
Admissions ticking up at my place again too.
I don't expect a massive surge, but neither can we resume normal service with 4 medical wards of covid and 25% of ICU occupied.
So, how many delegates are going to turn up to COP26 on commercial flights, or does environmentalism go out of the window when it comes to their own travel arrangements?
It’s much harder to sell to the public, when those advocating significant raises in the cost of living are swanning around the world on private planes.
There's absolutely no reason why the whole thing couldn't be conducted through video conferencing.
Yeah. That would be nice, but it really isn't how humans or diplomacy works.
Covid cases rising again today, over 40K. Hospital admissions also rising slightly in the last few days. Deaths I guess we will have to wait till tomorrow/Wed.
Am I the only person feeling somewhat anxious that this disease isn't over with yet? Should I just relax?
Admissions ticking up at my place again too.
I don't expect a massive surge, but neither can we resume normal service with 4 medical wards of covid and 25% of ICU occupied.
Any info on the admissions? Is it still the elderly and the unvaccinated?
A combination of complacency, lethargy and Woke crap - ‘omg GPT3 might be racist’ - means the west has handed the race to AI to China, and it may already be too late to catch up.
If China dominates AI it dominates the world like no power before it
You should have learnt by now that most people aren’t interested in the really big stories.
We’ve been directly told in the last year that there is definitely ultra tech in our skies and oceans, which either belongs to adversaries of the West or non human intelligence / life forms. And everyone shrugged.
People aren’t going to listen too hard to a senior Pentagon official if he says the US has surrendered technological dominance to China and that a point will be reached (or may already have been reached) when their lead will be insurmountable. Forever.
Cognitive dissonance innit. Much more comfortable to talk about IDS’s majority instead.
Some people are INCREDIBLY resistant to the idea of artificial general intelligence. I have an extremely smart brother who is always open to new ideas but he just won't accept that this - machine intelligence - can ever happen, let alone that it is actually happening right now
Existentially, it frightens him
I think some people assume that events from science fiction are made up and can’t ever happen because they are fiction, particularly the bad events. Scifi writers really are just futurists and as a group have a pretty reasonable track record.
It's not just scifi writers being futurists; scientists feed off scifi, and scifi feeds off science. I've got a good book on this somewhere, going into how fiction from HG Wells onwards fed into science, just as they devoured science in turn.
An example is the humble iPad. Back in 1972, computer scientist came up with the concept of the Dynabook (*) - a computer for education. For decades, computer professionals have used it as an objective, and endpoint. Steve Jobs was apparently one of them. A vision that has taken four decades to come anywhere near fulfilment.
Alan Key doesn't think we've reached the endpoint yet.
(*) Not the laptop line
Imagine describing a smartphone to someone living in 1930 or even 1960.
"Everyone will own a device with which they can immediately communicate with almost anyone else on the planet, by voice or on screen. Also it will have instant access to all of human knowledge. And it will summon vehicles, take photos, play a near infinite variety of music, do sums, translate languages, record voices, make automatic payments, access your bank, access all media from TV to newspapers, tell you the weather, entertain you with games, show you live football, store all your personal data and let you argue about politics all day with strangers"
"My God, how big will this device be? Size of a house???"
"No, about the size of a cigarette packet"
Imagine if you told them what cigarettes were doing to them!
On thread - what this tells me is that the proportion of climate sceptics probably doesn't vary all that much by constituency (though it would be interesting to see polling to confirm). We jump through considerable hoops to ensure that the ethnic identities of our representatives are broadly in proportion to the population at large - it doesn't seem unreasonable to me that it should be desirable that the views of MPs are roughly in proportion to the population at large. Which implies a voice for minority opinions such as climate scepticism, albeit a minority one. Which by accident or design appears to be what we have.
Climate sceptics puzzle me. I am not a scientist but the whole thing seems pretty open and shut to me and there appears to be a broad consensus across scientific opinion. So I wonder, what do climate sceptics really think? That the climate isn't warming? I can see it with my own eyes, and measurements of temperature seem to back up this impression very convincingly. Do they think that this is all lies? That the climate is warming but it's nothing to do with human activity? This seems even less plausible. The planet seems to be warming up at unprecedented speed and at a time that correlates perfectly with human activity that models predict should be having this effect. That the greenhouse gases theory isn't correct? The story seems highly plausible, whether conceptually or if you put it through a complex climate model. That scientists don't understand their own models and instruments? It's possible, but seems implausible that some random uninformed punter understands them better. That scientists are engaged in a vast conspiracy? Unlikely if you understand how science operates. If anyone was going to fund a conspiracy here, fossil fuel interests seem most plausible - they have deep pockets and strong vested interests. That the whole thing is real but there's no point doing anything to stop it? This is the craziest take of all, if you actually think about what life on earth would be like with say a 3 or 4 degree temperature increase. So, like I say, these people are a mystery to me. People are entitled to their own opinions of course, but not their own facts.
If people don't like the political implications of accepting that something is true then they will practice cognitive dissonance instead, so they don't have to face up to them.
That's why climate action needs to be depoliticised in order for us to go as fast as possible, and not attached to ecosocialism.
No, this is backwards.
The problem is that we're not having a political debate between right and left wing ways of solving the climate change problem, because the right wing allowed itself to be captured by the special interests who were making lots of money out of the status quo.
No-one says we have to depoliticise trade policy, or education policy - we have robust arguments about whether left or right wing answers will work better.
Climate change should be the same, but the right wing wasted several decades. You can't blame the left wing for that.
I don't think that's true in the UK.
We had a right-wing PM who was one of the first to draw attention to it in the UN in 1989, because she understood the science, and there's been a broad consensus on the urgency of tacking it here for at least 20 years.
But yes, what I mean is there should be a political consensus on the importance of it being addressed and then the debate takes place between left and right as to who is best placed to do that.
On thread - what this tells me is that the proportion of climate sceptics probably doesn't vary all that much by constituency (though it would be interesting to see polling to confirm). We jump through considerable hoops to ensure that the ethnic identities of our representatives are broadly in proportion to the population at large - it doesn't seem unreasonable to me that it should be desirable that the views of MPs are roughly in proportion to the population at large. Which implies a voice for minority opinions such as climate scepticism, albeit a minority one. Which by accident or design appears to be what we have.
Climate sceptics puzzle me. I am not a scientist but the whole thing seems pretty open and shut to me and there appears to be a broad consensus across scientific opinion. So I wonder, what do climate sceptics really think? That the climate isn't warming? I can see it with my own eyes, and measurements of temperature seem to back up this impression very convincingly. Do they think that this is all lies? That the climate is warming but it's nothing to do with human activity? This seems even less plausible. The planet seems to be warming up at unprecedented speed and at a time that correlates perfectly with human activity that models predict should be having this effect. That the greenhouse gases theory isn't correct? The story seems highly plausible, whether conceptually or if you put it through a complex climate model. That scientists don't understand their own models and instruments? It's possible, but seems implausible that some random uninformed punter understands them better. That scientists are engaged in a vast conspiracy? Unlikely if you understand how science operates. If anyone was going to fund a conspiracy here, fossil fuel interests seem most plausible - they have deep pockets and strong vested interests. That the whole thing is real but there's no point doing anything to stop it? This is the craziest take of all, if you actually think about what life on earth would be like with say a 3 or 4 degree temperature increase. So, like I say, these people are a mystery to me. People are entitled to their own opinions of course, but not their own facts.
If people don't like the political implications of accepting that something is true then they will practice cognitive dissonance instead, so they don't have to face up to them.
That's why climate action needs to be depoliticised in order for us to go as fast as possible, and not attached to ecosocialism.
Our choice of climate change actions is going to create winners and losers. It's a political decision to its core. What's needed is political leadership. People will listen to people they trust.
For some reason, for a lot of people in this country, that is Boris Johnson and the Conservative party more generally. So it's great that they do talk about climate change and have committed to doing some things about it. Obviously not as much as needed, but steps in the right direction.
That's definitely missing on the US right.
People forget that "global warming" went mainstream in the late 80's when The Blessed Margaret took up the cause!
On topic, if anything’s going to get Johnson this year or next, it’s going to be rising utility and fuel bills, to pay for what David Cameron ended up describing as the “Green Crap”.
Those who live in Wokingham might not care too much about the bills, but those in Warrington and Workington certainly do.
I grew up in Wokingham. It is not the town it once was. For the last 10 or more years there has been mass house building making the town much bigger than it ever used to be. As a result there are many new people living there with different political views. In my view Redwood kept his seat at the last election due to fear of Corbyn. Redwood is not popular in Wokingham. I wouldn't be the least surprised if Wokingham went LD at the next election.
I grew up in Yateley, 25 years ago. Wokingham used to be a good night out, that was just about walkable back home. Been living abroad for the last decade though, so not been there in a long time.
That's quite some walk back home - must be well over 5 miles!
Yeah, a couple of hours if the legs were working properly. But when you’re 19 or 20 you don’t want to waste £20 on a taxi, do you?
The issue is categorically not people leaving leading to higher wages. Anyone who thinks that doesn't understand basic economics.
The issue is we were trapped in a feedback loop.
Brexit hasn't created the labour shortage - the labour shortage was already there and has been for decades. What its done is broken the feedback loop by removing the reason wages were imbalanced in the first place. Now wages can rise to reach an equilibrium where demand no longer exceeds supply.
Plenty of people voted for Brexit because they thought once the foreigners had gone wages would rise.
But your comment doesn't make sense. A labour shortage would result in higher wages. You say this hasn't happened. But it can now because of Brexit. What element of Brexit has done this?
Covid cases rising again today, over 40K. Hospital admissions also rising slightly in the last few days. Deaths I guess we will have to wait till tomorrow/Wed.
Am I the only person feeling somewhat anxious that this disease isn't over with yet? Should I just relax?
Admissions ticking up at my place again too.
I don't expect a massive surge, but neither can we resume normal service with 4 medical wards of covid and 25% of ICU occupied.
Any info on the admissions? Is it still the elderly and the unvaccinated?
One in six are unvaccinated pregnant women according to the radio news
Ah, Mr Thomspson, I have a small bone to pick with you.
We were discussing house price movements relative to income, and in particular where to start measuring on the Nationwide price-to-incomes scale. We were using the average for 2003 as our starting point... but the EU 8 didn't join until May 2004.
Well yes I quited deliberately picked the price the year before they joined as the starting point.
If you pick at the point of joining you've got the disruption of joining happening (eg if people have already made plans to buy homes to let out to those arriving) and if you pick a point after they've joined then its already even more disrupted too.
Same logic as why you yourself have said it will take years before we can analyse the effects of Brexit. To do so we'll need to then compare years into the future with before Brexit happened.
A year before? Oh come on. In the September 2003 quarter, there were no Eastern Europeans arriving. And no-one particularly expected that many people to arrive.
If you run a linear regression the reality is that the dominant driver of house prices is affordability. Between 1999 and late 2004, average mortgage rates dropped from 8.5% to under 4%. This meant that they could now afford a more expensive property. (This was combined with the fact that their existing property had risen in value, increasing the size of their deposit.)
A combination of complacency, lethargy and Woke crap - ‘omg GPT3 might be racist’ - means the west has handed the race to AI to China, and it may already be too late to catch up.
If China dominates AI it dominates the world like no power before it
You should have learnt by now that most people aren’t interested in the really big stories.
We’ve been directly told in the last year that there is definitely ultra tech in our skies and oceans, which either belongs to adversaries of the West or non human intelligence / life forms. And everyone shrugged.
People aren’t going to listen too hard to a senior Pentagon official if he says the US has surrendered technological dominance to China and that a point will be reached (or may already have been reached) when their lead will be insurmountable. Forever.
Cognitive dissonance innit. Much more comfortable to talk about IDS’s majority instead.
Some people are INCREDIBLY resistant to the idea of artificial general intelligence. I have an extremely smart brother who is always open to new ideas but he just won't accept that this - machine intelligence - can ever happen, let alone that it is actually happening right now
Existentially, it frightens him
I think some people assume that events from science fiction are made up and can’t ever happen because they are fiction, particularly the bad events. Scifi writers really are just futurists and as a group have a pretty reasonable track record.
It's not just scifi writers being futurists; scientists feed off scifi, and scifi feeds off science. I've got a good book on this somewhere, going into how fiction from HG Wells onwards fed into science, just as they devoured science in turn.
An example is the humble iPad. Back in 1972, computer scientist came up with the concept of the Dynabook (*) - a computer for education. For decades, computer professionals have used it as an objective, and endpoint. Steve Jobs was apparently one of them. A vision that has taken four decades to come anywhere near fulfilment.
Alan Key doesn't think we've reached the endpoint yet.
(*) Not the laptop line
Imagine describing a smartphone to someone living in 1930 or even 1960.
"Everyone will own a device with which they can immediately communicate with almost anyone else on the planet, by voice or on screen. Also it will have instant access to all of human knowledge. And it will summon vehicles, take photos, play a near infinite variety of music, do sums, translate languages, record voices, make automatic payments, access your bank, access all media from TV to newspapers, tell you the weather, entertain you with games, show you live football, store all your personal data and let you argue about politics all day with strangers"
"My God, how big will this device be? Size of a house???"
"No, about the size of a cigarette packet"
Imagine if you told them what cigarettes were doing to them!
When I am bored I sometimes play a game with PB. I go to a longer comment (avoiding the name at the top) and I read the first 2 or 3 sentences. And then I test myself: I see if I can guess the identity of the commenter from the opinion, syntax, vocabulary, style
To make this game even easier, if a post begins "Well, ..." you have a good chance of telling it's me after one word.
Fuck, I was just mulling over my over use of 'Well' at the start of posts!
For those reasons (and more) I think we'd have eventually moved away from fossil fuels regardless of climate change but it might have happened 30-40 years later.
There are simply better ways of producing energy more cleanly and easily with extremely advanced technology, but the economics and the engineering has to be there first.
Yep. The way out of this was always technology - and the other benefits helped to make that make sense. This was widely recognised a decade back in the field (I remember sitting in a seminar with an invited speaker setting out some projections on how green energy could become competitive within a decade or less - I don't recall the projections, but the overall prediction has proved correct).
I never heard any of the serious climate scientists who came to speak advocating a hair-shirt approach. It was all (apart from the projections themselves on climate) about the potential mitigating technologies, the new power sources and the tech to do the same things with less energy through greater efficiency.
Of course, back then such technologies were derided by people like Boris Johnson ("couldn't pull the skin off a rice pudding") and other right-wing politicians. Instead of offering their own solutions, they preferred to simply deny the existence of a problem. And now they have the gall to moan about "ecosocialists" dominating the field!
A combination of complacency, lethargy and Woke crap - ‘omg GPT3 might be racist’ - means the west has handed the race to AI to China, and it may already be too late to catch up.
If China dominates AI it dominates the world like no power before it
You should have learnt by now that most people aren’t interested in the really big stories.
We’ve been directly told in the last year that there is definitely ultra tech in our skies and oceans, which either belongs to adversaries of the West or non human intelligence / life forms. And everyone shrugged.
People aren’t going to listen too hard to a senior Pentagon official if he says the US has surrendered technological dominance to China and that a point will be reached (or may already have been reached) when their lead will be insurmountable. Forever.
Cognitive dissonance innit. Much more comfortable to talk about IDS’s majority instead.
Some people are INCREDIBLY resistant to the idea of artificial general intelligence. I have an extremely smart brother who is always open to new ideas but he just won't accept that this - machine intelligence - can ever happen, let alone that it is actually happening right now
Existentially, it frightens him
I think some people assume that events from science fiction are made up and can’t ever happen because they are fiction, particularly the bad events. Scifi writers really are just futurists and as a group have a pretty reasonable track record.
It's not just scifi writers being futurists; scientists feed off scifi, and scifi feeds off science. I've got a good book on this somewhere, going into how fiction from HG Wells onwards fed into science, just as they devoured science in turn.
An example is the humble iPad. Back in 1972, computer scientist came up with the concept of the Dynabook (*) - a computer for education. For decades, computer professionals have used it as an objective, and endpoint. Steve Jobs was apparently one of them. A vision that has taken four decades to come anywhere near fulfilment.
Alan Key doesn't think we've reached the endpoint yet.
(*) Not the laptop line
Imagine describing a smartphone to someone living in 1930 or even 1960.
"Everyone will own a device with which they can immediately communicate with almost anyone else on the planet, by voice or on screen. Also it will have instant access to all of human knowledge. And it will summon vehicles, take photos, play a near infinite variety of music, do sums, translate languages, record voices, make automatic payments, access your bank, access all media from TV to newspapers, tell you the weather, entertain you with games, show you live football, store all your personal data and let you argue about politics all day with strangers"
"My God, how big will this device be? Size of a house???"
"No, about the size of a cigarette packet"
Clarke, Niven/Pournelle and others were predicting them from the 1960s onwards. There's something a little like the iPad in 2001, I think. It was called the NewsPad.
Acorn did a little portable computer prototype called the NewsPAD, but it was never released. It was cool to play with it back in 1997/8.
Gentle reminder that #Brexit is important, but still not no.1 priority for the EU. Those whose job it is to focus on Brexit will be following this week's developments closely - the rest will be focused on Poland, new leadership in Central Europe, coalition talks in Germany, etc.
Which is yet another reason to add to the list shared here by @mij_europe the other day (which was basically parotting what I've written here for the past four years) as to why the UK 'holds all the cards' in these forthcoming negotiations.
The UK government cares passionately about what is going on and speak with a single voice. The EU's 27 governments do not.
That thread suggested that the EU had gone so far and no further, and that any rejection from Frost will lead to a trade war.
I agree with the general point though, that the U.K. “holds most of the cards” on NI.
I suspect Leavers will find the EU is stronger than they think and Remainers will find the EU is not as nice as they think.
I don't think the EU will immediately suspend the TCA, but they and member states can cause plenty of damage from the off, if they want to, which seems to be the case.
The UK can and will retaliate, but the effect will be less, except perhaps for Ireland
Why do you think the EU didn't follow through on its initial ultimatum not to ratify the TCA until the UK fully implemented the protocol?
Because as I have said previously, the UK not implementing the Protocol is something they can ignore for a very long time. Consciously breaching a just agreed treaty isn't something they can accept. It doesn't have anything to do with Ireland - most member states will be on the same page on this.
Article 16 is part of the treaty. How does using it constitute breaching the treaty?
I justly invoke part of a treaty You are renaging on promises He is an international outlaw
Yep. The mercurial nature of Article 16. If invoked by the EU over vaccines it's an outrageous abuse of the Treaty. If invoked by the UK over the Irish Sea border it's a justifiable interpretation of the Treaty. The truth is both are an abuse. Those who condemn the second and excuse the first are quisling ultra remainer 5th columnists like Devious Grevious. And those who condemn the first and excuse/support the second are hard leaver nutjobs who see the UK/EU relationship as a forever war where we have God on our side. There are, as it happens, rather more of the latter types on PB.com.
The EU invoking over vaccines was an outrageous abuse. The conditions for invocation are explicitly set out.
The invocation conditions were not met with UvdL invoked it. They are met now.
Everyone on all sides agrees that diversion of trade is happening, the pro-EU side consider it a good thing and evidence of "Brexit being bad" but if its happening that's the condition met for invocation. You can't deny that.
Yep, a perfect illustration of what I said -
"And those who condemn the first and excuse/support the second are hard leaver nutjobs who see the UK/EU relationship as a forever war where we have God on our side."
This is a piece of cake this morning.
Except I'm an entirely rational and moderate Leaver who has been shown to be right time and again.
Do you deny that diversion of trade is happening at the minute? Yes or no? Do you deny that diversion of trade is an entirely legitimate trigger? Yes or no?
If you can't answer these two simple questions, you show yourself off to be the trolling hypocrite you are.
In my years on here I struggle to recall you calling anything significant to do with Brexit right. What you mainly do is churn out simple simon, hard leaver, Brit Nat propaganda, then strain every sinew to interpret events as being a vindication of it, in the process and where necessary (which is often) rewriting both what you previously said, and why you previously said it, and what has actually happened.
As to A16, what is relevant is the existence, nature, extent of the problems being caused by the agreed NI Protocol. This can't be boiled down to the noddy "yes/no" multiple choice couplet you present here. The actual "yes/no" question is - are the problems of such thorniness and magnitude as to justify suspending the Protocol or reneging on it? And to this the objectively best (non-quisling, non-hardleaver-nutjob) answer is No.
Philip is highly suggestible. I legitimately insisted on a Y/N answer about something else yesterday, and he has taken up the idea and run with it. It is of course usually deployed fallaciously in "Have you stopped beating your wife?" type questions, as here.
My response to most of his posts these days is from Frank N. Furter:
"How forceful you are, Philip. Such a perfect specimen of manhood. So... dominant. You must be awfully proud of him, Mrs Thompson."
When he got schooled a few weeks ago on the lump of labour fallacy he was committing, he starting referring to the fallacy himself, trying to twist it to support his own point of view. It's sad more than anything.
Hm. The lump of labour fallacy is itself something of a fallacy. Or, it exists, at the macro level. Granted, as the supply of labour increases, the supply of jobs there are to do also increases. But it takes a long, long time to filter through, and labour is poorer in the short term and certainly no more rich in the long term. It is of no comfort to an individual low wage worker whose wages are being held down by a limitless supply of unskilled labour that in the long run that labour will also create a demand for more unskilled labour.
I thought that too. ie the government approach of restricting labour to drive up wages is economically illiterate but there would be a lengthy drag while employers tried to stay in business at previous staffing levels.
In fact the adjustment seems to be quite quick, as far as the sketchy evidence goes.
For all the economic expertise of our Brexiters on here they have failed to grasp the simplest of economic facts.
For them it is simple - restrictions on labour = wages up = prices up hurrah! Let's all pay ourselves more.
They ignore (to be charitable) or do not appreciate that restrictions on labour will shift the demand curve leftwards which will have an effect on prices and hence an equilibrium will be reached at a lower price point hence profitability will decrease hence wage rises will reverse hence we are back where we started.
Except with an adjustment of the wealth, skewed towards the low-paid, who are now closer to being able to afford to live where they work. Something of a reversal of recent trends, which has seen wealth accrue to capital rather than labour.
It depends. Two new coffee (or sprout picking) machines increase the returns to capital but that is what everyone seems to be crying out for.
Productivity gains is the only way that the lower paid will be able to increase their wealth in real terms in a sustainable way (ie beyond any market equilibrium adjustment period).
Without productivity gains the lower paid will remain disadvantaged.
Indeed, ask the garage owner who invested a quarter of a mil in a mechanical car wash, just before they became replaced by slave labour.
What we have now in the UK, is a medium-term opportunity for investment in capital and increases in productivity. In the short term, we see experienced people in certain sectors able to gain significantly from the labour shortages.
Some years ago there was a poster who was trying to sell mechanical car washes, but had, for the reasons given, to give up the idea. I wonder whether he (or she) still posts and what the situation is now.
A combination of complacency, lethargy and Woke crap - ‘omg GPT3 might be racist’ - means the west has handed the race to AI to China, and it may already be too late to catch up.
If China dominates AI it dominates the world like no power before it
You should have learnt by now that most people aren’t interested in the really big stories.
We’ve been directly told in the last year that there is definitely ultra tech in our skies and oceans, which either belongs to adversaries of the West or non human intelligence / life forms. And everyone shrugged.
People aren’t going to listen too hard to a senior Pentagon official if he says the US has surrendered technological dominance to China and that a point will be reached (or may already have been reached) when their lead will be insurmountable. Forever.
Cognitive dissonance innit. Much more comfortable to talk about IDS’s majority instead.
Some people are INCREDIBLY resistant to the idea of artificial general intelligence. I have an extremely smart brother who is always open to new ideas but he just won't accept that this - machine intelligence - can ever happen, let alone that it is actually happening right now
Existentially, it frightens him
I think some people assume that events from science fiction are made up and can’t ever happen because they are fiction, particularly the bad events. Scifi writers really are just futurists and as a group have a pretty reasonable track record.
It's not just scifi writers being futurists; scientists feed off scifi, and scifi feeds off science. I've got a good book on this somewhere, going into how fiction from HG Wells onwards fed into science, just as they devoured science in turn.
An example is the humble iPad. Back in 1972, computer scientist came up with the concept of the Dynabook (*) - a computer for education. For decades, computer professionals have used it as an objective, and endpoint. Steve Jobs was apparently one of them. A vision that has taken four decades to come anywhere near fulfilment.
Alan Key doesn't think we've reached the endpoint yet.
(*) Not the laptop line
Imagine describing a smartphone to someone living in 1930 or even 1960.
"Everyone will own a device with which they can immediately communicate with almost anyone else on the planet, by voice or on screen. Also it will have instant access to all of human knowledge. And it will summon vehicles, take photos, play a near infinite variety of music, do sums, translate languages, record voices, make automatic payments, access your bank, access all media from TV to newspapers, tell you the weather, entertain you with games, show you live football, store all your personal data and let you argue about politics all day with strangers"
"My God, how big will this device be? Size of a house???"
"No, about the size of a cigarette packet"
Usborne published a "Guide to Computers" in 1983. It predicited that in 25 years time there would be a palm sized computer with a colour touch screen, voice recognition and an always on radio network connection cheap enough that everyone would own one.
On thread - what this tells me is that the proportion of climate sceptics probably doesn't vary all that much by constituency (though it would be interesting to see polling to confirm). We jump through considerable hoops to ensure that the ethnic identities of our representatives are broadly in proportion to the population at large - it doesn't seem unreasonable to me that it should be desirable that the views of MPs are roughly in proportion to the population at large. Which implies a voice for minority opinions such as climate scepticism, albeit a minority one. Which by accident or design appears to be what we have.
Climate sceptics puzzle me. I am not a scientist but the whole thing seems pretty open and shut to me and there appears to be a broad consensus across scientific opinion. So I wonder, what do climate sceptics really think? That the climate isn't warming? I can see it with my own eyes, and measurements of temperature seem to back up this impression very convincingly. Do they think that this is all lies? That the climate is warming but it's nothing to do with human activity? This seems even less plausible. The planet seems to be warming up at unprecedented speed and at a time that correlates perfectly with human activity that models predict should be having this effect. That the greenhouse gases theory isn't correct? The story seems highly plausible, whether conceptually or if you put it through a complex climate model. That scientists don't understand their own models and instruments? It's possible, but seems implausible that some random uninformed punter understands them better. That scientists are engaged in a vast conspiracy? Unlikely if you understand how science operates. If anyone was going to fund a conspiracy here, fossil fuel interests seem most plausible - they have deep pockets and strong vested interests. That the whole thing is real but there's no point doing anything to stop it? This is the craziest take of all, if you actually think about what life on earth would be like with say a 3 or 4 degree temperature increase. So, like I say, these people are a mystery to me. People are entitled to their own opinions of course, but not their own facts.
If people don't like the political implications of accepting that something is true then they will practice cognitive dissonance instead, so they don't have to face up to them.
That's why climate action needs to be depoliticised in order for us to go as fast as possible, and not attached to ecosocialism.
Our choice of climate change actions is going to create winners and losers. It's a political decision to its core. What's needed is political leadership. People will listen to people they trust.
For some reason, for a lot of people in this country, that is Boris Johnson and the Conservative party more generally. So it's great that they do talk about climate change and have committed to doing some things about it. Obviously not as much as needed, but steps in the right direction.
That's definitely missing on the US right.
People forget that "global warming" went mainstream in the late 80's when The Blessed Margaret took up the cause!
"The furnaces of the world are now burning about 2,000,000,000 tons of coal a year. When this is burned, uniting with oxygen, it adds about 7,000,000,000 tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere yearly. This tends to make the air a more effective blanket for the earth and to raise its temperature. The effect may be considerable in a few centuries."
On thread - what this tells me is that the proportion of climate sceptics probably doesn't vary all that much by constituency (though it would be interesting to see polling to confirm). We jump through considerable hoops to ensure that the ethnic identities of our representatives are broadly in proportion to the population at large - it doesn't seem unreasonable to me that it should be desirable that the views of MPs are roughly in proportion to the population at large. Which implies a voice for minority opinions such as climate scepticism, albeit a minority one. Which by accident or design appears to be what we have.
Climate sceptics puzzle me. I am not a scientist but the whole thing seems pretty open and shut to me and there appears to be a broad consensus across scientific opinion. So I wonder, what do climate sceptics really think? That the climate isn't warming? I can see it with my own eyes, and measurements of temperature seem to back up this impression very convincingly. Do they think that this is all lies? That the climate is warming but it's nothing to do with human activity? This seems even less plausible. The planet seems to be warming up at unprecedented speed and at a time that correlates perfectly with human activity that models predict should be having this effect. That the greenhouse gases theory isn't correct? The story seems highly plausible, whether conceptually or if you put it through a complex climate model. That scientists don't understand their own models and instruments? It's possible, but seems implausible that some random uninformed punter understands them better. That scientists are engaged in a vast conspiracy? Unlikely if you understand how science operates. If anyone was going to fund a conspiracy here, fossil fuel interests seem most plausible - they have deep pockets and strong vested interests. That the whole thing is real but there's no point doing anything to stop it? This is the craziest take of all, if you actually think about what life on earth would be like with say a 3 or 4 degree temperature increase. So, like I say, these people are a mystery to me. People are entitled to their own opinions of course, but not their own facts.
If people don't like the political implications of accepting that something is true then they will practice cognitive dissonance instead, so they don't have to face up to them.
That's why climate action needs to be depoliticised in order for us to go as fast as possible, and not attached to ecosocialism.
Our choice of climate change actions is going to create winners and losers. It's a political decision to its core. What's needed is political leadership. People will listen to people they trust.
For some reason, for a lot of people in this country, that is Boris Johnson and the Conservative party more generally. So it's great that they do talk about climate change and have committed to doing some things about it. Obviously not as much as needed, but steps in the right direction.
That's definitely missing on the US right.
People forget that "global warming" went mainstream in the late 80's when The Blessed Margaret took up the cause!
That was before the right became subservient to the interests of the fossil fuel industries and rational thought from that quarter was effectively neutered for the next few decades.
"Supply chain problems that have been tormenting retailers for months are showing up in America's stores
Around the country, there are shortages of goods on shelves in Target, Costco, Home Depot and Sears
The issues aren't specific to any one type of good and are down to problems with shipping and distribution
Cargo ships off can't get into overworked ports to drop off goods and are hovering off the coast
There is a global shortage in truck drivers which is stalling distribution of goods and railroads are also jammed
The cost of shipping a single container from China to LA reached $20,000 last month - four times what it cost last October
Some retailers are telling people to buy Christmas gifts now to ensure they arrive on time
There is no immediate end in sight: Biden has launched a White House supply chain task force but businesses fear the problems will stretch on for months yet"
On topic, if anything’s going to get Johnson this year or next, it’s going to be rising utility and fuel bills, to pay for what David Cameron ended up describing as the “Green Crap”.
Those who live in Wokingham might not care too much about the bills, but those in Warrington and Workington certainly do.
I grew up in Wokingham. It is not the town it once was. For the last 10 or more years there has been mass house building making the town much bigger than it ever used to be. As a result there are many new people living there with different political views. In my view Redwood kept his seat at the last election due to fear of Corbyn. Redwood is not popular in Wokingham. I wouldn't be the least surprised if Wokingham went LD at the next election.
I grew up in Yateley, 25 years ago. Wokingham used to be a good night out, that was just about walkable back home. Been living abroad for the last decade though, so not been there in a long time.
That's quite some walk back home - must be well over 5 miles!
Yeah, a couple of hours if the legs were working properly. But when you’re 19 or 20 you don’t want to waste £20 on a taxi, do you?
It would depend if you were alone or not.
In my day of course, one could often thumb a lift.
The issue is categorically not people leaving leading to higher wages. Anyone who thinks that doesn't understand basic economics.
The issue is we were trapped in a feedback loop.
Brexit hasn't created the labour shortage - the labour shortage was already there and has been for decades. What its done is broken the feedback loop by removing the reason wages were imbalanced in the first place. Now wages can rise to reach an equilibrium where demand no longer exceeds supply.
Plenty of people voted for Brexit because they thought once the foreigners had gone wages would rise.
But your comment doesn't make sense. A labour shortage would result in higher wages. You say this hasn't happened. But it can now because of Brexit. What element of Brexit has done this?
I thought I explained that with the flow chart.
A labour shortage should have resulted in higher wages. But since there was an infinite pool of people who could be fished from to fill the shortage, it was cheaper to import more people than pay the higher wages.
But importing more people didn't "fill the shortage" because once the new people arrived they added to the nation's aggregate demand. So there was still a shortage. So wages should have gone up but didn't due to the infinite labour pool. So more vacancies, more people arrived and the aggregate demand increased again.
It was a feedback loop. What Brexit has done is removed the infinite pool of labour, thus breaking the feedback loop. So the labour shortage is there yes, as its been for about twenty years and counting, but now instead of bringing more people in to fill the vacancies, add to aggregate demand and create more vacancies . . . instead wages have to go up, demand will come down, and we'll finally have equilibrium.
When I am bored I sometimes play a game with PB. I go to a longer comment (avoiding the name at the top) and I read the first 2 or 3 sentences. And then I test myself: I see if I can guess the identity of the commenter from the opinion, syntax, vocabulary, style
To make this game even easier, if a post begins "Well, ..." you have a good chance of telling it's me after one word.
Fuck, I was just mulling over my over use of 'Well' at the start of posts!
On thread - what this tells me is that the proportion of climate sceptics probably doesn't vary all that much by constituency (though it would be interesting to see polling to confirm). We jump through considerable hoops to ensure that the ethnic identities of our representatives are broadly in proportion to the population at large - it doesn't seem unreasonable to me that it should be desirable that the views of MPs are roughly in proportion to the population at large. Which implies a voice for minority opinions such as climate scepticism, albeit a minority one. Which by accident or design appears to be what we have.
Climate sceptics puzzle me. I am not a scientist but the whole thing seems pretty open and shut to me and there appears to be a broad consensus across scientific opinion. So I wonder, what do climate sceptics really think? That the climate isn't warming? I can see it with my own eyes, and measurements of temperature seem to back up this impression very convincingly. Do they think that this is all lies? That the climate is warming but it's nothing to do with human activity? This seems even less plausible. The planet seems to be warming up at unprecedented speed and at a time that correlates perfectly with human activity that models predict should be having this effect. That the greenhouse gases theory isn't correct? The story seems highly plausible, whether conceptually or if you put it through a complex climate model. That scientists don't understand their own models and instruments? It's possible, but seems implausible that some random uninformed punter understands them better. That scientists are engaged in a vast conspiracy? Unlikely if you understand how science operates. If anyone was going to fund a conspiracy here, fossil fuel interests seem most plausible - they have deep pockets and strong vested interests. That the whole thing is real but there's no point doing anything to stop it? This is the craziest take of all, if you actually think about what life on earth would be like with say a 3 or 4 degree temperature increase. So, like I say, these people are a mystery to me. People are entitled to their own opinions of course, but not their own facts.
If people don't like the political implications of accepting that something is true then they will practice cognitive dissonance instead, so they don't have to face up to them.
That's why climate action needs to be depoliticised in order for us to go as fast as possible, and not attached to ecosocialism.
The simplistic approach of dividing everyone into climate change believers and clearly stupid or bad faith "deniers"/sceptics is a very poor formulation of the situation and is an insult to the intelligence. It closes down debate (not a good thing). There are hugely complex areas for discussion in terms of the trust we should put in models that have not and cannot yet be validated, the effects of warming and how best to reduce emissions. Step out of line on any of these and you are a "denier". People have been told that the GWPF (Lawson's outfit) are deniers and not to be trusted. However, look at the academic advisors https://www.thegwpf.org/who-we-are/#academicAdvisoryCouncil if you dare to access such a transgressive site and can you honestly say they are not well qualified? They represent a minority, that is true, but determining policy when debate is being intentionally closed down is dangerous.
On thread - what this tells me is that the proportion of climate sceptics probably doesn't vary all that much by constituency (though it would be interesting to see polling to confirm). We jump through considerable hoops to ensure that the ethnic identities of our representatives are broadly in proportion to the population at large - it doesn't seem unreasonable to me that it should be desirable that the views of MPs are roughly in proportion to the population at large. Which implies a voice for minority opinions such as climate scepticism, albeit a minority one. Which by accident or design appears to be what we have.
Climate sceptics puzzle me. I am not a scientist but the whole thing seems pretty open and shut to me and there appears to be a broad consensus across scientific opinion. So I wonder, what do climate sceptics really think? That the climate isn't warming? I can see it with my own eyes, and measurements of temperature seem to back up this impression very convincingly. Do they think that this is all lies? That the climate is warming but it's nothing to do with human activity? This seems even less plausible. The planet seems to be warming up at unprecedented speed and at a time that correlates perfectly with human activity that models predict should be having this effect. That the greenhouse gases theory isn't correct? The story seems highly plausible, whether conceptually or if you put it through a complex climate model. That scientists don't understand their own models and instruments? It's possible, but seems implausible that some random uninformed punter understands them better. That scientists are engaged in a vast conspiracy? Unlikely if you understand how science operates. If anyone was going to fund a conspiracy here, fossil fuel interests seem most plausible - they have deep pockets and strong vested interests. That the whole thing is real but there's no point doing anything to stop it? This is the craziest take of all, if you actually think about what life on earth would be like with say a 3 or 4 degree temperature increase. So, like I say, these people are a mystery to me. People are entitled to their own opinions of course, but not their own facts.
If people don't like the political implications of accepting that something is true then they will practice cognitive dissonance instead, so they don't have to face up to them.
That's why climate action needs to be depoliticised in order for us to go as fast as possible, and not attached to ecosocialism.
Our choice of climate change actions is going to create winners and losers. It's a political decision to its core. What's needed is political leadership. People will listen to people they trust.
For some reason, for a lot of people in this country, that is Boris Johnson and the Conservative party more generally. So it's great that they do talk about climate change and have committed to doing some things about it. Obviously not as much as needed, but steps in the right direction.
That's definitely missing on the US right.
People forget that "global warming" went mainstream in the late 80's when The Blessed Margaret took up the cause!
That was before the right became subservient to the interests of the fossil fuel industries and rational thought from that quarter was effectively neutered for the next few decades.
Don't debate any specific points, just dismiss doubters as bad actors.
Covid cases rising again today, over 40K. Hospital admissions also rising slightly in the last few days. Deaths I guess we will have to wait till tomorrow/Wed.
Am I the only person feeling somewhat anxious that this disease isn't over with yet? Should I just relax?
Admissions ticking up at my place again too.
I don't expect a massive surge, but neither can we resume normal service with 4 medical wards of covid and 25% of ICU occupied.
Any info on the admissions? Is it still the elderly and the unvaccinated?
One in six are unvaccinated pregnant women according to the radio news
Wasn't that ICU patients?
But yes, part of our staffing crisis is that women go off on maternity leave as soon as they can. They have seen what covid in pregnancy does.
On thread - what this tells me is that the proportion of climate sceptics probably doesn't vary all that much by constituency (though it would be interesting to see polling to confirm). We jump through considerable hoops to ensure that the ethnic identities of our representatives are broadly in proportion to the population at large - it doesn't seem unreasonable to me that it should be desirable that the views of MPs are roughly in proportion to the population at large. Which implies a voice for minority opinions such as climate scepticism, albeit a minority one. Which by accident or design appears to be what we have.
Climate sceptics puzzle me. I am not a scientist but the whole thing seems pretty open and shut to me and there appears to be a broad consensus across scientific opinion. So I wonder, what do climate sceptics really think? That the climate isn't warming? I can see it with my own eyes, and measurements of temperature seem to back up this impression very convincingly. Do they think that this is all lies? That the climate is warming but it's nothing to do with human activity? This seems even less plausible. The planet seems to be warming up at unprecedented speed and at a time that correlates perfectly with human activity that models predict should be having this effect. That the greenhouse gases theory isn't correct? The story seems highly plausible, whether conceptually or if you put it through a complex climate model. That scientists don't understand their own models and instruments? It's possible, but seems implausible that some random uninformed punter understands them better. That scientists are engaged in a vast conspiracy? Unlikely if you understand how science operates. If anyone was going to fund a conspiracy here, fossil fuel interests seem most plausible - they have deep pockets and strong vested interests. That the whole thing is real but there's no point doing anything to stop it? This is the craziest take of all, if you actually think about what life on earth would be like with say a 3 or 4 degree temperature increase. So, like I say, these people are a mystery to me. People are entitled to their own opinions of course, but not their own facts.
If people don't like the political implications of accepting that something is true then they will practice cognitive dissonance instead, so they don't have to face up to them.
That's why climate action needs to be depoliticised in order for us to go as fast as possible, and not attached to ecosocialism.
Our choice of climate change actions is going to create winners and losers. It's a political decision to its core. What's needed is political leadership. People will listen to people they trust.
For some reason, for a lot of people in this country, that is Boris Johnson and the Conservative party more generally. So it's great that they do talk about climate change and have committed to doing some things about it. Obviously not as much as needed, but steps in the right direction.
That's definitely missing on the US right.
People forget that "global warming" went mainstream in the late 80's when The Blessed Margaret took up the cause!
"The furnaces of the world are now burning about 2,000,000,000 tons of coal a year. When this is burned, uniting with oxygen, it adds about 7,000,000,000 tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere yearly. This tends to make the air a more effective blanket for the earth and to raise its temperature. The effect may be considerable in a few centuries."
Yeah I know the theory had been around for a very long time but it was only in the mid to late 1980s that it went mainstream and a lot of that was down to Lady Thatcher making speeches about it.
Ten years previous to her UN speech the world was going through an "Ice Age" scare.
Mrs T also did a lot to combat the ozone layer problem as well to be fair (which a lot of people forget now)
The issue is categorically not people leaving leading to higher wages. Anyone who thinks that doesn't understand basic economics.
The issue is we were trapped in a feedback loop.
Brexit hasn't created the labour shortage - the labour shortage was already there and has been for decades. What its done is broken the feedback loop by removing the reason wages were imbalanced in the first place. Now wages can rise to reach an equilibrium where demand no longer exceeds supply.
Plenty of people voted for Brexit because they thought once the foreigners had gone wages would rise.
But your comment doesn't make sense. A labour shortage would result in higher wages. You say this hasn't happened. But it can now because of Brexit. What element of Brexit has done this?
I thought I explained that with the flow chart.
A labour shortage should have resulted in higher wages. But since there was an infinite pool of people who could be fished from to fill the shortage, it was cheaper to import more people than pay the higher wages.
But importing more people didn't "fill the shortage" because once the new people arrived they added to the nation's aggregate demand. So there was still a shortage. So wages should have gone up but didn't due to the infinite labour pool. So more vacancies, more people arrived and the aggregate demand increased again.
It was a feedback loop. What Brexit has done is removed the infinite pool of labour, thus breaking the feedback loop. So the labour shortage is there yes, as its been for about twenty years and counting, but now instead of bringing more people in to fill the vacancies, add to aggregate demand and create more vacancies . . . instead wages have to go up, demand will come down, and we'll finally have equilibrium.
Huh? Wages only go up for a reason. Not just "because". Higher demand, cp, means higher wages and lower demand lower wages.
The presence of immigration or otherwise is irrelevant - more immigrants = more labour = more demand = wages in equilibrium; fewer immigrants = less labour = less demand = wages in equilibrium.
Why you think the latter scenario should result in equilibrium settling at a higher level than previously is anyone's guess.
Conservative 40% (–) Labour 36% (-1) Liberal Democrat 9% (-1) Green 6% (+2) Scottish National Party 4% (–) Reform UK 4% (+1) Other 1% (–)
Changes +/- 4 Oct
Between Boris Johnson and Keir Starmer, 42% say they think Boris Johnson would be a better Prime Minister for the United Kingdom at this moment than Keir Starmer, a result which has not changed since last week’s poll. Conversely, 31% think Keir Starmer would be the better Prime Minister when compared to Boris Johnson (down 1%).
A combination of complacency, lethargy and Woke crap - ‘omg GPT3 might be racist’ - means the west has handed the race to AI to China, and it may already be too late to catch up.
If China dominates AI it dominates the world like no power before it
You should have learnt by now that most people aren’t interested in the really big stories.
We’ve been directly told in the last year that there is definitely ultra tech in our skies and oceans, which either belongs to adversaries of the West or non human intelligence / life forms. And everyone shrugged.
People aren’t going to listen too hard to a senior Pentagon official if he says the US has surrendered technological dominance to China and that a point will be reached (or may already have been reached) when their lead will be insurmountable. Forever.
Cognitive dissonance innit. Much more comfortable to talk about IDS’s majority instead.
Some people are INCREDIBLY resistant to the idea of artificial general intelligence. I have an extremely smart brother who is always open to new ideas but he just won't accept that this - machine intelligence - can ever happen, let alone that it is actually happening right now
Existentially, it frightens him
I think some people assume that events from science fiction are made up and can’t ever happen because they are fiction, particularly the bad events. Scifi writers really are just futurists and as a group have a pretty reasonable track record.
It's not just scifi writers being futurists; scientists feed off scifi, and scifi feeds off science. I've got a good book on this somewhere, going into how fiction from HG Wells onwards fed into science, just as they devoured science in turn.
An example is the humble iPad. Back in 1972, computer scientist came up with the concept of the Dynabook (*) - a computer for education. For decades, computer professionals have used it as an objective, and endpoint. Steve Jobs was apparently one of them. A vision that has taken four decades to come anywhere near fulfilment.
Alan Key doesn't think we've reached the endpoint yet.
(*) Not the laptop line
Imagine describing a smartphone to someone living in 1930 or even 1960.
"Everyone will own a device with which they can immediately communicate with almost anyone else on the planet, by voice or on screen. Also it will have instant access to all of human knowledge. And it will summon vehicles, take photos, play a near infinite variety of music, do sums, translate languages, record voices, make automatic payments, access your bank, access all media from TV to newspapers, tell you the weather, entertain you with games, show you live football, store all your personal data and let you argue about politics all day with strangers"
"My God, how big will this device be? Size of a house???"
"No, about the size of a cigarette packet"
Clarke, Niven/Pournelle and others were predicting them from the 1960s onwards. There's something a little like the iPad in 2001, I think. It was called the NewsPad.
Acorn did a little portable computer prototype called the NewsPAD, but it was never released. It was cool to play with it back in 1997/8.
I visited Xerox Park about a decade ago. It's easy to forget just how insanely forward thinking they were. In the 1970s they basically developed:
The issue is categorically not people leaving leading to higher wages. Anyone who thinks that doesn't understand basic economics.
The issue is we were trapped in a feedback loop.
Brexit hasn't created the labour shortage - the labour shortage was already there and has been for decades. What its done is broken the feedback loop by removing the reason wages were imbalanced in the first place. Now wages can rise to reach an equilibrium where demand no longer exceeds supply.
Plenty of people voted for Brexit because they thought once the foreigners had gone wages would rise.
But your comment doesn't make sense. A labour shortage would result in higher wages. You say this hasn't happened. But it can now because of Brexit. What element of Brexit has done this?
I thought I explained that with the flow chart.
A labour shortage should have resulted in higher wages. But since there was an infinite pool of people who could be fished from to fill the shortage, it was cheaper to import more people than pay the higher wages.
But importing more people didn't "fill the shortage" because once the new people arrived they added to the nation's aggregate demand. So there was still a shortage. So wages should have gone up but didn't due to the infinite labour pool. So more vacancies, more people arrived and the aggregate demand increased again.
It was a feedback loop. What Brexit has done is removed the infinite pool of labour, thus breaking the feedback loop. So the labour shortage is there yes, as its been for about twenty years and counting, but now instead of bringing more people in to fill the vacancies, add to aggregate demand and create more vacancies . . . instead wages have to go up, demand will come down, and we'll finally have equilibrium.
Huh? Wages only go up for a reason. Not just "because". Higher demand, cp, means higher wages and lower demand lower wages.
The presence of immigration or otherwise is irrelevant - more immigrants = more labour = more demand = wages in equilibrium; fewer immigrants = less labour = less demand = wages in equilibrium.
Why you think the latter scenario should result in equilibrium settling at a higher level than previously is anyone's guess.
The issue is we haven't been in equilibrium for nearly twenty years! The presence of immigration or otherwise is not irrelevant since the availability of unlimited immigration was suppressing wages.
That's why there's been a labour shortage almost consistently since 2004, because real wages have been suppressed and below what they should have been, thus demand for labour has been exceeding supply.
Hundreds of thousands of new immigrants every year have been eagerly recruited to "fill the vacancies" but you can't fill vacancies via net immigration due to the fact the migrants are people who will have their own aggregate demand.
Wages should have gone up nearly twenty years ago. Ten years ago. Five years ago. They're going up now, not because of anything that's happened now other than the distortion that was preventing wages from rising has been removed.
My favourite rail fact of the day is that Paris-Amsterdam on the high-speed Thalys (480km) takes 3h15m while you can do London-Newcastle on the east coast mainline (450km) in 2h48m. Despite the Thalys having a top speed of 300km/h and the ECML intercities topping out at 200km/h
On thread - what this tells me is that the proportion of climate sceptics probably doesn't vary all that much by constituency (though it would be interesting to see polling to confirm). We jump through considerable hoops to ensure that the ethnic identities of our representatives are broadly in proportion to the population at large - it doesn't seem unreasonable to me that it should be desirable that the views of MPs are roughly in proportion to the population at large. Which implies a voice for minority opinions such as climate scepticism, albeit a minority one. Which by accident or design appears to be what we have.
Climate sceptics puzzle me. I am not a scientist but the whole thing seems pretty open and shut to me and there appears to be a broad consensus across scientific opinion. So I wonder, what do climate sceptics really think? That the climate isn't warming? I can see it with my own eyes, and measurements of temperature seem to back up this impression very convincingly. Do they think that this is all lies? That the climate is warming but it's nothing to do with human activity? This seems even less plausible. The planet seems to be warming up at unprecedented speed and at a time that correlates perfectly with human activity that models predict should be having this effect. That the greenhouse gases theory isn't correct? The story seems highly plausible, whether conceptually or if you put it through a complex climate model. That scientists don't understand their own models and instruments? It's possible, but seems implausible that some random uninformed punter understands them better. That scientists are engaged in a vast conspiracy? Unlikely if you understand how science operates. If anyone was going to fund a conspiracy here, fossil fuel interests seem most plausible - they have deep pockets and strong vested interests. That the whole thing is real but there's no point doing anything to stop it? This is the craziest take of all, if you actually think about what life on earth would be like with say a 3 or 4 degree temperature increase. So, like I say, these people are a mystery to me. People are entitled to their own opinions of course, but not their own facts.
The deadly difficulty is the last point. Facts matter. A possibility is that it is already a practical fact, baked in, that the current levels of CO2+the additional CO2 going into the atmosphere, which is increasing not decreasing in how much extra is going in+ the addition amounts planned by, for example, China's coal fired power programme mean that if the science is right we are already certain to reach apocalypse level, at date X give or take at best a few years.
I think Great Thunberg has already noticed this. If this is correct then amelioration, mitigation, continuing to limit the increase as much as possible and crossed fingers is the only option. But avoidance of the doomsday scenario is, on the data, a non option.
On thread - what this tells me is that the proportion of climate sceptics probably doesn't vary all that much by constituency (though it would be interesting to see polling to confirm). We jump through considerable hoops to ensure that the ethnic identities of our representatives are broadly in proportion to the population at large - it doesn't seem unreasonable to me that it should be desirable that the views of MPs are roughly in proportion to the population at large. Which implies a voice for minority opinions such as climate scepticism, albeit a minority one. Which by accident or design appears to be what we have.
Climate sceptics puzzle me. I am not a scientist but the whole thing seems pretty open and shut to me and there appears to be a broad consensus across scientific opinion. So I wonder, what do climate sceptics really think? That the climate isn't warming? I can see it with my own eyes, and measurements of temperature seem to back up this impression very convincingly. Do they think that this is all lies? That the climate is warming but it's nothing to do with human activity? This seems even less plausible. The planet seems to be warming up at unprecedented speed and at a time that correlates perfectly with human activity that models predict should be having this effect. That the greenhouse gases theory isn't correct? The story seems highly plausible, whether conceptually or if you put it through a complex climate model. That scientists don't understand their own models and instruments? It's possible, but seems implausible that some random uninformed punter understands them better. That scientists are engaged in a vast conspiracy? Unlikely if you understand how science operates. If anyone was going to fund a conspiracy here, fossil fuel interests seem most plausible - they have deep pockets and strong vested interests. That the whole thing is real but there's no point doing anything to stop it? This is the craziest take of all, if you actually think about what life on earth would be like with say a 3 or 4 degree temperature increase. So, like I say, these people are a mystery to me. People are entitled to their own opinions of course, but not their own facts.
If people don't like the political implications of accepting that something is true then they will practice cognitive dissonance instead, so they don't have to face up to them.
That's why climate action needs to be depoliticised in order for us to go as fast as possible, and not attached to ecosocialism.
Our choice of climate change actions is going to create winners and losers. It's a political decision to its core. What's needed is political leadership. People will listen to people they trust.
For some reason, for a lot of people in this country, that is Boris Johnson and the Conservative party more generally. So it's great that they do talk about climate change and have committed to doing some things about it. Obviously not as much as needed, but steps in the right direction.
That's definitely missing on the US right.
People forget that "global warming" went mainstream in the late 80's when The Blessed Margaret took up the cause!
"The furnaces of the world are now burning about 2,000,000,000 tons of coal a year. When this is burned, uniting with oxygen, it adds about 7,000,000,000 tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere yearly. This tends to make the air a more effective blanket for the earth and to raise its temperature. The effect may be considerable in a few centuries."
A combination of complacency, lethargy and Woke crap - ‘omg GPT3 might be racist’ - means the west has handed the race to AI to China, and it may already be too late to catch up.
If China dominates AI it dominates the world like no power before it
You should have learnt by now that most people aren’t interested in the really big stories.
We’ve been directly told in the last year that there is definitely ultra tech in our skies and oceans, which either belongs to adversaries of the West or non human intelligence / life forms. And everyone shrugged.
People aren’t going to listen too hard to a senior Pentagon official if he says the US has surrendered technological dominance to China and that a point will be reached (or may already have been reached) when their lead will be insurmountable. Forever.
Cognitive dissonance innit. Much more comfortable to talk about IDS’s majority instead.
Some people are INCREDIBLY resistant to the idea of artificial general intelligence. I have an extremely smart brother who is always open to new ideas but he just won't accept that this - machine intelligence - can ever happen, let alone that it is actually happening right now
Existentially, it frightens him
I think some people assume that events from science fiction are made up and can’t ever happen because they are fiction, particularly the bad events. Scifi writers really are just futurists and as a group have a pretty reasonable track record.
It's not just scifi writers being futurists; scientists feed off scifi, and scifi feeds off science. I've got a good book on this somewhere, going into how fiction from HG Wells onwards fed into science, just as they devoured science in turn.
An example is the humble iPad. Back in 1972, computer scientist came up with the concept of the Dynabook (*) - a computer for education. For decades, computer professionals have used it as an objective, and endpoint. Steve Jobs was apparently one of them. A vision that has taken four decades to come anywhere near fulfilment.
Alan Key doesn't think we've reached the endpoint yet.
(*) Not the laptop line
Imagine describing a smartphone to someone living in 1930 or even 1960.
"Everyone will own a device with which they can immediately communicate with almost anyone else on the planet, by voice or on screen. Also it will have instant access to all of human knowledge. And it will summon vehicles, take photos, play a near infinite variety of music, do sums, translate languages, record voices, make automatic payments, access your bank, access all media from TV to newspapers, tell you the weather, entertain you with games, show you live football, store all your personal data and let you argue about politics all day with strangers"
"My God, how big will this device be? Size of a house???"
"No, about the size of a cigarette packet"
Clarke, Niven/Pournelle and others were predicting them from the 1960s onwards. There's something a little like the iPad in 2001, I think. It was called the NewsPad.
Acorn did a little portable computer prototype called the NewsPAD, but it was never released. It was cool to play with it back in 1997/8.
I visited Xerox Park about a decade ago. It's easy to forget just how insanely forward thinking they were. In the 1970s they basically developed:
On thread - what this tells me is that the proportion of climate sceptics probably doesn't vary all that much by constituency (though it would be interesting to see polling to confirm). We jump through considerable hoops to ensure that the ethnic identities of our representatives are broadly in proportion to the population at large - it doesn't seem unreasonable to me that it should be desirable that the views of MPs are roughly in proportion to the population at large. Which implies a voice for minority opinions such as climate scepticism, albeit a minority one. Which by accident or design appears to be what we have.
Climate sceptics puzzle me. I am not a scientist but the whole thing seems pretty open and shut to me and there appears to be a broad consensus across scientific opinion. So I wonder, what do climate sceptics really think? That the climate isn't warming? I can see it with my own eyes, and measurements of temperature seem to back up this impression very convincingly. Do they think that this is all lies? That the climate is warming but it's nothing to do with human activity? This seems even less plausible. The planet seems to be warming up at unprecedented speed and at a time that correlates perfectly with human activity that models predict should be having this effect. That the greenhouse gases theory isn't correct? The story seems highly plausible, whether conceptually or if you put it through a complex climate model. That scientists don't understand their own models and instruments? It's possible, but seems implausible that some random uninformed punter understands them better. That scientists are engaged in a vast conspiracy? Unlikely if you understand how science operates. If anyone was going to fund a conspiracy here, fossil fuel interests seem most plausible - they have deep pockets and strong vested interests. That the whole thing is real but there's no point doing anything to stop it? This is the craziest take of all, if you actually think about what life on earth would be like with say a 3 or 4 degree temperature increase. So, like I say, these people are a mystery to me. People are entitled to their own opinions of course, but not their own facts.
If people don't like the political implications of accepting that something is true then they will practice cognitive dissonance instead, so they don't have to face up to them.
That's why climate action needs to be depoliticised in order for us to go as fast as possible, and not attached to ecosocialism.
Our choice of climate change actions is going to create winners and losers. It's a political decision to its core. What's needed is political leadership. People will listen to people they trust.
For some reason, for a lot of people in this country, that is Boris Johnson and the Conservative party more generally. So it's great that they do talk about climate change and have committed to doing some things about it. Obviously not as much as needed, but steps in the right direction.
That's definitely missing on the US right.
People forget that "global warming" went mainstream in the late 80's when The Blessed Margaret took up the cause!
"The furnaces of the world are now burning about 2,000,000,000 tons of coal a year. When this is burned, uniting with oxygen, it adds about 7,000,000,000 tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere yearly. This tends to make the air a more effective blanket for the earth and to raise its temperature. The effect may be considerable in a few centuries."
Yeah I know the theory had been around for a very long time but it was only in the mid to late 1980s that it went mainstream and a lot of that was down to Lady Thatcher making speeches about it.
Ten years previous to her UN speech the world was going through an "Ice Age" scare.
Mrs T also did a lot to combat the ozone layer problem as well to be fair (which a lot of people forget now)
There was some fears in the 1970s that increasing levels of particulate pollution could trigger another ice age, but even then it was quickly realised that greenhouse warming would predominate. By the start of the 1980s it was clear to climate scientists that global warming was a potential threat to mankind, and it is to Margaret Thatcher's credit that she was one of the first politicians to grasp the seriousness of the issue.
On thread - what this tells me is that the proportion of climate sceptics probably doesn't vary all that much by constituency (though it would be interesting to see polling to confirm). We jump through considerable hoops to ensure that the ethnic identities of our representatives are broadly in proportion to the population at large - it doesn't seem unreasonable to me that it should be desirable that the views of MPs are roughly in proportion to the population at large. Which implies a voice for minority opinions such as climate scepticism, albeit a minority one. Which by accident or design appears to be what we have.
Climate sceptics puzzle me. I am not a scientist but the whole thing seems pretty open and shut to me and there appears to be a broad consensus across scientific opinion. So I wonder, what do climate sceptics really think? That the climate isn't warming? I can see it with my own eyes, and measurements of temperature seem to back up this impression very convincingly. Do they think that this is all lies? That the climate is warming but it's nothing to do with human activity? This seems even less plausible. The planet seems to be warming up at unprecedented speed and at a time that correlates perfectly with human activity that models predict should be having this effect. That the greenhouse gases theory isn't correct? The story seems highly plausible, whether conceptually or if you put it through a complex climate model. That scientists don't understand their own models and instruments? It's possible, but seems implausible that some random uninformed punter understands them better. That scientists are engaged in a vast conspiracy? Unlikely if you understand how science operates. If anyone was going to fund a conspiracy here, fossil fuel interests seem most plausible - they have deep pockets and strong vested interests. That the whole thing is real but there's no point doing anything to stop it? This is the craziest take of all, if you actually think about what life on earth would be like with say a 3 or 4 degree temperature increase. So, like I say, these people are a mystery to me. People are entitled to their own opinions of course, but not their own facts.
The deadly difficulty is the last point. Facts matter. A possibility is that it is already a practical fact, baked in, that the current levels of CO2+the additional CO2 going into the atmosphere, which is increasing not decreasing in how much extra is going in+ the addition amounts planned by, for example, China's coal fired power programme mean that if the science is right we are already certain to reach apocalypse level, at date X give or take at best a few years.
I think Great Thunberg has already noticed this. If this is correct then amelioration, mitigation, continuing to limit the increase as much as possible and crossed fingers is the only option. But avoidance of the doomsday scenario is, on the data, a non option.
The issue is though that of something must be done, this is something, this must be done.
"Insulate Britain" pricks are calling for half a trillion to be spent on insulation. They've said "a few billion" won't be enough, it needs to be half a trillion. Just on insulation.
Now is insulation a good idea? Yes, why not?
Is insulation the best use of half a trillion pounds? Not necessarily.
Maybe half a trillion invested in new tidal lagoons or new energy generation or mitigation or many other options would do more than half a trillion in insulation.
Especially since our own emissions are rapidly becoming a drop in the ocean then our cash going into mitigation may increasing be the best use of it.
On thread - what this tells me is that the proportion of climate sceptics probably doesn't vary all that much by constituency (though it would be interesting to see polling to confirm). We jump through considerable hoops to ensure that the ethnic identities of our representatives are broadly in proportion to the population at large - it doesn't seem unreasonable to me that it should be desirable that the views of MPs are roughly in proportion to the population at large. Which implies a voice for minority opinions such as climate scepticism, albeit a minority one. Which by accident or design appears to be what we have.
Climate sceptics puzzle me. I am not a scientist but the whole thing seems pretty open and shut to me and there appears to be a broad consensus across scientific opinion. So I wonder, what do climate sceptics really think? That the climate isn't warming? I can see it with my own eyes, and measurements of temperature seem to back up this impression very convincingly. Do they think that this is all lies? That the climate is warming but it's nothing to do with human activity? This seems even less plausible. The planet seems to be warming up at unprecedented speed and at a time that correlates perfectly with human activity that models predict should be having this effect. That the greenhouse gases theory isn't correct? The story seems highly plausible, whether conceptually or if you put it through a complex climate model. That scientists don't understand their own models and instruments? It's possible, but seems implausible that some random uninformed punter understands them better. That scientists are engaged in a vast conspiracy? Unlikely if you understand how science operates. If anyone was going to fund a conspiracy here, fossil fuel interests seem most plausible - they have deep pockets and strong vested interests. That the whole thing is real but there's no point doing anything to stop it? This is the craziest take of all, if you actually think about what life on earth would be like with say a 3 or 4 degree temperature increase. So, like I say, these people are a mystery to me. People are entitled to their own opinions of course, but not their own facts.
If people don't like the political implications of accepting that something is true then they will practice cognitive dissonance instead, so they don't have to face up to them.
That's why climate action needs to be depoliticised in order for us to go as fast as possible, and not attached to ecosocialism.
Our choice of climate change actions is going to create winners and losers. It's a political decision to its core. What's needed is political leadership. People will listen to people they trust.
For some reason, for a lot of people in this country, that is Boris Johnson and the Conservative party more generally. So it's great that they do talk about climate change and have committed to doing some things about it. Obviously not as much as needed, but steps in the right direction.
That's definitely missing on the US right.
People forget that "global warming" went mainstream in the late 80's when The Blessed Margaret took up the cause!
"The furnaces of the world are now burning about 2,000,000,000 tons of coal a year. When this is burned, uniting with oxygen, it adds about 7,000,000,000 tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere yearly. This tends to make the air a more effective blanket for the earth and to raise its temperature. The effect may be considerable in a few centuries."
Yeah I know the theory had been around for a very long time but it was only in the mid to late 1980s that it went mainstream and a lot of that was down to Lady Thatcher making speeches about it.
Ten years previous to her UN speech the world was going through an "Ice Age" scare.
Mrs T also did a lot to combat the ozone layer problem as well to be fair (which a lot of people forget now)
My father had to brief her on the risks of global warming. She was sceptical and spent 30 minutes going through the data with him. After that she was convinced on the basis of the increasing levels of CO2 alone. She was a chemist first and a barrister second.
A combination of complacency, lethargy and Woke crap - ‘omg GPT3 might be racist’ - means the west has handed the race to AI to China, and it may already be too late to catch up.
If China dominates AI it dominates the world like no power before it
You should have learnt by now that most people aren’t interested in the really big stories.
We’ve been directly told in the last year that there is definitely ultra tech in our skies and oceans, which either belongs to adversaries of the West or non human intelligence / life forms. And everyone shrugged.
People aren’t going to listen too hard to a senior Pentagon official if he says the US has surrendered technological dominance to China and that a point will be reached (or may already have been reached) when their lead will be insurmountable. Forever.
Cognitive dissonance innit. Much more comfortable to talk about IDS’s majority instead.
Some people are INCREDIBLY resistant to the idea of artificial general intelligence. I have an extremely smart brother who is always open to new ideas but he just won't accept that this - machine intelligence - can ever happen, let alone that it is actually happening right now
Existentially, it frightens him
I think some people assume that events from science fiction are made up and can’t ever happen because they are fiction, particularly the bad events. Scifi writers really are just futurists and as a group have a pretty reasonable track record.
It's not just scifi writers being futurists; scientists feed off scifi, and scifi feeds off science. I've got a good book on this somewhere, going into how fiction from HG Wells onwards fed into science, just as they devoured science in turn.
An example is the humble iPad. Back in 1972, computer scientist came up with the concept of the Dynabook (*) - a computer for education. For decades, computer professionals have used it as an objective, and endpoint. Steve Jobs was apparently one of them. A vision that has taken four decades to come anywhere near fulfilment.
Alan Key doesn't think we've reached the endpoint yet.
(*) Not the laptop line
Imagine describing a smartphone to someone living in 1930 or even 1960.
"Everyone will own a device with which they can immediately communicate with almost anyone else on the planet, by voice or on screen. Also it will have instant access to all of human knowledge. And it will summon vehicles, take photos, play a near infinite variety of music, do sums, translate languages, record voices, make automatic payments, access your bank, access all media from TV to newspapers, tell you the weather, entertain you with games, show you live football, store all your personal data and let you argue about politics all day with strangers"
"My God, how big will this device be? Size of a house???"
"No, about the size of a cigarette packet"
Clarke, Niven/Pournelle and others were predicting them from the 1960s onwards. There's something a little like the iPad in 2001, I think. It was called the NewsPad.
Acorn did a little portable computer prototype called the NewsPAD, but it was never released. It was cool to play with it back in 1997/8.
I visited Xerox Park about a decade ago. It's easy to forget just how insanely forward thinking they were. In the 1970s they basically developed:
Ironic that they didn't actually benefit from any of this.
Hence Gates when Jobs sued him over windows based GUIs - he broke into Xerox and stole the TV and is complaining that I went round the next night and took the stereo.
The one thing I don't understand whenever climate change comes up, is this:
If the human brain is about to be superseded by artificial intelligence, and there is no way of actually stopping development in this area due to a combination of market forces and competition between hostile states; then why are people worrying about climate change?
It seems like people are hopelessly optimistic about being able to solve the AI problem, and disproportionately pessimistic about being able to solve climate change.
For good reasons we have not evolved with much capacity to worry about the nature of the species that will wipe us out and supersede us. Just as our brains have not evolved to be good at dealing with the question of what reality is like outside our experience of it.
It looks as if we have also evolved to think that the UK can act to solve a global problem of climate change even if the Chinese make it impossible to do so.
A combination of complacency, lethargy and Woke crap - ‘omg GPT3 might be racist’ - means the west has handed the race to AI to China, and it may already be too late to catch up.
If China dominates AI it dominates the world like no power before it
You should have learnt by now that most people aren’t interested in the really big stories.
We’ve been directly told in the last year that there is definitely ultra tech in our skies and oceans, which either belongs to adversaries of the West or non human intelligence / life forms. And everyone shrugged.
People aren’t going to listen too hard to a senior Pentagon official if he says the US has surrendered technological dominance to China and that a point will be reached (or may already have been reached) when their lead will be insurmountable. Forever.
Cognitive dissonance innit. Much more comfortable to talk about IDS’s majority instead.
Some people are INCREDIBLY resistant to the idea of artificial general intelligence. I have an extremely smart brother who is always open to new ideas but he just won't accept that this - machine intelligence - can ever happen, let alone that it is actually happening right now
Existentially, it frightens him
I think some people assume that events from science fiction are made up and can’t ever happen because they are fiction, particularly the bad events. Scifi writers really are just futurists and as a group have a pretty reasonable track record.
It's not just scifi writers being futurists; scientists feed off scifi, and scifi feeds off science. I've got a good book on this somewhere, going into how fiction from HG Wells onwards fed into science, just as they devoured science in turn.
An example is the humble iPad. Back in 1972, computer scientist came up with the concept of the Dynabook (*) - a computer for education. For decades, computer professionals have used it as an objective, and endpoint. Steve Jobs was apparently one of them. A vision that has taken four decades to come anywhere near fulfilment.
Alan Key doesn't think we've reached the endpoint yet.
(*) Not the laptop line
Imagine describing a smartphone to someone living in 1930 or even 1960.
"Everyone will own a device with which they can immediately communicate with almost anyone else on the planet, by voice or on screen. Also it will have instant access to all of human knowledge. And it will summon vehicles, take photos, play a near infinite variety of music, do sums, translate languages, record voices, make automatic payments, access your bank, access all media from TV to newspapers, tell you the weather, entertain you with games, show you live football, store all your personal data and let you argue about politics all day with strangers"
"My God, how big will this device be? Size of a house???"
"No, about the size of a cigarette packet"
Clarke, Niven/Pournelle and others were predicting them from the 1960s onwards. There's something a little like the iPad in 2001, I think. It was called the NewsPad.
Acorn did a little portable computer prototype called the NewsPAD, but it was never released. It was cool to play with it back in 1997/8.
I visited Xerox Park about a decade ago. It's easy to forget just how insanely forward thinking they were. In the 1970s they basically developed:
On thread - what this tells me is that the proportion of climate sceptics probably doesn't vary all that much by constituency (though it would be interesting to see polling to confirm). We jump through considerable hoops to ensure that the ethnic identities of our representatives are broadly in proportion to the population at large - it doesn't seem unreasonable to me that it should be desirable that the views of MPs are roughly in proportion to the population at large. Which implies a voice for minority opinions such as climate scepticism, albeit a minority one. Which by accident or design appears to be what we have.
Climate sceptics puzzle me. I am not a scientist but the whole thing seems pretty open and shut to me and there appears to be a broad consensus across scientific opinion. So I wonder, what do climate sceptics really think? That the climate isn't warming? I can see it with my own eyes, and measurements of temperature seem to back up this impression very convincingly. Do they think that this is all lies? That the climate is warming but it's nothing to do with human activity? This seems even less plausible. The planet seems to be warming up at unprecedented speed and at a time that correlates perfectly with human activity that models predict should be having this effect. That the greenhouse gases theory isn't correct? The story seems highly plausible, whether conceptually or if you put it through a complex climate model. That scientists don't understand their own models and instruments? It's possible, but seems implausible that some random uninformed punter understands them better. That scientists are engaged in a vast conspiracy? Unlikely if you understand how science operates. If anyone was going to fund a conspiracy here, fossil fuel interests seem most plausible - they have deep pockets and strong vested interests. That the whole thing is real but there's no point doing anything to stop it? This is the craziest take of all, if you actually think about what life on earth would be like with say a 3 or 4 degree temperature increase. So, like I say, these people are a mystery to me. People are entitled to their own opinions of course, but not their own facts.
The deadly difficulty is the last point. Facts matter. A possibility is that it is already a practical fact, baked in, that the current levels of CO2+the additional CO2 going into the atmosphere, which is increasing not decreasing in how much extra is going in+ the addition amounts planned by, for example, China's coal fired power programme mean that if the science is right we are already certain to reach apocalypse level, at date X give or take at best a few years.
I think Great Thunberg has already noticed this. If this is correct then amelioration, mitigation, continuing to limit the increase as much as possible and crossed fingers is the only option. But avoidance of the doomsday scenario is, on the data, a non option.
The issue is though that of something must be done, this is something, this must be done.
"Insulate Britain" pricks are calling for half a trillion to be spent on insulation. They've said "a few billion" won't be enough, it needs to be half a trillion. Just on insulation.
Now is insulation a good idea? Yes, why not?
Is insulation the best use of half a trillion pounds? Not necessarily.
Maybe half a trillion invested in new tidal lagoons or new energy generation or mitigation or many other options would do more than half a trillion in insulation.
Especially since our own emissions are rapidly becoming a drop in the ocean then our cash going into mitigation may increasing be the best use of it.
And even if you agree that half a trillion should be spent on insulating homes - these idiots sitting in the middle of the motorway and stopping Stroke stricken grannies from getting to hospital are just destroying their own argument and potentially setting the green cause back years...
A combination of complacency, lethargy and Woke crap - ‘omg GPT3 might be racist’ - means the west has handed the race to AI to China, and it may already be too late to catch up.
If China dominates AI it dominates the world like no power before it
You should have learnt by now that most people aren’t interested in the really big stories.
We’ve been directly told in the last year that there is definitely ultra tech in our skies and oceans, which either belongs to adversaries of the West or non human intelligence / life forms. And everyone shrugged.
People aren’t going to listen too hard to a senior Pentagon official if he says the US has surrendered technological dominance to China and that a point will be reached (or may already have been reached) when their lead will be insurmountable. Forever.
Cognitive dissonance innit. Much more comfortable to talk about IDS’s majority instead.
Some people are INCREDIBLY resistant to the idea of artificial general intelligence. I have an extremely smart brother who is always open to new ideas but he just won't accept that this - machine intelligence - can ever happen, let alone that it is actually happening right now
Existentially, it frightens him
I think some people assume that events from science fiction are made up and can’t ever happen because they are fiction, particularly the bad events. Scifi writers really are just futurists and as a group have a pretty reasonable track record.
It's not just scifi writers being futurists; scientists feed off scifi, and scifi feeds off science. I've got a good book on this somewhere, going into how fiction from HG Wells onwards fed into science, just as they devoured science in turn.
An example is the humble iPad. Back in 1972, computer scientist came up with the concept of the Dynabook (*) - a computer for education. For decades, computer professionals have used it as an objective, and endpoint. Steve Jobs was apparently one of them. A vision that has taken four decades to come anywhere near fulfilment.
Alan Key doesn't think we've reached the endpoint yet.
(*) Not the laptop line
Imagine describing a smartphone to someone living in 1930 or even 1960.
"Everyone will own a device with which they can immediately communicate with almost anyone else on the planet, by voice or on screen. Also it will have instant access to all of human knowledge. And it will summon vehicles, take photos, play a near infinite variety of music, do sums, translate languages, record voices, make automatic payments, access your bank, access all media from TV to newspapers, tell you the weather, entertain you with games, show you live football, store all your personal data and let you argue about politics all day with strangers"
"My God, how big will this device be? Size of a house???"
"No, about the size of a cigarette packet"
Clarke, Niven/Pournelle and others were predicting them from the 1960s onwards. There's something a little like the iPad in 2001, I think. It was called the NewsPad.
Acorn did a little portable computer prototype called the NewsPAD, but it was never released. It was cool to play with it back in 1997/8.
I visited Xerox Park about a decade ago. It's easy to forget just how insanely forward thinking they were. In the 1970s they basically developed:
Ironic that they didn't actually benefit from any of this.
Hence Gates when Jobs sued him over windows based GUIs - he broke into Xerox and stole the TV and is complaining that I went round the next night and took the stereo.
Except that Jobs (mostly) *bought* the IP from Xerox - and they were perfectly happy to sell it.
On thread - what this tells me is that the proportion of climate sceptics probably doesn't vary all that much by constituency (though it would be interesting to see polling to confirm). We jump through considerable hoops to ensure that the ethnic identities of our representatives are broadly in proportion to the population at large - it doesn't seem unreasonable to me that it should be desirable that the views of MPs are roughly in proportion to the population at large. Which implies a voice for minority opinions such as climate scepticism, albeit a minority one. Which by accident or design appears to be what we have.
Climate sceptics puzzle me. I am not a scientist but the whole thing seems pretty open and shut to me and there appears to be a broad consensus across scientific opinion. So I wonder, what do climate sceptics really think? That the climate isn't warming? I can see it with my own eyes, and measurements of temperature seem to back up this impression very convincingly. Do they think that this is all lies? That the climate is warming but it's nothing to do with human activity? This seems even less plausible. The planet seems to be warming up at unprecedented speed and at a time that correlates perfectly with human activity that models predict should be having this effect. That the greenhouse gases theory isn't correct? The story seems highly plausible, whether conceptually or if you put it through a complex climate model. That scientists don't understand their own models and instruments? It's possible, but seems implausible that some random uninformed punter understands them better. That scientists are engaged in a vast conspiracy? Unlikely if you understand how science operates. If anyone was going to fund a conspiracy here, fossil fuel interests seem most plausible - they have deep pockets and strong vested interests. That the whole thing is real but there's no point doing anything to stop it? This is the craziest take of all, if you actually think about what life on earth would be like with say a 3 or 4 degree temperature increase. So, like I say, these people are a mystery to me. People are entitled to their own opinions of course, but not their own facts.
If people don't like the political implications of accepting that something is true then they will practice cognitive dissonance instead, so they don't have to face up to them.
That's why climate action needs to be depoliticised in order for us to go as fast as possible, and not attached to ecosocialism.
Our choice of climate change actions is going to create winners and losers. It's a political decision to its core. What's needed is political leadership. People will listen to people they trust.
For some reason, for a lot of people in this country, that is Boris Johnson and the Conservative party more generally. So it's great that they do talk about climate change and have committed to doing some things about it. Obviously not as much as needed, but steps in the right direction.
That's definitely missing on the US right.
People forget that "global warming" went mainstream in the late 80's when The Blessed Margaret took up the cause!
"The furnaces of the world are now burning about 2,000,000,000 tons of coal a year. When this is burned, uniting with oxygen, it adds about 7,000,000,000 tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere yearly. This tends to make the air a more effective blanket for the earth and to raise its temperature. The effect may be considerable in a few centuries."
Yeah I know the theory had been around for a very long time but it was only in the mid to late 1980s that it went mainstream and a lot of that was down to Lady Thatcher making speeches about it.
Ten years previous to her UN speech the world was going through an "Ice Age" scare.
Mrs T also did a lot to combat the ozone layer problem as well to be fair (which a lot of people forget now)
My father had to brief her on the risks of global warming. She was sceptical and spent 30 minutes going through the data with him. After that she was convinced on the basis of the increasing levels of CO2 alone. She was a chemist first and a barrister second.
When is the next ice age due? Perhaps global warming will offset it nicely.
Where I live, only a few thousand years ago a mile of ice would have been over my head. Global cooling isn't great either.
On thread - what this tells me is that the proportion of climate sceptics probably doesn't vary all that much by constituency (though it would be interesting to see polling to confirm). We jump through considerable hoops to ensure that the ethnic identities of our representatives are broadly in proportion to the population at large - it doesn't seem unreasonable to me that it should be desirable that the views of MPs are roughly in proportion to the population at large. Which implies a voice for minority opinions such as climate scepticism, albeit a minority one. Which by accident or design appears to be what we have.
Climate sceptics puzzle me. I am not a scientist but the whole thing seems pretty open and shut to me and there appears to be a broad consensus across scientific opinion. So I wonder, what do climate sceptics really think? That the climate isn't warming? I can see it with my own eyes, and measurements of temperature seem to back up this impression very convincingly. Do they think that this is all lies? That the climate is warming but it's nothing to do with human activity? This seems even less plausible. The planet seems to be warming up at unprecedented speed and at a time that correlates perfectly with human activity that models predict should be having this effect. That the greenhouse gases theory isn't correct? The story seems highly plausible, whether conceptually or if you put it through a complex climate model. That scientists don't understand their own models and instruments? It's possible, but seems implausible that some random uninformed punter understands them better. That scientists are engaged in a vast conspiracy? Unlikely if you understand how science operates. If anyone was going to fund a conspiracy here, fossil fuel interests seem most plausible - they have deep pockets and strong vested interests. That the whole thing is real but there's no point doing anything to stop it? This is the craziest take of all, if you actually think about what life on earth would be like with say a 3 or 4 degree temperature increase. So, like I say, these people are a mystery to me. People are entitled to their own opinions of course, but not their own facts.
If people don't like the political implications of accepting that something is true then they will practice cognitive dissonance instead, so they don't have to face up to them.
That's why climate action needs to be depoliticised in order for us to go as fast as possible, and not attached to ecosocialism.
Our choice of climate change actions is going to create winners and losers. It's a political decision to its core. What's needed is political leadership. People will listen to people they trust.
For some reason, for a lot of people in this country, that is Boris Johnson and the Conservative party more generally. So it's great that they do talk about climate change and have committed to doing some things about it. Obviously not as much as needed, but steps in the right direction.
That's definitely missing on the US right.
People forget that "global warming" went mainstream in the late 80's when The Blessed Margaret took up the cause!
"The furnaces of the world are now burning about 2,000,000,000 tons of coal a year. When this is burned, uniting with oxygen, it adds about 7,000,000,000 tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere yearly. This tends to make the air a more effective blanket for the earth and to raise its temperature. The effect may be considerable in a few centuries."
Yeah I know the theory had been around for a very long time but it was only in the mid to late 1980s that it went mainstream and a lot of that was down to Lady Thatcher making speeches about it.
Ten years previous to her UN speech the world was going through an "Ice Age" scare.
Mrs T also did a lot to combat the ozone layer problem as well to be fair (which a lot of people forget now)
My father had to brief her on the risks of global warming. She was sceptical and spent 30 minutes going through the data with him. After that she was convinced on the basis of the increasing levels of CO2 alone. She was a chemist first and a barrister second.
The issue is categorically not people leaving leading to higher wages. Anyone who thinks that doesn't understand basic economics.
The issue is we were trapped in a feedback loop.
Brexit hasn't created the labour shortage - the labour shortage was already there and has been for decades. What its done is broken the feedback loop by removing the reason wages were imbalanced in the first place. Now wages can rise to reach an equilibrium where demand no longer exceeds supply.
Plenty of people voted for Brexit because they thought once the foreigners had gone wages would rise.
But your comment doesn't make sense. A labour shortage would result in higher wages. You say this hasn't happened. But it can now because of Brexit. What element of Brexit has done this?
I thought I explained that with the flow chart.
A labour shortage should have resulted in higher wages. But since there was an infinite pool of people who could be fished from to fill the shortage, it was cheaper to import more people than pay the higher wages.
But importing more people didn't "fill the shortage" because once the new people arrived they added to the nation's aggregate demand. So there was still a shortage. So wages should have gone up but didn't due to the infinite labour pool. So more vacancies, more people arrived and the aggregate demand increased again.
It was a feedback loop. What Brexit has done is removed the infinite pool of labour, thus breaking the feedback loop. So the labour shortage is there yes, as its been for about twenty years and counting, but now instead of bringing more people in to fill the vacancies, add to aggregate demand and create more vacancies . . . instead wages have to go up, demand will come down, and we'll finally have equilibrium.
Huh? Wages only go up for a reason. Not just "because". Higher demand, cp, means higher wages and lower demand lower wages.
The presence of immigration or otherwise is irrelevant - more immigrants = more labour = more demand = wages in equilibrium; fewer immigrants = less labour = less demand = wages in equilibrium.
Why you think the latter scenario should result in equilibrium settling at a higher level than previously is anyone's guess.
The issue is we haven't been in equilibrium for nearly twenty years! The presence of immigration or otherwise is not irrelevant since the availability of unlimited immigration was suppressing wages.
That's why there's been a labour shortage almost consistently since 2004, because real wages have been suppressed and below what they should have been, thus demand for labour has been exceeding supply.
Hundreds of thousands of new immigrants every year have been eagerly recruited to "fill the vacancies" but you can't fill vacancies via net immigration due to the fact the migrants are people who will have their own aggregate demand.
Wages should have gone up nearly twenty years ago. Ten years ago. Five years ago. They're going up now, not because of anything that's happened now other than the distortion that was preventing wages from rising has been removed.
Philip can you please use all your economics training to unpick your sentence:
"The presence of immigration or otherwise is not irrelevant since the availability of unlimited immigration was suppressing wages...That's why there's been a labour shortage almost consistently since 2004"
And also
"you can't fill vacancies via net immigration due to the fact the migrants are people who will have their own aggregate demand"
On the one hand you say there has been "unlimited immigration" while on the other there has been a labour shortage. Then you talk about vacancies. Vacancies = downward pressure on wages, while "their own aggregate demand" = upwards pressure on wages.
More immigrants = more demand. Fewer immigrants = less demand. With the appropriate effect on wages.
I genuinely don't know what you are trying to say here.
On thread - what this tells me is that the proportion of climate sceptics probably doesn't vary all that much by constituency (though it would be interesting to see polling to confirm). We jump through considerable hoops to ensure that the ethnic identities of our representatives are broadly in proportion to the population at large - it doesn't seem unreasonable to me that it should be desirable that the views of MPs are roughly in proportion to the population at large. Which implies a voice for minority opinions such as climate scepticism, albeit a minority one. Which by accident or design appears to be what we have.
Climate sceptics puzzle me. I am not a scientist but the whole thing seems pretty open and shut to me and there appears to be a broad consensus across scientific opinion. So I wonder, what do climate sceptics really think? That the climate isn't warming? I can see it with my own eyes, and measurements of temperature seem to back up this impression very convincingly. Do they think that this is all lies? That the climate is warming but it's nothing to do with human activity? This seems even less plausible. The planet seems to be warming up at unprecedented speed and at a time that correlates perfectly with human activity that models predict should be having this effect. That the greenhouse gases theory isn't correct? The story seems highly plausible, whether conceptually or if you put it through a complex climate model. That scientists don't understand their own models and instruments? It's possible, but seems implausible that some random uninformed punter understands them better. That scientists are engaged in a vast conspiracy? Unlikely if you understand how science operates. If anyone was going to fund a conspiracy here, fossil fuel interests seem most plausible - they have deep pockets and strong vested interests. That the whole thing is real but there's no point doing anything to stop it? This is the craziest take of all, if you actually think about what life on earth would be like with say a 3 or 4 degree temperature increase. So, like I say, these people are a mystery to me. People are entitled to their own opinions of course, but not their own facts.
If people don't like the political implications of accepting that something is true then they will practice cognitive dissonance instead, so they don't have to face up to them.
That's why climate action needs to be depoliticised in order for us to go as fast as possible, and not attached to ecosocialism.
Our choice of climate change actions is going to create winners and losers. It's a political decision to its core. What's needed is political leadership. People will listen to people they trust.
For some reason, for a lot of people in this country, that is Boris Johnson and the Conservative party more generally. So it's great that they do talk about climate change and have committed to doing some things about it. Obviously not as much as needed, but steps in the right direction.
That's definitely missing on the US right.
People forget that "global warming" went mainstream in the late 80's when The Blessed Margaret took up the cause!
"The furnaces of the world are now burning about 2,000,000,000 tons of coal a year. When this is burned, uniting with oxygen, it adds about 7,000,000,000 tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere yearly. This tends to make the air a more effective blanket for the earth and to raise its temperature. The effect may be considerable in a few centuries."
Yeah I know the theory had been around for a very long time but it was only in the mid to late 1980s that it went mainstream and a lot of that was down to Lady Thatcher making speeches about it.
Ten years previous to her UN speech the world was going through an "Ice Age" scare.
Mrs T also did a lot to combat the ozone layer problem as well to be fair (which a lot of people forget now)
My father had to brief her on the risks of global warming. She was sceptical and spent 30 minutes going through the data with him. After that she was convinced on the basis of the increasing levels of CO2 alone. She was a chemist first and a barrister second.
Oh right. How interesting.
... and that was in the mid 80's. My father left the civil service in 87 (from memory).
The one thing I don't understand whenever climate change comes up, is this:
If the human brain is about to be superseded by artificial intelligence, and there is no way of actually stopping development in this area due to a combination of market forces and competition between hostile states; then why are people worrying about climate change?
It seems like people are hopelessly optimistic about being able to solve the AI problem, and disproportionately pessimistic about being able to solve climate change.
As someone said, people didn't stop using stone because the stone age was over. Most of those who think that might happen, hope that being superseded doesn't entail being wiped out. Anyway runaway global warming would make it heaps more difficult to make and run the hardware to run AIs on.
This is a long read and shows how chronic the supply chain situation is in the USA. This is having a knock on effect to the rest of the world. Shipping is already highly constrained. The slowness to unload the ships only compounds the problem.
This will get better eventually, but it won’t be this winter.
On thread - what this tells me is that the proportion of climate sceptics probably doesn't vary all that much by constituency (though it would be interesting to see polling to confirm). We jump through considerable hoops to ensure that the ethnic identities of our representatives are broadly in proportion to the population at large - it doesn't seem unreasonable to me that it should be desirable that the views of MPs are roughly in proportion to the population at large. Which implies a voice for minority opinions such as climate scepticism, albeit a minority one. Which by accident or design appears to be what we have.
Climate sceptics puzzle me. I am not a scientist but the whole thing seems pretty open and shut to me and there appears to be a broad consensus across scientific opinion. So I wonder, what do climate sceptics really think? That the climate isn't warming? I can see it with my own eyes, and measurements of temperature seem to back up this impression very convincingly. Do they think that this is all lies? That the climate is warming but it's nothing to do with human activity? This seems even less plausible. The planet seems to be warming up at unprecedented speed and at a time that correlates perfectly with human activity that models predict should be having this effect. That the greenhouse gases theory isn't correct? The story seems highly plausible, whether conceptually or if you put it through a complex climate model. That scientists don't understand their own models and instruments? It's possible, but seems implausible that some random uninformed punter understands them better. That scientists are engaged in a vast conspiracy? Unlikely if you understand how science operates. If anyone was going to fund a conspiracy here, fossil fuel interests seem most plausible - they have deep pockets and strong vested interests. That the whole thing is real but there's no point doing anything to stop it? This is the craziest take of all, if you actually think about what life on earth would be like with say a 3 or 4 degree temperature increase. So, like I say, these people are a mystery to me. People are entitled to their own opinions of course, but not their own facts.
If people don't like the political implications of accepting that something is true then they will practice cognitive dissonance instead, so they don't have to face up to them.
That's why climate action needs to be depoliticised in order for us to go as fast as possible, and not attached to ecosocialism.
Our choice of climate change actions is going to create winners and losers. It's a political decision to its core. What's needed is political leadership. People will listen to people they trust.
For some reason, for a lot of people in this country, that is Boris Johnson and the Conservative party more generally. So it's great that they do talk about climate change and have committed to doing some things about it. Obviously not as much as needed, but steps in the right direction.
That's definitely missing on the US right.
People forget that "global warming" went mainstream in the late 80's when The Blessed Margaret took up the cause!
"The furnaces of the world are now burning about 2,000,000,000 tons of coal a year. When this is burned, uniting with oxygen, it adds about 7,000,000,000 tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere yearly. This tends to make the air a more effective blanket for the earth and to raise its temperature. The effect may be considerable in a few centuries."
Yeah I know the theory had been around for a very long time but it was only in the mid to late 1980s that it went mainstream and a lot of that was down to Lady Thatcher making speeches about it.
Ten years previous to her UN speech the world was going through an "Ice Age" scare.
Mrs T also did a lot to combat the ozone layer problem as well to be fair (which a lot of people forget now)
My father had to brief her on the risks of global warming. She was sceptical and spent 30 minutes going through the data with him. After that she was convinced on the basis of the increasing levels of CO2 alone. She was a chemist first and a barrister second.
Sounds like the AIDS crisis - after Norman Fowler took her through the data she agreed to one of the biggest public health campaigns - years ahead of more “sophisticated” countries like France.
On thread - what this tells me is that the proportion of climate sceptics probably doesn't vary all that much by constituency (though it would be interesting to see polling to confirm). We jump through considerable hoops to ensure that the ethnic identities of our representatives are broadly in proportion to the population at large - it doesn't seem unreasonable to me that it should be desirable that the views of MPs are roughly in proportion to the population at large. Which implies a voice for minority opinions such as climate scepticism, albeit a minority one. Which by accident or design appears to be what we have.
Climate sceptics puzzle me. I am not a scientist but the whole thing seems pretty open and shut to me and there appears to be a broad consensus across scientific opinion. So I wonder, what do climate sceptics really think? That the climate isn't warming? I can see it with my own eyes, and measurements of temperature seem to back up this impression very convincingly. Do they think that this is all lies? That the climate is warming but it's nothing to do with human activity? This seems even less plausible. The planet seems to be warming up at unprecedented speed and at a time that correlates perfectly with human activity that models predict should be having this effect. That the greenhouse gases theory isn't correct? The story seems highly plausible, whether conceptually or if you put it through a complex climate model. That scientists don't understand their own models and instruments? It's possible, but seems implausible that some random uninformed punter understands them better. That scientists are engaged in a vast conspiracy? Unlikely if you understand how science operates. If anyone was going to fund a conspiracy here, fossil fuel interests seem most plausible - they have deep pockets and strong vested interests. That the whole thing is real but there's no point doing anything to stop it? This is the craziest take of all, if you actually think about what life on earth would be like with say a 3 or 4 degree temperature increase. So, like I say, these people are a mystery to me. People are entitled to their own opinions of course, but not their own facts.
If people don't like the political implications of accepting that something is true then they will practice cognitive dissonance instead, so they don't have to face up to them.
That's why climate action needs to be depoliticised in order for us to go as fast as possible, and not attached to ecosocialism.
The simplistic approach of dividing everyone into climate change believers and clearly stupid or bad faith "deniers"/sceptics is a very poor formulation of the situation and is an insult to the intelligence. It closes down debate (not a good thing). There are hugely complex areas for discussion in terms of the trust we should put in models that have not and cannot yet be validated, the effects of warming and how best to reduce emissions. Step out of line on any of these and you are a "denier". People have been told that the GWPF (Lawson's outfit) are deniers and not to be trusted. However, look at the academic advisors https://www.thegwpf.org/who-we-are/#academicAdvisoryCouncil if you dare to access such a transgressive site and can you honestly say they are not well qualified? They represent a minority, that is true, but determining policy when debate is being intentionally closed down is dangerous.
They're very well qualifed. Just not, for the most part, in climate science. Much like the iSAGE group are mostly very eminent scientists, just that many of them don't have a very strong link with epidemiology.
Now, it's important to take the views of people outside of the field (see e.g. physicists suggesting that Covid might be airbourne before that became the majority view - and several other cases in the past).
You can also argue that climate science systematically (if unintentionally) selects those who accept the underlying principle of there being a problem (may be something in that, too).
However, there is a lack of serious alternative modelling coming from these institutions that hasn't been widely discredited.
As for climate models, they are of course validated (and invalidated) continuously. They're not of course validated yet for their predictions beyond today, but past models have been assessed for their predictions over the past decade and more.
Anyway, as someone else posted, we're probably going to get to carbon emissions that are in the red zone for many of the models, so we'll likely get to find out how good they were. Let us hope that they're consistently over-pessimistic and we can enjoy our new, cleaner world in the second half of this century wthout widespread climate disruption.
On thread - what this tells me is that the proportion of climate sceptics probably doesn't vary all that much by constituency (though it would be interesting to see polling to confirm). We jump through considerable hoops to ensure that the ethnic identities of our representatives are broadly in proportion to the population at large - it doesn't seem unreasonable to me that it should be desirable that the views of MPs are roughly in proportion to the population at large. Which implies a voice for minority opinions such as climate scepticism, albeit a minority one. Which by accident or design appears to be what we have.
Climate sceptics puzzle me. I am not a scientist but the whole thing seems pretty open and shut to me and there appears to be a broad consensus across scientific opinion. So I wonder, what do climate sceptics really think? That the climate isn't warming? I can see it with my own eyes, and measurements of temperature seem to back up this impression very convincingly. Do they think that this is all lies? That the climate is warming but it's nothing to do with human activity? This seems even less plausible. The planet seems to be warming up at unprecedented speed and at a time that correlates perfectly with human activity that models predict should be having this effect. That the greenhouse gases theory isn't correct? The story seems highly plausible, whether conceptually or if you put it through a complex climate model. That scientists don't understand their own models and instruments? It's possible, but seems implausible that some random uninformed punter understands them better. That scientists are engaged in a vast conspiracy? Unlikely if you understand how science operates. If anyone was going to fund a conspiracy here, fossil fuel interests seem most plausible - they have deep pockets and strong vested interests. That the whole thing is real but there's no point doing anything to stop it? This is the craziest take of all, if you actually think about what life on earth would be like with say a 3 or 4 degree temperature increase. So, like I say, these people are a mystery to me. People are entitled to their own opinions of course, but not their own facts.
If people don't like the political implications of accepting that something is true then they will practice cognitive dissonance instead, so they don't have to face up to them.
That's why climate action needs to be depoliticised in order for us to go as fast as possible, and not attached to ecosocialism.
Our choice of climate change actions is going to create winners and losers. It's a political decision to its core. What's needed is political leadership. People will listen to people they trust.
For some reason, for a lot of people in this country, that is Boris Johnson and the Conservative party more generally. So it's great that they do talk about climate change and have committed to doing some things about it. Obviously not as much as needed, but steps in the right direction.
That's definitely missing on the US right.
People forget that "global warming" went mainstream in the late 80's when The Blessed Margaret took up the cause!
"The furnaces of the world are now burning about 2,000,000,000 tons of coal a year. When this is burned, uniting with oxygen, it adds about 7,000,000,000 tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere yearly. This tends to make the air a more effective blanket for the earth and to raise its temperature. The effect may be considerable in a few centuries."
Yeah I know the theory had been around for a very long time but it was only in the mid to late 1980s that it went mainstream and a lot of that was down to Lady Thatcher making speeches about it.
Ten years previous to her UN speech the world was going through an "Ice Age" scare.
Mrs T also did a lot to combat the ozone layer problem as well to be fair (which a lot of people forget now)
My father had to brief her on the risks of global warming. She was sceptical and spent 30 minutes going through the data with him. After that she was convinced on the basis of the increasing levels of CO2 alone. She was a chemist first and a barrister second.
Oh right. How interesting.
She only read for the Bar, AIUI, so she could get into Parliament. I've known a couple of people whose first degree was scientific, but they subsequently read for Bar for career advancement. Worked well for one of them, IIRC. Not sure about some of the others..
The issue is categorically not people leaving leading to higher wages. Anyone who thinks that doesn't understand basic economics.
The issue is we were trapped in a feedback loop.
Brexit hasn't created the labour shortage - the labour shortage was already there and has been for decades. What its done is broken the feedback loop by removing the reason wages were imbalanced in the first place. Now wages can rise to reach an equilibrium where demand no longer exceeds supply.
Plenty of people voted for Brexit because they thought once the foreigners had gone wages would rise.
But your comment doesn't make sense. A labour shortage would result in higher wages. You say this hasn't happened. But it can now because of Brexit. What element of Brexit has done this?
I thought I explained that with the flow chart.
A labour shortage should have resulted in higher wages. But since there was an infinite pool of people who could be fished from to fill the shortage, it was cheaper to import more people than pay the higher wages.
But importing more people didn't "fill the shortage" because once the new people arrived they added to the nation's aggregate demand. So there was still a shortage. So wages should have gone up but didn't due to the infinite labour pool. So more vacancies, more people arrived and the aggregate demand increased again.
It was a feedback loop. What Brexit has done is removed the infinite pool of labour, thus breaking the feedback loop. So the labour shortage is there yes, as its been for about twenty years and counting, but now instead of bringing more people in to fill the vacancies, add to aggregate demand and create more vacancies . . . instead wages have to go up, demand will come down, and we'll finally have equilibrium.
Huh? Wages only go up for a reason. Not just "because". Higher demand, cp, means higher wages and lower demand lower wages.
The presence of immigration or otherwise is irrelevant - more immigrants = more labour = more demand = wages in equilibrium; fewer immigrants = less labour = less demand = wages in equilibrium.
Why you think the latter scenario should result in equilibrium settling at a higher level than previously is anyone's guess.
The issue is we haven't been in equilibrium for nearly twenty years! The presence of immigration or otherwise is not irrelevant since the availability of unlimited immigration was suppressing wages.
That's why there's been a labour shortage almost consistently since 2004, because real wages have been suppressed and below what they should have been, thus demand for labour has been exceeding supply.
Hundreds of thousands of new immigrants every year have been eagerly recruited to "fill the vacancies" but you can't fill vacancies via net immigration due to the fact the migrants are people who will have their own aggregate demand.
Wages should have gone up nearly twenty years ago. Ten years ago. Five years ago. They're going up now, not because of anything that's happened now other than the distortion that was preventing wages from rising has been removed.
Philip can you please use all your economics training to unpick your sentence:
"The presence of immigration or otherwise is not irrelevant since the availability of unlimited immigration was suppressing wages...That's why there's been a labour shortage almost consistently since 2004"
And also
"you can't fill vacancies via net immigration due to the fact the migrants are people who will have their own aggregate demand"
On the one hand you say there has been "unlimited immigration" while on the other there has been a labour shortage. Then you talk about vacancies. Vacancies = downward pressure on wages, while "their own aggregate demand" = upwards pressure on wages.
More immigrants = more demand. Fewer immigrants = less demand. With the appropriate effect on wages.
I genuinely don't know what you are trying to say here.
Lower wage imported labour reduces aggregate demand per capita.
This list is the place to start for those who think SKS can't be PM. If Labour take the top 35 targets and the LDs take 10 seats in the zone where they come a strong second, and the SNP take 3 Tory seats, or collectively anything better than that, Boris ceases to be PM. There is no candidate but SKS to be PM in that case at least until another quick election.
The issue is categorically not people leaving leading to higher wages. Anyone who thinks that doesn't understand basic economics.
The issue is we were trapped in a feedback loop.
Brexit hasn't created the labour shortage - the labour shortage was already there and has been for decades. What its done is broken the feedback loop by removing the reason wages were imbalanced in the first place. Now wages can rise to reach an equilibrium where demand no longer exceeds supply.
Plenty of people voted for Brexit because they thought once the foreigners had gone wages would rise.
But your comment doesn't make sense. A labour shortage would result in higher wages. You say this hasn't happened. But it can now because of Brexit. What element of Brexit has done this?
I thought I explained that with the flow chart.
A labour shortage should have resulted in higher wages. But since there was an infinite pool of people who could be fished from to fill the shortage, it was cheaper to import more people than pay the higher wages.
But importing more people didn't "fill the shortage" because once the new people arrived they added to the nation's aggregate demand. So there was still a shortage. So wages should have gone up but didn't due to the infinite labour pool. So more vacancies, more people arrived and the aggregate demand increased again.
It was a feedback loop. What Brexit has done is removed the infinite pool of labour, thus breaking the feedback loop. So the labour shortage is there yes, as its been for about twenty years and counting, but now instead of bringing more people in to fill the vacancies, add to aggregate demand and create more vacancies . . . instead wages have to go up, demand will come down, and we'll finally have equilibrium.
Huh? Wages only go up for a reason. Not just "because". Higher demand, cp, means higher wages and lower demand lower wages.
The presence of immigration or otherwise is irrelevant - more immigrants = more labour = more demand = wages in equilibrium; fewer immigrants = less labour = less demand = wages in equilibrium.
Why you think the latter scenario should result in equilibrium settling at a higher level than previously is anyone's guess.
The issue is we haven't been in equilibrium for nearly twenty years! The presence of immigration or otherwise is not irrelevant since the availability of unlimited immigration was suppressing wages.
That's why there's been a labour shortage almost consistently since 2004, because real wages have been suppressed and below what they should have been, thus demand for labour has been exceeding supply.
Hundreds of thousands of new immigrants every year have been eagerly recruited to "fill the vacancies" but you can't fill vacancies via net immigration due to the fact the migrants are people who will have their own aggregate demand.
Wages should have gone up nearly twenty years ago. Ten years ago. Five years ago. They're going up now, not because of anything that's happened now other than the distortion that was preventing wages from rising has been removed.
Philip can you please use all your economics training to unpick your sentence:
"The presence of immigration or otherwise is not irrelevant since the availability of unlimited immigration was suppressing wages...That's why there's been a labour shortage almost consistently since 2004"
And also
"you can't fill vacancies via net immigration due to the fact the migrants are people who will have their own aggregate demand"
On the one hand you say there has been "unlimited immigration" while on the other there has been a labour shortage. Then you talk about vacancies. Vacancies = downward pressure on wages, while "their own aggregate demand" = upwards pressure on wages.
More immigrants = more demand. Fewer immigrants = less demand. With the appropriate effect on wages.
I genuinely don't know what you are trying to say here.
Lower wage imported labour reduces aggregate demand per capita.
But the size of the economy grows giving rise to new avenues of demand.
On thread - what this tells me is that the proportion of climate sceptics probably doesn't vary all that much by constituency (though it would be interesting to see polling to confirm). We jump through considerable hoops to ensure that the ethnic identities of our representatives are broadly in proportion to the population at large - it doesn't seem unreasonable to me that it should be desirable that the views of MPs are roughly in proportion to the population at large. Which implies a voice for minority opinions such as climate scepticism, albeit a minority one. Which by accident or design appears to be what we have.
Climate sceptics puzzle me. I am not a scientist but the whole thing seems pretty open and shut to me and there appears to be a broad consensus across scientific opinion. So I wonder, what do climate sceptics really think? That the climate isn't warming? I can see it with my own eyes, and measurements of temperature seem to back up this impression very convincingly. Do they think that this is all lies? That the climate is warming but it's nothing to do with human activity? This seems even less plausible. The planet seems to be warming up at unprecedented speed and at a time that correlates perfectly with human activity that models predict should be having this effect. That the greenhouse gases theory isn't correct? The story seems highly plausible, whether conceptually or if you put it through a complex climate model. That scientists don't understand their own models and instruments? It's possible, but seems implausible that some random uninformed punter understands them better. That scientists are engaged in a vast conspiracy? Unlikely if you understand how science operates. If anyone was going to fund a conspiracy here, fossil fuel interests seem most plausible - they have deep pockets and strong vested interests. That the whole thing is real but there's no point doing anything to stop it? This is the craziest take of all, if you actually think about what life on earth would be like with say a 3 or 4 degree temperature increase. So, like I say, these people are a mystery to me. People are entitled to their own opinions of course, but not their own facts.
If people don't like the political implications of accepting that something is true then they will practice cognitive dissonance instead, so they don't have to face up to them.
That's why climate action needs to be depoliticised in order for us to go as fast as possible, and not attached to ecosocialism.
The simplistic approach of dividing everyone into climate change believers and clearly stupid or bad faith "deniers"/sceptics is a very poor formulation of the situation and is an insult to the intelligence. It closes down debate (not a good thing). There are hugely complex areas for discussion in terms of the trust we should put in models that have not and cannot yet be validated, the effects of warming and how best to reduce emissions. Step out of line on any of these and you are a "denier". People have been told that the GWPF (Lawson's outfit) are deniers and not to be trusted. However, look at the academic advisors https://www.thegwpf.org/who-we-are/#academicAdvisoryCouncil if you dare to access such a transgressive site and can you honestly say they are not well qualified? They represent a minority, that is true, but determining policy when debate is being intentionally closed down is dangerous.
They're very well qualifed. Just not, for the most part, in climate science. Much like the iSAGE group are mostly very eminent scientists, just that many of them don't have a very strong link with epidemiology.
Now, it's important to take the views of people outside of the field (see e.g. physicists suggesting that Covid might be airbourne before that became the majority view - and several other cases in the past).
You can also argue that climate science systematically (if unintentionally) selects those who accept the underlying principle of there being a problem (may be something in that, too).
However, there is a lack of serious alternative modelling coming from these institutions that hasn't been widely discredited.
As for climate models, they are of course validated (and invalidated) continuously. They're not of course validated yet for their predictions beyond today, but past models have been assessed for their predictions over the past decade and more.
Anyway, as someone else posted, we're probably going to get to carbon emissions that are in the red zone for many of the models, so we'll likely get to find out how good they were. Let us hope that they're consistently over-pessimistic and we can enjoy our new, cleaner world in the second half of this century wthout widespread climate disruption.
Unwarranted reliance on models is the root of the problem. I'm loosing more sleep over the likely impact of the zero carbon programme than I am over global warming.
Covid cases rising again today, over 40K. Hospital admissions also rising slightly in the last few days. Deaths I guess we will have to wait till tomorrow/Wed.
Am I the only person feeling somewhat anxious that this disease isn't over with yet? Should I just relax?
Admissions ticking up at my place again too.
I don't expect a massive surge, but neither can we resume normal service with 4 medical wards of covid and 25% of ICU occupied.
Any info on the admissions? Is it still the elderly and the unvaccinated?
One in six are unvaccinated pregnant women according to the radio news
Wasn't that ICU patients?
But yes, part of our staffing crisis is that women go off on maternity leave as soon as they can. They have seen what covid in pregnancy does.
This list is the place to start for those who think SKS can't be PM. If Labour take the top 35 targets and the LDs take 10 seats in the zone where they come a strong second, and the SNP take 3 Tory seats, or collectively anything better than that, Boris ceases to be PM. There is no candidate but SKS to be PM in that case at least until another quick election.
For those who think SKS will be PM an NHS psychiatric unit is surely the best place to start!!
A combination of complacency, lethargy and Woke crap - ‘omg GPT3 might be racist’ - means the west has handed the race to AI to China, and it may already be too late to catch up.
If China dominates AI it dominates the world like no power before it
You should have learnt by now that most people aren’t interested in the really big stories.
We’ve been directly told in the last year that there is definitely ultra tech in our skies and oceans, which either belongs to adversaries of the West or non human intelligence / life forms. And everyone shrugged.
People aren’t going to listen too hard to a senior Pentagon official if he says the US has surrendered technological dominance to China and that a point will be reached (or may already have been reached) when their lead will be insurmountable. Forever.
Cognitive dissonance innit. Much more comfortable to talk about IDS’s majority instead.
Some people are INCREDIBLY resistant to the idea of artificial general intelligence. I have an extremely smart brother who is always open to new ideas but he just won't accept that this - machine intelligence - can ever happen, let alone that it is actually happening right now
Existentially, it frightens him
I think some people assume that events from science fiction are made up and can’t ever happen because they are fiction, particularly the bad events. Scifi writers really are just futurists and as a group have a pretty reasonable track record.
It's not just scifi writers being futurists; scientists feed off scifi, and scifi feeds off science. I've got a good book on this somewhere, going into how fiction from HG Wells onwards fed into science, just as they devoured science in turn.
An example is the humble iPad. Back in 1972, computer scientist came up with the concept of the Dynabook (*) - a computer for education. For decades, computer professionals have used it as an objective, and endpoint. Steve Jobs was apparently one of them. A vision that has taken four decades to come anywhere near fulfilment.
Alan Key doesn't think we've reached the endpoint yet.
(*) Not the laptop line
Imagine describing a smartphone to someone living in 1930 or even 1960.
"Everyone will own a device with which they can immediately communicate with almost anyone else on the planet, by voice or on screen. Also it will have instant access to all of human knowledge. And it will summon vehicles, take photos, play a near infinite variety of music, do sums, translate languages, record voices, make automatic payments, access your bank, access all media from TV to newspapers, tell you the weather, entertain you with games, show you live football, store all your personal data and let you argue about politics all day with strangers"
"My God, how big will this device be? Size of a house???"
"No, about the size of a cigarette packet"
Clarke, Niven/Pournelle and others were predicting them from the 1960s onwards. There's something a little like the iPad in 2001, I think. It was called the NewsPad.
Acorn did a little portable computer prototype called the NewsPAD, but it was never released. It was cool to play with it back in 1997/8.
I visited Xerox Park about a decade ago. It's easy to forget just how insanely forward thinking they were. In the 1970s they basically developed:
Ironic that they didn't actually benefit from any of this.
Hence Gates when Jobs sued him over windows based GUIs - he broke into Xerox and stole the TV and is complaining that I went round the next night and took the stereo.
Conservative 40% (–) Labour 36% (-1) Liberal Democrat 9% (-1) Green 6% (+2) Scottish National Party 4% (–) Reform UK 4% (+1) Other 1% (–)
Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s net approval rating stands at -6%, a figure which has not changed in the past two weeks. This week’s poll finds 42% disapproving (no change) of his overall job performance, against 36% approving (no change).
Keir Starmer’s net approval rating has remained consistent in the past week as well, at -11%. 37% disapprove of Keir Starmer’s job performance (up 1%), while 26% approve (up 1%). Meanwhile, 31% neither approve nor disapprove of Starmer’s job performance (down 1%).
On thread - what this tells me is that the proportion of climate sceptics probably doesn't vary all that much by constituency (though it would be interesting to see polling to confirm). We jump through considerable hoops to ensure that the ethnic identities of our representatives are broadly in proportion to the population at large - it doesn't seem unreasonable to me that it should be desirable that the views of MPs are roughly in proportion to the population at large. Which implies a voice for minority opinions such as climate scepticism, albeit a minority one. Which by accident or design appears to be what we have.
Climate sceptics puzzle me. I am not a scientist but the whole thing seems pretty open and shut to me and there appears to be a broad consensus across scientific opinion. So I wonder, what do climate sceptics really think? That the climate isn't warming? I can see it with my own eyes, and measurements of temperature seem to back up this impression very convincingly. Do they think that this is all lies? That the climate is warming but it's nothing to do with human activity? This seems even less plausible. The planet seems to be warming up at unprecedented speed and at a time that correlates perfectly with human activity that models predict should be having this effect. That the greenhouse gases theory isn't correct? The story seems highly plausible, whether conceptually or if you put it through a complex climate model. That scientists don't understand their own models and instruments? It's possible, but seems implausible that some random uninformed punter understands them better. That scientists are engaged in a vast conspiracy? Unlikely if you understand how science operates. If anyone was going to fund a conspiracy here, fossil fuel interests seem most plausible - they have deep pockets and strong vested interests. That the whole thing is real but there's no point doing anything to stop it? This is the craziest take of all, if you actually think about what life on earth would be like with say a 3 or 4 degree temperature increase. So, like I say, these people are a mystery to me. People are entitled to their own opinions of course, but not their own facts.
If people don't like the political implications of accepting that something is true then they will practice cognitive dissonance instead, so they don't have to face up to them.
That's why climate action needs to be depoliticised in order for us to go as fast as possible, and not attached to ecosocialism.
Our choice of climate change actions is going to create winners and losers. It's a political decision to its core. What's needed is political leadership. People will listen to people they trust.
For some reason, for a lot of people in this country, that is Boris Johnson and the Conservative party more generally. So it's great that they do talk about climate change and have committed to doing some things about it. Obviously not as much as needed, but steps in the right direction.
That's definitely missing on the US right.
People forget that "global warming" went mainstream in the late 80's when The Blessed Margaret took up the cause!
"The furnaces of the world are now burning about 2,000,000,000 tons of coal a year. When this is burned, uniting with oxygen, it adds about 7,000,000,000 tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere yearly. This tends to make the air a more effective blanket for the earth and to raise its temperature. The effect may be considerable in a few centuries."
Yeah I know the theory had been around for a very long time but it was only in the mid to late 1980s that it went mainstream and a lot of that was down to Lady Thatcher making speeches about it.
Ten years previous to her UN speech the world was going through an "Ice Age" scare.
Mrs T also did a lot to combat the ozone layer problem as well to be fair (which a lot of people forget now)
My father had to brief her on the risks of global warming. She was sceptical and spent 30 minutes going through the data with him. After that she was convinced on the basis of the increasing levels of CO2 alone. She was a chemist first and a barrister second.
When is the next ice age due? Perhaps global warming will offset it nicely.
Where I live, only a few thousand years ago a mile of ice would have been over my head. Global cooling isn't great either.
The next ice age won't be for a long, long time, if ever. I think it was James Hansen who calculated that the output of a couple of decent-sized coal power stations would have been sufficient to offset the next ice age.
The Earth's climate is a delicate system, with all sorts of feedbacks that cause it to swing wildly in response to the smallest of inputs. We see this historically in its magnified response to the tiny influences of Milankovich cycles. What humans have just done is the equavalent of whacking the Newton's cradle with a hammer.
A combination of complacency, lethargy and Woke crap - ‘omg GPT3 might be racist’ - means the west has handed the race to AI to China, and it may already be too late to catch up.
If China dominates AI it dominates the world like no power before it
You should have learnt by now that most people aren’t interested in the really big stories.
We’ve been directly told in the last year that there is definitely ultra tech in our skies and oceans, which either belongs to adversaries of the West or non human intelligence / life forms. And everyone shrugged.
People aren’t going to listen too hard to a senior Pentagon official if he says the US has surrendered technological dominance to China and that a point will be reached (or may already have been reached) when their lead will be insurmountable. Forever.
Cognitive dissonance innit. Much more comfortable to talk about IDS’s majority instead.
Some people are INCREDIBLY resistant to the idea of artificial general intelligence. I have an extremely smart brother who is always open to new ideas but he just won't accept that this - machine intelligence - can ever happen, let alone that it is actually happening right now
Existentially, it frightens him
I don't have a problem believing it's happening. My problem is that people anywhere think it's a good idea to develop this technology in the first place.
The issue is categorically not people leaving leading to higher wages. Anyone who thinks that doesn't understand basic economics.
The issue is we were trapped in a feedback loop.
Brexit hasn't created the labour shortage - the labour shortage was already there and has been for decades. What its done is broken the feedback loop by removing the reason wages were imbalanced in the first place. Now wages can rise to reach an equilibrium where demand no longer exceeds supply.
Plenty of people voted for Brexit because they thought once the foreigners had gone wages would rise.
But your comment doesn't make sense. A labour shortage would result in higher wages. You say this hasn't happened. But it can now because of Brexit. What element of Brexit has done this?
I thought I explained that with the flow chart.
A labour shortage should have resulted in higher wages. But since there was an infinite pool of people who could be fished from to fill the shortage, it was cheaper to import more people than pay the higher wages.
But importing more people didn't "fill the shortage" because once the new people arrived they added to the nation's aggregate demand. So there was still a shortage. So wages should have gone up but didn't due to the infinite labour pool. So more vacancies, more people arrived and the aggregate demand increased again.
It was a feedback loop. What Brexit has done is removed the infinite pool of labour, thus breaking the feedback loop. So the labour shortage is there yes, as its been for about twenty years and counting, but now instead of bringing more people in to fill the vacancies, add to aggregate demand and create more vacancies . . . instead wages have to go up, demand will come down, and we'll finally have equilibrium.
Huh? Wages only go up for a reason. Not just "because". Higher demand, cp, means higher wages and lower demand lower wages.
The presence of immigration or otherwise is irrelevant - more immigrants = more labour = more demand = wages in equilibrium; fewer immigrants = less labour = less demand = wages in equilibrium.
Why you think the latter scenario should result in equilibrium settling at a higher level than previously is anyone's guess.
The issue is we haven't been in equilibrium for nearly twenty years! The presence of immigration or otherwise is not irrelevant since the availability of unlimited immigration was suppressing wages.
That's why there's been a labour shortage almost consistently since 2004, because real wages have been suppressed and below what they should have been, thus demand for labour has been exceeding supply.
Hundreds of thousands of new immigrants every year have been eagerly recruited to "fill the vacancies" but you can't fill vacancies via net immigration due to the fact the migrants are people who will have their own aggregate demand.
Wages should have gone up nearly twenty years ago. Ten years ago. Five years ago. They're going up now, not because of anything that's happened now other than the distortion that was preventing wages from rising has been removed.
Philip can you please use all your economics training to unpick your sentence:
"The presence of immigration or otherwise is not irrelevant since the availability of unlimited immigration was suppressing wages...That's why there's been a labour shortage almost consistently since 2004"
And also
"you can't fill vacancies via net immigration due to the fact the migrants are people who will have their own aggregate demand"
On the one hand you say there has been "unlimited immigration" while on the other there has been a labour shortage. Then you talk about vacancies. Vacancies = downward pressure on wages, while "their own aggregate demand" = upwards pressure on wages.
More immigrants = more demand. Fewer immigrants = less demand. With the appropriate effect on wages.
I genuinely don't know what you are trying to say here.
Lower wage imported labour reduces aggregate demand per capita.
But the size of the economy grows giving rise to new avenues of demand.
Which doesn't not necessarily translate into an increase in wages, if a section of the labour market is in surplus.
An important point is that an economy can't (generally) expand infinitely to match a surplus in a supply of a limited group of skills. So if you keep pouring in left handed prop wash mixers, the economy may expand until other constraints kick in, at which point you will have a surplus of left handed prop wash mixers. And wages for left handed prop wash mixers will then fall to the lowest clearing value.
When I am bored I sometimes play a game with PB. I go to a longer comment (avoiding the name at the top) and I read the first 2 or 3 sentences. And then I test myself: I see if I can guess the identity of the commenter from the opinion, syntax, vocabulary, style
It is surprisingly easy, we all have a style. What is more surprising is how robotic and repetitive some commenters are, such that you can not only guess the identity of the commenter, but you can predict what they will say next, after those first 2 sentences, sometimes down to the precise word.
Two extreme examples are Kinabalu on the left, and HYUFD on the right. No offence guys, but I suggest you are actually bots on Russia's SputnikGPT-3 in Chelyabinsk, autocompleting your comments following the prompt of a prior comment - as that is how GPT3 works. It is basically "autocomplete on crack"
That raises a further question, one I have mentioned before. What if ALL intelligence is just autocomplete? We think we have original thoughts, ideas, concepts, but maybe all of us - not just the twin droids kinabalu and HYUFD - are just a bunch of algorithms, responding as we must?
If all intelligence is just autocomplete, then AI is already here, and it is called GPT3, and it only going to get more intelligent
Here's a fascinating essay exploring that exact same idea that I had last year. Or, I should say, that idea I thought i had, in reality it was just me autocompleting the new reality of Natural Language Programming
The most fun posters are those whose views on a subject are unpredictable.
Hat tip to @IshmaelZ, who is reasonably inscrutable.
Bit of fun, see how many people can get of these:
(1) "100% disagreed. If the price of human body parts goes down demand for them will rise until equilibrium is found. Do you deny this? Yes/No."
(2) "Mr kinabalu, there’s a reason why Usain Bolt’s entrance into the 4th form girls’ egg and spoon race would be deemed by most to be inappropriate."
(3) "High intensity burns, preferably at the gym and in close proximity to a “htg” doing unfeasible contortions on a mat, that’s my ying to the yang of an otherwise indulgent lifestyle. When I’ve accomplished 30 secs of that, and got my breath back, I feel splendid."
(4) "Afternoon team, good debating from everyone today, anybody know where I can buy a new bike, mine’s crocked. TIA."
(5) "PB Tories might be able to articulate something borderline intelligible every so often if they weren’t always gagging on Johnson’s cock."
(6) "Had it with men in dresses and wanker scientists who talk wank the whole time. I’m going to Switzerland."
(7) "I was at a dinner in Islington the other evening and had terrific fun demonstrating to the people there how the green belt is an example of the Payroll being kept at the gates of the castle by their lords and masters."
(8) "You must think I button up the back you half-witted cretin. Jog on."
(9) "I know this won’t be popular on here but my feeling is that the more the Dems bang on about the Capitol “riots” and the attempted “coup” (lol) the more people will notice their risible double standards and look forward to voting for Trump next time."
(10) "Can't see why woke is sapping the moral fibre of the West? Cognitive bias, pure and simple."
(11) "Sky News. Boris says everything is coming up roses. Nothing from Labour."
(12) "Crumpets for tea is possible if Starmer is PM in a hung parliament being propped up by Sturgeon and the SNP otherwise no chance because Boris has said it can’t be for another 40 years."
Apols to those missing. Could have done loads more.
Conservative 40% (–) Labour 36% (-1) Liberal Democrat 9% (-1) Green 6% (+2) Scottish National Party 4% (–) Reform UK 4% (+1) Other 1% (–)
Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s net approval rating stands at -6%, a figure which has not changed in the past two weeks. This week’s poll finds 42% disapproving (no change) of his overall job performance, against 36% approving (no change).
Keir Starmer’s net approval rating has remained consistent in the past week as well, at -11%. 37% disapprove of Keir Starmer’s job performance (up 1%), while 26% approve (up 1%). Meanwhile, 31% neither approve nor disapprove of Starmer’s job performance (down 1%).
The issue is categorically not people leaving leading to higher wages. Anyone who thinks that doesn't understand basic economics.
The issue is we were trapped in a feedback loop.
Brexit hasn't created the labour shortage - the labour shortage was already there and has been for decades. What its done is broken the feedback loop by removing the reason wages were imbalanced in the first place. Now wages can rise to reach an equilibrium where demand no longer exceeds supply.
Plenty of people voted for Brexit because they thought once the foreigners had gone wages would rise.
But your comment doesn't make sense. A labour shortage would result in higher wages. You say this hasn't happened. But it can now because of Brexit. What element of Brexit has done this?
I thought I explained that with the flow chart.
A labour shortage should have resulted in higher wages. But since there was an infinite pool of people who could be fished from to fill the shortage, it was cheaper to import more people than pay the higher wages.
But importing more people didn't "fill the shortage" because once the new people arrived they added to the nation's aggregate demand. So there was still a shortage. So wages should have gone up but didn't due to the infinite labour pool. So more vacancies, more people arrived and the aggregate demand increased again.
It was a feedback loop. What Brexit has done is removed the infinite pool of labour, thus breaking the feedback loop. So the labour shortage is there yes, as its been for about twenty years and counting, but now instead of bringing more people in to fill the vacancies, add to aggregate demand and create more vacancies . . . instead wages have to go up, demand will come down, and we'll finally have equilibrium.
Huh? Wages only go up for a reason. Not just "because". Higher demand, cp, means higher wages and lower demand lower wages.
The presence of immigration or otherwise is irrelevant - more immigrants = more labour = more demand = wages in equilibrium; fewer immigrants = less labour = less demand = wages in equilibrium.
Why you think the latter scenario should result in equilibrium settling at a higher level than previously is anyone's guess.
The issue is we haven't been in equilibrium for nearly twenty years! The presence of immigration or otherwise is not irrelevant since the availability of unlimited immigration was suppressing wages.
That's why there's been a labour shortage almost consistently since 2004, because real wages have been suppressed and below what they should have been, thus demand for labour has been exceeding supply.
Hundreds of thousands of new immigrants every year have been eagerly recruited to "fill the vacancies" but you can't fill vacancies via net immigration due to the fact the migrants are people who will have their own aggregate demand.
Wages should have gone up nearly twenty years ago. Ten years ago. Five years ago. They're going up now, not because of anything that's happened now other than the distortion that was preventing wages from rising has been removed.
Philip can you please use all your economics training to unpick your sentence:
"The presence of immigration or otherwise is not irrelevant since the availability of unlimited immigration was suppressing wages...That's why there's been a labour shortage almost consistently since 2004"
And also
"you can't fill vacancies via net immigration due to the fact the migrants are people who will have their own aggregate demand"
On the one hand you say there has been "unlimited immigration" while on the other there has been a labour shortage. Then you talk about vacancies. Vacancies = downward pressure on wages, while "their own aggregate demand" = upwards pressure on wages.
More immigrants = more demand. Fewer immigrants = less demand. With the appropriate effect on wages.
I genuinely don't know what you are trying to say here.
Lower wage imported labour reduces aggregate demand per capita.
But the size of the economy grows giving rise to new avenues of demand.
The reality is that it's complicated.
What is almost certainly the case is that increasing wages (right now) are more the result of Covid-bounceback, rather than Brexit. Because it's a trend we're seeing everywhere (except France).
The issue is categorically not people leaving leading to higher wages. Anyone who thinks that doesn't understand basic economics.
The issue is we were trapped in a feedback loop.
Brexit hasn't created the labour shortage - the labour shortage was already there and has been for decades. What its done is broken the feedback loop by removing the reason wages were imbalanced in the first place. Now wages can rise to reach an equilibrium where demand no longer exceeds supply.
Plenty of people voted for Brexit because they thought once the foreigners had gone wages would rise.
But your comment doesn't make sense. A labour shortage would result in higher wages. You say this hasn't happened. But it can now because of Brexit. What element of Brexit has done this?
I thought I explained that with the flow chart.
A labour shortage should have resulted in higher wages. But since there was an infinite pool of people who could be fished from to fill the shortage, it was cheaper to import more people than pay the higher wages.
But importing more people didn't "fill the shortage" because once the new people arrived they added to the nation's aggregate demand. So there was still a shortage. So wages should have gone up but didn't due to the infinite labour pool. So more vacancies, more people arrived and the aggregate demand increased again.
It was a feedback loop. What Brexit has done is removed the infinite pool of labour, thus breaking the feedback loop. So the labour shortage is there yes, as its been for about twenty years and counting, but now instead of bringing more people in to fill the vacancies, add to aggregate demand and create more vacancies . . . instead wages have to go up, demand will come down, and we'll finally have equilibrium.
Huh? Wages only go up for a reason. Not just "because". Higher demand, cp, means higher wages and lower demand lower wages.
The presence of immigration or otherwise is irrelevant - more immigrants = more labour = more demand = wages in equilibrium; fewer immigrants = less labour = less demand = wages in equilibrium.
Why you think the latter scenario should result in equilibrium settling at a higher level than previously is anyone's guess.
The issue is we haven't been in equilibrium for nearly twenty years! The presence of immigration or otherwise is not irrelevant since the availability of unlimited immigration was suppressing wages.
That's why there's been a labour shortage almost consistently since 2004, because real wages have been suppressed and below what they should have been, thus demand for labour has been exceeding supply.
Hundreds of thousands of new immigrants every year have been eagerly recruited to "fill the vacancies" but you can't fill vacancies via net immigration due to the fact the migrants are people who will have their own aggregate demand.
Wages should have gone up nearly twenty years ago. Ten years ago. Five years ago. They're going up now, not because of anything that's happened now other than the distortion that was preventing wages from rising has been removed.
Philip can you please use all your economics training to unpick your sentence:
"The presence of immigration or otherwise is not irrelevant since the availability of unlimited immigration was suppressing wages...That's why there's been a labour shortage almost consistently since 2004"
And also
"you can't fill vacancies via net immigration due to the fact the migrants are people who will have their own aggregate demand"
On the one hand you say there has been "unlimited immigration" while on the other there has been a labour shortage. Then you talk about vacancies. Vacancies = downward pressure on wages, while "their own aggregate demand" = upwards pressure on wages.
More immigrants = more demand. Fewer immigrants = less demand. With the appropriate effect on wages.
I genuinely don't know what you are trying to say here.
Lower wage imported labour reduces aggregate demand per capita.
But the size of the economy grows giving rise to new avenues of demand.
Which doesn't not necessarily translate into an increase in wages, if a section of the labour market is in surplus.
An important point is that an economy can't (generally) expand infinitely to match a surplus in a supply of a limited group of skills. So if you keep pouring in left handed prop wash mixers, the economy may expand until other constraints kick in, at which point you will have a surplus of left handed prop wash mixers. And wages for left handed prop wash mixers will then fall to the lowest clearing value.
That is true. It depends also on whether the immigrants are essential (complements) to making the machines work.
The issue is categorically not people leaving leading to higher wages. Anyone who thinks that doesn't understand basic economics.
The issue is we were trapped in a feedback loop.
Brexit hasn't created the labour shortage - the labour shortage was already there and has been for decades. What its done is broken the feedback loop by removing the reason wages were imbalanced in the first place. Now wages can rise to reach an equilibrium where demand no longer exceeds supply.
Plenty of people voted for Brexit because they thought once the foreigners had gone wages would rise.
But your comment doesn't make sense. A labour shortage would result in higher wages. You say this hasn't happened. But it can now because of Brexit. What element of Brexit has done this?
I thought I explained that with the flow chart.
A labour shortage should have resulted in higher wages. But since there was an infinite pool of people who could be fished from to fill the shortage, it was cheaper to import more people than pay the higher wages.
But importing more people didn't "fill the shortage" because once the new people arrived they added to the nation's aggregate demand. So there was still a shortage. So wages should have gone up but didn't due to the infinite labour pool. So more vacancies, more people arrived and the aggregate demand increased again.
It was a feedback loop. What Brexit has done is removed the infinite pool of labour, thus breaking the feedback loop. So the labour shortage is there yes, as its been for about twenty years and counting, but now instead of bringing more people in to fill the vacancies, add to aggregate demand and create more vacancies . . . instead wages have to go up, demand will come down, and we'll finally have equilibrium.
Huh? Wages only go up for a reason. Not just "because". Higher demand, cp, means higher wages and lower demand lower wages.
The presence of immigration or otherwise is irrelevant - more immigrants = more labour = more demand = wages in equilibrium; fewer immigrants = less labour = less demand = wages in equilibrium.
Why you think the latter scenario should result in equilibrium settling at a higher level than previously is anyone's guess.
The issue is we haven't been in equilibrium for nearly twenty years! The presence of immigration or otherwise is not irrelevant since the availability of unlimited immigration was suppressing wages.
That's why there's been a labour shortage almost consistently since 2004, because real wages have been suppressed and below what they should have been, thus demand for labour has been exceeding supply.
Hundreds of thousands of new immigrants every year have been eagerly recruited to "fill the vacancies" but you can't fill vacancies via net immigration due to the fact the migrants are people who will have their own aggregate demand.
Wages should have gone up nearly twenty years ago. Ten years ago. Five years ago. They're going up now, not because of anything that's happened now other than the distortion that was preventing wages from rising has been removed.
Philip can you please use all your economics training to unpick your sentence:
"The presence of immigration or otherwise is not irrelevant since the availability of unlimited immigration was suppressing wages...That's why there's been a labour shortage almost consistently since 2004"
And also
"you can't fill vacancies via net immigration due to the fact the migrants are people who will have their own aggregate demand"
On the one hand you say there has been "unlimited immigration" while on the other there has been a labour shortage. Then you talk about vacancies. Vacancies = downward pressure on wages, while "their own aggregate demand" = upwards pressure on wages.
More immigrants = more demand. Fewer immigrants = less demand. With the appropriate effect on wages.
I genuinely don't know what you are trying to say here.
Lower wage imported labour reduces aggregate demand per capita.
But the size of the economy grows giving rise to new avenues of demand.
The reality is that it's complicated.
What is almost certainly the case is that increasing wages (right now) are more the result of Covid-bounceback, rather than Brexit. Because it's a trend we're seeing everywhere (except France).
I agree. We have been dormant for some time economically.
I just disputed the supposed given that Brexit has lead to fewer immigrants and therefore higher wages.
The issue is categorically not people leaving leading to higher wages. Anyone who thinks that doesn't understand basic economics.
The issue is we were trapped in a feedback loop.
Brexit hasn't created the labour shortage - the labour shortage was already there and has been for decades. What its done is broken the feedback loop by removing the reason wages were imbalanced in the first place. Now wages can rise to reach an equilibrium where demand no longer exceeds supply.
Plenty of people voted for Brexit because they thought once the foreigners had gone wages would rise.
But your comment doesn't make sense. A labour shortage would result in higher wages. You say this hasn't happened. But it can now because of Brexit. What element of Brexit has done this?
I thought I explained that with the flow chart.
A labour shortage should have resulted in higher wages. But since there was an infinite pool of people who could be fished from to fill the shortage, it was cheaper to import more people than pay the higher wages.
But importing more people didn't "fill the shortage" because once the new people arrived they added to the nation's aggregate demand. So there was still a shortage. So wages should have gone up but didn't due to the infinite labour pool. So more vacancies, more people arrived and the aggregate demand increased again.
It was a feedback loop. What Brexit has done is removed the infinite pool of labour, thus breaking the feedback loop. So the labour shortage is there yes, as its been for about twenty years and counting, but now instead of bringing more people in to fill the vacancies, add to aggregate demand and create more vacancies . . . instead wages have to go up, demand will come down, and we'll finally have equilibrium.
Huh? Wages only go up for a reason. Not just "because". Higher demand, cp, means higher wages and lower demand lower wages.
The presence of immigration or otherwise is irrelevant - more immigrants = more labour = more demand = wages in equilibrium; fewer immigrants = less labour = less demand = wages in equilibrium.
Why you think the latter scenario should result in equilibrium settling at a higher level than previously is anyone's guess.
The issue is we haven't been in equilibrium for nearly twenty years! The presence of immigration or otherwise is not irrelevant since the availability of unlimited immigration was suppressing wages.
That's why there's been a labour shortage almost consistently since 2004, because real wages have been suppressed and below what they should have been, thus demand for labour has been exceeding supply.
Hundreds of thousands of new immigrants every year have been eagerly recruited to "fill the vacancies" but you can't fill vacancies via net immigration due to the fact the migrants are people who will have their own aggregate demand.
Wages should have gone up nearly twenty years ago. Ten years ago. Five years ago. They're going up now, not because of anything that's happened now other than the distortion that was preventing wages from rising has been removed.
Philip can you please use all your economics training to unpick your sentence:
"The presence of immigration or otherwise is not irrelevant since the availability of unlimited immigration was suppressing wages...That's why there's been a labour shortage almost consistently since 2004"
And also
"you can't fill vacancies via net immigration due to the fact the migrants are people who will have their own aggregate demand"
On the one hand you say there has been "unlimited immigration" while on the other there has been a labour shortage. Then you talk about vacancies. Vacancies = downward pressure on wages, while "their own aggregate demand" = upwards pressure on wages.
More immigrants = more demand. Fewer immigrants = less demand. With the appropriate effect on wages.
I genuinely don't know what you are trying to say here.
Lower wage imported labour reduces aggregate demand per capita.
But the size of the economy grows giving rise to new avenues of demand.
The reality is that it's complicated.
What is almost certainly the case is that increasing wages (right now) are more the result of Covid-bounceback, rather than Brexit. Because it's a trend we're seeing everywhere (except France).
In many place, I think, the people on shitty wages and condition switched to doing different things during lockdowns. A major reason was that shitty jobs are associated with no-work-no-pay to an extreme degree.
Many people in such jobs are not naturally adventurous. So losing their jobs forced them to make a move that they would not otherwise have done. And in a number of places, they are not going back.
When I am bored I sometimes play a game with PB. I go to a longer comment (avoiding the name at the top) and I read the first 2 or 3 sentences. And then I test myself: I see if I can guess the identity of the commenter from the opinion, syntax, vocabulary, style
It is surprisingly easy, we all have a style. What is more surprising is how robotic and repetitive some commenters are, such that you can not only guess the identity of the commenter, but you can predict what they will say next, after those first 2 sentences, sometimes down to the precise word.
Two extreme examples are Kinabalu on the left, and HYUFD on the right. No offence guys, but I suggest you are actually bots on Russia's SputnikGPT-3 in Chelyabinsk, autocompleting your comments following the prompt of a prior comment - as that is how GPT3 works. It is basically "autocomplete on crack"
That raises a further question, one I have mentioned before. What if ALL intelligence is just autocomplete? We think we have original thoughts, ideas, concepts, but maybe all of us - not just the twin droids kinabalu and HYUFD - are just a bunch of algorithms, responding as we must?
If all intelligence is just autocomplete, then AI is already here, and it is called GPT3, and it only going to get more intelligent
Here's a fascinating essay exploring that exact same idea that I had last year. Or, I should say, that idea I thought i had, in reality it was just me autocompleting the new reality of Natural Language Programming
The most fun posters are those whose views on a subject are unpredictable.
Hat tip to @IshmaelZ, who is reasonably inscrutable.
Bit of fun, see how many people can get of these:
(1) "100% disagreed. If the price of human body parts goes down demand for them will rise until equilibrium is found. Do you deny this? Yes/No."
(2) "Mr kinabalu, there’s a reason why Usain Bolt’s entrance into the 4th form girls’ egg and spoon race would be deemed by most to be inappropriate."
(3) "High intensity burns, preferably at the gym and in close proximity to a “htg” doing unfeasible contortions on a mat, that’s my ying to the yang of an otherwise indulgent lifestyle. When I’ve accomplished 30 secs of that, and got my breath back, I feel splendid."
(4) "Afternoon team, good debating from everyone today, anybody know where I can buy a new bike, mine’s crocked. TIA."
(5) "PB Tories might be able to articulate something borderline intelligible every so often if they weren’t always gagging on Johnson’s cock."
(6) "Had it with men in dresses and wanker scientists who talk wank the whole time. I’m going to Switzerland."
(7) "I was at a dinner in Islington the other evening and had terrific fun demonstrating to the people there how the green belt is an example of the Payroll being kept at the gates of the castle by their lords and masters."
(8) "You must think I button up the back you half-witted cretin. Jog on."
(9) "I know this won’t be popular on here but my feeling is that the more the Dems bang on about the Capitol “riots” and the attempted “coup” (lol) the more people will notice their risible double standards and look forward to voting for Trump next time."
(10) "Can't see why woke is sapping the moral fibre of the West? Cognitive bias, pure and simple."
(11) "Sky News. Boris says everything is coming up roses. Nothing from Labour."
(12) "Crumpets for tea is possible if Starmer is PM in a hung parliament being propped up by Sturgeon and the SNP otherwise no chance because Boris has said it can’t be for another 40 years."
Apols to those missing. Could have done loads more.
1 PT 2 Morris Dancer 3 DuraAce? 4 DuraAce? 5 DuraAce? (hopefully at least 1 out of 3!) 6 Max 7 Malmesbury?/Charles? 8 Malcolm 9 Mr Ed 10 CR? 11 BigG 12 HYUFD
On thread - what this tells me is that the proportion of climate sceptics probably doesn't vary all that much by constituency (though it would be interesting to see polling to confirm). We jump through considerable hoops to ensure that the ethnic identities of our representatives are broadly in proportion to the population at large - it doesn't seem unreasonable to me that it should be desirable that the views of MPs are roughly in proportion to the population at large. Which implies a voice for minority opinions such as climate scepticism, albeit a minority one. Which by accident or design appears to be what we have.
Climate sceptics puzzle me. I am not a scientist but the whole thing seems pretty open and shut to me and there appears to be a broad consensus across scientific opinion. So I wonder, what do climate sceptics really think? That the climate isn't warming? I can see it with my own eyes, and measurements of temperature seem to back up this impression very convincingly. Do they think that this is all lies? That the climate is warming but it's nothing to do with human activity? This seems even less plausible. The planet seems to be warming up at unprecedented speed and at a time that correlates perfectly with human activity that models predict should be having this effect. That the greenhouse gases theory isn't correct? The story seems highly plausible, whether conceptually or if you put it through a complex climate model. That scientists don't understand their own models and instruments? It's possible, but seems implausible that some random uninformed punter understands them better. That scientists are engaged in a vast conspiracy? Unlikely if you understand how science operates. If anyone was going to fund a conspiracy here, fossil fuel interests seem most plausible - they have deep pockets and strong vested interests. That the whole thing is real but there's no point doing anything to stop it? This is the craziest take of all, if you actually think about what life on earth would be like with say a 3 or 4 degree temperature increase. So, like I say, these people are a mystery to me. People are entitled to their own opinions of course, but not their own facts.
Good post. What is a climate change skeptic?
Forget those who say their daffodils are blooming earlier - they cannot distinguish between climate and weather. The facts are that over one hundred years global climate has risen by about 1.5 degrees centigrade. Anyone who argues against that is insane - they must think that this is a conspiracy between thermometers.
1.5 degrees doesn't seem a lot to most people - which is why a large chunk are not bothered about it. But, of course, it IS a lot. It is extreme in a single century's terms. The merely natural planet warming and cooling of old happens over a much longer time-span. So those that say "it's nature innit" are also wrong.
It is reckoned that about 1 degree of the 1.5 degrees is human-caused. Can only be an estimate of course. For my money I think we could be responsible for the whole 1.5 degrees.
This leads us to the next issue: that of apportioning responsibility. Looking to economics, the atmosphere is a public good, and public goods are replete with free rider problems and other non-trivial issues. Human-caused climate change is an example of Hardon's Tragedy of the Commons. A very good paper on this is below.
"The ‘tragedy of the commons’ refers to the situation when individuals, acting rationally in their own self‐interest, nonetheless act irrationally as a collective group by irreparably depleting a resource that is owned in common. The current climate change crisis is an example of ‘the tragedy’ on a global scale."
Global problems need global solutions and a world of nation-states is not conducive to this. That's why whatever we do will be of little effect and be too late.
When I am bored I sometimes play a game with PB. I go to a longer comment (avoiding the name at the top) and I read the first 2 or 3 sentences. And then I test myself: I see if I can guess the identity of the commenter from the opinion, syntax, vocabulary, style
It is surprisingly easy, we all have a style. What is more surprising is how robotic and repetitive some commenters are, such that you can not only guess the identity of the commenter, but you can predict what they will say next, after those first 2 sentences, sometimes down to the precise word.
Two extreme examples are Kinabalu on the left, and HYUFD on the right. No offence guys, but I suggest you are actually bots on Russia's SputnikGPT-3 in Chelyabinsk, autocompleting your comments following the prompt of a prior comment - as that is how GPT3 works. It is basically "autocomplete on crack"
That raises a further question, one I have mentioned before. What if ALL intelligence is just autocomplete? We think we have original thoughts, ideas, concepts, but maybe all of us - not just the twin droids kinabalu and HYUFD - are just a bunch of algorithms, responding as we must?
If all intelligence is just autocomplete, then AI is already here, and it is called GPT3, and it only going to get more intelligent
Here's a fascinating essay exploring that exact same idea that I had last year. Or, I should say, that idea I thought i had, in reality it was just me autocompleting the new reality of Natural Language Programming
The most fun posters are those whose views on a subject are unpredictable.
Hat tip to @IshmaelZ, who is reasonably inscrutable.
Bit of fun, see how many people can get of these:
(1) "100% disagreed. If the price of human body parts goes down demand for them will rise until equilibrium is found. Do you deny this? Yes/No."
(2) "Mr kinabalu, there’s a reason why Usain Bolt’s entrance into the 4th form girls’ egg and spoon race would be deemed by most to be inappropriate."
(3) "High intensity burns, preferably at the gym and in close proximity to a “htg” doing unfeasible contortions on a mat, that’s my ying to the yang of an otherwise indulgent lifestyle. When I’ve accomplished 30 secs of that, and got my breath back, I feel splendid."
(4) "Afternoon team, good debating from everyone today, anybody know where I can buy a new bike, mine’s crocked. TIA."
(5) "PB Tories might be able to articulate something borderline intelligible every so often if they weren’t always gagging on Johnson’s cock."
(6) "Had it with men in dresses and wanker scientists who talk wank the whole time. I’m going to Switzerland."
(7) "I was at a dinner in Islington the other evening and had terrific fun demonstrating to the people there how the green belt is an example of the Payroll being kept at the gates of the castle by their lords and masters."
(8) "You must think I button up the back you half-witted cretin. Jog on."
(9) "I know this won’t be popular on here but my feeling is that the more the Dems bang on about the Capitol “riots” and the attempted “coup” (lol) the more people will notice their risible double standards and look forward to voting for Trump next time."
(10) "Can't see why woke is sapping the moral fibre of the West? Cognitive bias, pure and simple."
(11) "Sky News. Boris says everything is coming up roses. Nothing from Labour."
(12) "Crumpets for tea is possible if Starmer is PM in a hung parliament being propped up by Sturgeon and the SNP otherwise no chance because Boris has said it can’t be for another 40 years."
Apols to those missing. Could have done loads more.
1 PT 2 Morris Dancer 3 DuraAce? 4 DuraAce? 5 DuraAce? (hopefully at least 1 out of 3!) 6 Max 7 Malmesbury?/Charles? 8 Malcolm 9 Mr Ed 10 CR? 11 BigG 12 HYUFD
Conservative 40% (–) Labour 36% (-1) Liberal Democrat 9% (-1) Green 6% (+2) Scottish National Party 4% (–) Reform UK 4% (+1) Other 1% (–)
Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s net approval rating stands at -6%, a figure which has not changed in the past two weeks. This week’s poll finds 42% disapproving (no change) of his overall job performance, against 36% approving (no change).
Keir Starmer’s net approval rating has remained consistent in the past week as well, at -11%. 37% disapprove of Keir Starmer’s job performance (up 1%), while 26% approve (up 1%). Meanwhile, 31% neither approve nor disapprove of Starmer’s job performance (down 1%).
On thread - what this tells me is that the proportion of climate sceptics probably doesn't vary all that much by constituency (though it would be interesting to see polling to confirm). We jump through considerable hoops to ensure that the ethnic identities of our representatives are broadly in proportion to the population at large - it doesn't seem unreasonable to me that it should be desirable that the views of MPs are roughly in proportion to the population at large. Which implies a voice for minority opinions such as climate scepticism, albeit a minority one. Which by accident or design appears to be what we have.
Climate sceptics puzzle me. I am not a scientist but the whole thing seems pretty open and shut to me and there appears to be a broad consensus across scientific opinion. So I wonder, what do climate sceptics really think? That the climate isn't warming? I can see it with my own eyes, and measurements of temperature seem to back up this impression very convincingly. Do they think that this is all lies? That the climate is warming but it's nothing to do with human activity? This seems even less plausible. The planet seems to be warming up at unprecedented speed and at a time that correlates perfectly with human activity that models predict should be having this effect. That the greenhouse gases theory isn't correct? The story seems highly plausible, whether conceptually or if you put it through a complex climate model. That scientists don't understand their own models and instruments? It's possible, but seems implausible that some random uninformed punter understands them better. That scientists are engaged in a vast conspiracy? Unlikely if you understand how science operates. If anyone was going to fund a conspiracy here, fossil fuel interests seem most plausible - they have deep pockets and strong vested interests. That the whole thing is real but there's no point doing anything to stop it? This is the craziest take of all, if you actually think about what life on earth would be like with say a 3 or 4 degree temperature increase. So, like I say, these people are a mystery to me. People are entitled to their own opinions of course, but not their own facts.
If people don't like the political implications of accepting that something is true then they will practice cognitive dissonance instead, so they don't have to face up to them.
That's why climate action needs to be depoliticised in order for us to go as fast as possible, and not attached to ecosocialism.
Our choice of climate change actions is going to create winners and losers. It's a political decision to its core. What's needed is political leadership. People will listen to people they trust.
For some reason, for a lot of people in this country, that is Boris Johnson and the Conservative party more generally. So it's great that they do talk about climate change and have committed to doing some things about it. Obviously not as much as needed, but steps in the right direction.
That's definitely missing on the US right.
People forget that "global warming" went mainstream in the late 80's when The Blessed Margaret took up the cause!
"The furnaces of the world are now burning about 2,000,000,000 tons of coal a year. When this is burned, uniting with oxygen, it adds about 7,000,000,000 tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere yearly. This tends to make the air a more effective blanket for the earth and to raise its temperature. The effect may be considerable in a few centuries."
Yeah I know the theory had been around for a very long time but it was only in the mid to late 1980s that it went mainstream and a lot of that was down to Lady Thatcher making speeches about it.
Ten years previous to her UN speech the world was going through an "Ice Age" scare.
Mrs T also did a lot to combat the ozone layer problem as well to be fair (which a lot of people forget now)
I'd argue that the various Clean Air acts enacted since the 1950s have done more for the UK environment and health than any other legislation - even ones restricting smoking. Yet they are little heralded.
When I am bored I sometimes play a game with PB. I go to a longer comment (avoiding the name at the top) and I read the first 2 or 3 sentences. And then I test myself: I see if I can guess the identity of the commenter from the opinion, syntax, vocabulary, style
It is surprisingly easy, we all have a style. What is more surprising is how robotic and repetitive some commenters are, such that you can not only guess the identity of the commenter, but you can predict what they will say next, after those first 2 sentences, sometimes down to the precise word.
Two extreme examples are Kinabalu on the left, and HYUFD on the right. No offence guys, but I suggest you are actually bots on Russia's SputnikGPT-3 in Chelyabinsk, autocompleting your comments following the prompt of a prior comment - as that is how GPT3 works. It is basically "autocomplete on crack"
That raises a further question, one I have mentioned before. What if ALL intelligence is just autocomplete? We think we have original thoughts, ideas, concepts, but maybe all of us - not just the twin droids kinabalu and HYUFD - are just a bunch of algorithms, responding as we must?
If all intelligence is just autocomplete, then AI is already here, and it is called GPT3, and it only going to get more intelligent
Here's a fascinating essay exploring that exact same idea that I had last year. Or, I should say, that idea I thought i had, in reality it was just me autocompleting the new reality of Natural Language Programming
The most fun posters are those whose views on a subject are unpredictable.
Hat tip to @IshmaelZ, who is reasonably inscrutable.
Bit of fun, see how many people can get of these:
(1) "100% disagreed. If the price of human body parts goes down demand for them will rise until equilibrium is found. Do you deny this? Yes/No."
(2) "Mr kinabalu, there’s a reason why Usain Bolt’s entrance into the 4th form girls’ egg and spoon race would be deemed by most to be inappropriate."
(3) "High intensity burns, preferably at the gym and in close proximity to a “htg” doing unfeasible contortions on a mat, that’s my ying to the yang of an otherwise indulgent lifestyle. When I’ve accomplished 30 secs of that, and got my breath back, I feel splendid."
(4) "Afternoon team, good debating from everyone today, anybody know where I can buy a new bike, mine’s crocked. TIA."
(5) "PB Tories might be able to articulate something borderline intelligible every so often if they weren’t always gagging on Johnson’s cock."
(6) "Had it with men in dresses and wanker scientists who talk wank the whole time. I’m going to Switzerland."
(7) "I was at a dinner in Islington the other evening and had terrific fun demonstrating to the people there how the green belt is an example of the Payroll being kept at the gates of the castle by their lords and masters."
(8) "You must think I button up the back you half-witted cretin. Jog on."
(9) "I know this won’t be popular on here but my feeling is that the more the Dems bang on about the Capitol “riots” and the attempted “coup” (lol) the more people will notice their risible double standards and look forward to voting for Trump next time."
(10) "Can't see why woke is sapping the moral fibre of the West? Cognitive bias, pure and simple."
(11) "Sky News. Boris says everything is coming up roses. Nothing from Labour."
(12) "Crumpets for tea is possible if Starmer is PM in a hung parliament being propped up by Sturgeon and the SNP otherwise no chance because Boris has said it can’t be for another 40 years."
Apols to those missing. Could have done loads more.
"Need to keep an eye on you. Bit troubling. Not like you at all. Which you know. Don't you. But your card's marked. See if you don't."
Comments
"Everyone will own a device with which they can immediately communicate with almost anyone else on the planet, by voice or on screen. Also it will have instant access to all of human knowledge. And it will summon vehicles, take photos, play a near infinite variety of music, do sums, translate languages, record voices, make automatic payments, access your bank, access all media from TV to newspapers, tell you the weather, entertain you with games, show you live football, store all your personal data and let you argue about politics all day with strangers"
"My God, how big will this device be? Size of a house???"
"No, about the size of a cigarette packet"
I don't expect a massive surge, but neither can we resume normal service with 4 medical wards of covid and 25% of ICU occupied.
We had a right-wing PM who was one of the first to draw attention to it in the UN in 1989, because she understood the science, and there's been a broad consensus on the urgency of tacking it here for at least 20 years.
But yes, what I mean is there should be a political consensus on the importance of it being addressed and then the debate takes place between left and right as to who is best placed to do that.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VnAzoDtwCBg
But your comment doesn't make sense. A labour shortage would result in higher wages. You say this hasn't happened. But it can now because of Brexit. What element of Brexit has done this?
If you run a linear regression the reality is that the dominant driver of house prices is affordability. Between 1999 and late 2004, average mortgage rates dropped from 8.5% to under 4%. This meant that they could now afford a more expensive property. (This was combined with the fact that their existing property had risen in value, increasing the size of their deposit.)
I shall try more 'Fuck'.
In a not-at-all-unnerving-move, they have decided to call it MEGATRON
https://twitter.com/jackclarkSF/status/1447582082427981826?s=20
Acorn did a little portable computer prototype called the NewsPAD, but it was never released. It was cool to play with it back in 1997/8.
I wonder whether he (or she) still posts and what the situation is now.
That's how you do predictions.
1912 newspaper
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.businessinsider.com/newspaper-in-1912-linked-coal-to-climate-change-2018-8?amp
"America experiencing monumental shortage on everything caused by supply chain bottlenecks"
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10079935/The-shortage-Shelves-bare-delays-deliveries-pharmacies-without-medication.html?ito=social-twitter_mailonline
"Supply chain problems that have been tormenting retailers for months are showing up in America's stores
Around the country, there are shortages of goods on shelves in Target, Costco, Home Depot and Sears
The issues aren't specific to any one type of good and are down to problems with shipping and distribution
Cargo ships off can't get into overworked ports to drop off goods and are hovering off the coast
There is a global shortage in truck drivers which is stalling distribution of goods and railroads are also jammed
The cost of shipping a single container from China to LA reached $20,000 last month - four times what it cost last October
Some retailers are telling people to buy Christmas gifts now to ensure they arrive on time
There is no immediate end in sight: Biden has launched a White House supply chain task force but businesses fear the problems will stretch on for months yet"
In my day of course, one could often thumb a lift.
A labour shortage should have resulted in higher wages. But since there was an infinite pool of people who could be fished from to fill the shortage, it was cheaper to import more people than pay the higher wages.
But importing more people didn't "fill the shortage" because once the new people arrived they added to the nation's aggregate demand. So there was still a shortage. So wages should have gone up but didn't due to the infinite labour pool. So more vacancies, more people arrived and the aggregate demand increased again.
It was a feedback loop. What Brexit has done is removed the infinite pool of labour, thus breaking the feedback loop. So the labour shortage is there yes, as its been for about twenty years and counting, but now instead of bringing more people in to fill the vacancies, add to aggregate demand and create more vacancies . . . instead wages have to go up, demand will come down, and we'll finally have equilibrium.
But yes, part of our staffing crisis is that women go off on maternity leave as soon as they can. They have seen what covid in pregnancy does.
Ten years previous to her UN speech the world was going through an "Ice Age" scare.
Mrs T also did a lot to combat the ozone layer problem as well to be fair (which a lot of people forget now)
The presence of immigration or otherwise is irrelevant - more immigrants = more labour = more demand = wages in equilibrium; fewer immigrants = less labour = less demand = wages in equilibrium.
Why you think the latter scenario should result in equilibrium settling at a higher level than previously is anyone's guess.
Westminster Voting Intention (11 Oct):
Conservative 40% (–)
Labour 36% (-1)
Liberal Democrat 9% (-1)
Green 6% (+2)
Scottish National Party 4% (–)
Reform UK 4% (+1)
Other 1% (–)
Changes +/- 4 Oct
Between Boris Johnson and Keir Starmer, 42% say they think Boris Johnson would be a better Prime Minister for the United Kingdom at this moment than Keir Starmer, a result which has not changed since last week’s poll. Conversely, 31% think Keir Starmer would be the better Prime Minister when compared to Boris Johnson (down 1%).
- modern UIs
- tablet computers
- laser printers
- postcript
Ironic that they didn't actually benefit from any of this.
That's why there's been a labour shortage almost consistently since 2004, because real wages have been suppressed and below what they should have been, thus demand for labour has been exceeding supply.
Hundreds of thousands of new immigrants every year have been eagerly recruited to "fill the vacancies" but you can't fill vacancies via net immigration due to the fact the migrants are people who will have their own aggregate demand.
Wages should have gone up nearly twenty years ago. Ten years ago. Five years ago. They're going up now, not because of anything that's happened now other than the distortion that was preventing wages from rising has been removed.
https://twitter.com/joncstone/status/1447587459898937349?s=20
I think Great Thunberg has already noticed this. If this is correct then amelioration, mitigation, continuing to limit the increase as much as possible and crossed fingers is the only option. But avoidance of the doomsday scenario is, on the data, a non option.
Any time I hear "Not our core business", I release the safety catch on my Browning.
"Insulate Britain" pricks are calling for half a trillion to be spent on insulation. They've said "a few billion" won't be enough, it needs to be half a trillion. Just on insulation.
Now is insulation a good idea? Yes, why not?
Is insulation the best use of half a trillion pounds? Not necessarily.
Maybe half a trillion invested in new tidal lagoons or new energy generation or mitigation or many other options would do more than half a trillion in insulation.
Especially since our own emissions are rapidly becoming a drop in the ocean then our cash going into mitigation may increasing be the best use of it.
It looks as if we have also evolved to think that the UK can act to solve a global problem of climate change even if the Chinese make it impossible to do so.
Where I live, only a few thousand years ago a mile of ice would have been over my head. Global cooling isn't great either.
"The presence of immigration or otherwise is not irrelevant since the availability of unlimited immigration was suppressing wages...That's why there's been a labour shortage almost consistently since 2004"
And also
"you can't fill vacancies via net immigration due to the fact the migrants are people who will have their own aggregate demand"
On the one hand you say there has been "unlimited immigration" while on the other there has been a labour shortage. Then you talk about vacancies. Vacancies = downward pressure on wages, while "their own aggregate demand" = upwards pressure on wages.
More immigrants = more demand. Fewer immigrants = less demand. With the appropriate effect on wages.
I genuinely don't know what you are trying to say here.
This will get better eventually, but it won’t be this winter.
We are in for a tough, hard, time this winter.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/interactive/2021/supply-chain-issues/
Now, it's important to take the views of people outside of the field (see e.g. physicists suggesting that Covid might be airbourne before that became the majority view - and several other cases in the past).
You can also argue that climate science systematically (if unintentionally) selects those who accept the underlying principle of there being a problem (may be something in that, too).
However, there is a lack of serious alternative modelling coming from these institutions that hasn't been widely discredited.
As for climate models, they are of course validated (and invalidated) continuously. They're not of course validated yet for their predictions beyond today, but past models have been assessed for their predictions over the past decade and more.
Anyway, as someone else posted, we're probably going to get to carbon emissions that are in the red zone for many of the models, so we'll likely get to find out how good they were. Let us hope that they're consistently over-pessimistic and we can enjoy our new, cleaner world in the second half of this century wthout widespread climate disruption.
SKS has nothing to offer.
Worked well for one of them, IIRC. Not sure about some of the others..
For those who think SKS will be PM an NHS psychiatric unit is surely the best place to start!!
https://www.moroccoworldnews.com/2021/10/344869/ship-to-arrive-in-poole-in-new-brexit-busting-route-between-uk-morocco
Conservative 40% (–)
Labour 36% (-1)
Liberal Democrat 9% (-1)
Green 6% (+2)
Scottish National Party 4% (–)
Reform UK 4% (+1)
Other 1% (–)
Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s net approval rating stands at -6%, a figure which has not changed in the past two weeks. This week’s poll finds 42% disapproving (no change) of his overall job performance, against 36% approving (no change).
Keir Starmer’s net approval rating has remained consistent in the past week as well, at -11%. 37% disapprove of Keir Starmer’s job performance (up 1%), while 26% approve (up 1%). Meanwhile, 31% neither approve nor disapprove of Starmer’s job performance (down 1%).
https://redfieldandwiltonstrategies.com/latest-gb-voting-intention-11-october-2021/
The Earth's climate is a delicate system, with all sorts of feedbacks that cause it to swing wildly in response to the smallest of inputs. We see this historically in its magnified response to the tiny influences of Milankovich cycles. What humans have just done is the equavalent of whacking the Newton's cradle with a hammer.
An important point is that an economy can't (generally) expand infinitely to match a surplus in a supply of a limited group of skills. So if you keep pouring in left handed prop wash mixers, the economy may expand until other constraints kick in, at which point you will have a surplus of left handed prop wash mixers. And wages for left handed prop wash mixers will then fall to the lowest clearing value.
(1) "100% disagreed. If the price of human body parts goes down demand for them will rise until equilibrium is found. Do you deny this? Yes/No."
(2) "Mr kinabalu, there’s a reason why Usain Bolt’s entrance into the 4th form girls’ egg and spoon race would be deemed by most to be inappropriate."
(3) "High intensity burns, preferably at the gym and in close proximity to a “htg” doing unfeasible contortions on a mat, that’s my ying to the yang of an otherwise indulgent lifestyle. When I’ve accomplished 30 secs of that, and got my breath back, I feel splendid."
(4) "Afternoon team, good debating from everyone today, anybody know where I can buy a new bike, mine’s crocked. TIA."
(5) "PB Tories might be able to articulate something borderline intelligible every so often if they weren’t always gagging on Johnson’s cock."
(6) "Had it with men in dresses and wanker scientists who talk wank the whole time. I’m going to Switzerland."
(7) "I was at a dinner in Islington the other evening and had terrific fun demonstrating to the people there how the green belt is an example of the Payroll being kept at the gates of the castle by their lords and masters."
(8) "You must think I button up the back you half-witted cretin. Jog on."
(9) "I know this won’t be popular on here but my feeling is that the more the Dems bang on about the Capitol “riots” and the attempted “coup” (lol) the more people will notice their risible double standards and look forward to voting for Trump next time."
(10) "Can't see why woke is sapping the moral fibre of the West? Cognitive bias, pure and simple."
(11) "Sky News. Boris says everything is coming up roses. Nothing from Labour."
(12) "Crumpets for tea is possible if Starmer is PM in a hung parliament being propped up by Sturgeon and the SNP otherwise no chance because Boris has said it can’t be for another 40 years."
Apols to those missing. Could have done loads more.
What is almost certainly the case is that increasing wages (right now) are more the result of Covid-bounceback, rather than Brexit. Because it's a trend we're seeing everywhere (except France).
I just disputed the supposed given that Brexit has lead to fewer immigrants and therefore higher wages.
Many people in such jobs are not naturally adventurous. So losing their jobs forced them to make a move that they would not otherwise have done. And in a number of places, they are not going back.
This is the list of October polls from Wikipedia.
Very consistent numbers, apart from YouGov which have Labour considerably lower, with SNP and Greens higher.
2 Morris Dancer
3 DuraAce?
4 DuraAce?
5 DuraAce? (hopefully at least 1 out of 3!)
6 Max
7 Malmesbury?/Charles?
8 Malcolm
9 Mr Ed
10 CR?
11 BigG
12 HYUFD
Forget those who say their daffodils are blooming earlier - they cannot distinguish between climate and weather. The facts are that over one hundred years global climate has risen by about 1.5 degrees centigrade. Anyone who argues against that is insane - they must think that this is a conspiracy between thermometers.
1.5 degrees doesn't seem a lot to most people - which is why a large chunk are not bothered about it. But, of course, it IS a lot. It is extreme in a single century's terms. The merely natural planet warming and cooling of old happens over a much longer time-span. So those that say "it's nature innit" are also wrong.
It is reckoned that about 1 degree of the 1.5 degrees is human-caused. Can only be an estimate of course. For my money I think we could be responsible for the whole 1.5 degrees.
https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/chapter/spm/
This leads us to the next issue: that of apportioning responsibility. Looking to economics, the atmosphere is a public good, and public goods are replete with free rider problems and other non-trivial issues. Human-caused climate change is an example of Hardon's Tragedy of the Commons. A very good paper on this is below.
"The ‘tragedy of the commons’ refers to the situation when individuals, acting rationally in their own self‐interest, nonetheless act irrationally as a collective group by irreparably depleting a resource that is owned in common. The current climate change crisis is an example of ‘the tragedy’ on a global scale."
https://www.econlib.org/library/Columns/y2020/Schwartzclimatechange.html#:~:text=A growing number of people,an unstructured group of people.&text=In other words, individuals in,from over-grazing common lands.
Global problems need global solutions and a world of nation-states is not conducive to this. That's why whatever we do will be of little effect and be too late.
At least Boris is only useless.