No Sh*t, Sherlock! – politicalbetting.com

“That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons that history has to teach.” (Huxley)
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“That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons that history has to teach.” (Huxley)
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no way this dude come in and fixes twitters unusable broken search in a month while the thousands of people couldn't in years
https://twitter.com/PlayboysJourney/status/1594886286447345665
that’s what Elon told me my job was, and I will try my hardest to do it. I have 12 weeks. also trying to get rid of that nondismissable login pop up after you scroll a little bit ugh these things ruin the Internet
https://twitter.com/realGeorgeHotz/status/1594906882027552773
Is the CoP also on the side of the criminal, then?! (Certainly not on the side of the cop, who is presumably personally liable for assault.)
Is the poor standard of vetting by the police a general problem or particular to the police? Politicians are subject to an army of amateur sleuths looking at everything they've said and done since they were children, but I'm not convinced that public institutions or companies bother to anything like the same extent.
5 of the 8 received campaign donations from FTX employees, from $2,900 to $11,600.
https://twitter.com/unusual_whales/status/1596130056329650177
I thought Dave Chappelles bit on SNL the other week was brilliant where he said about Trump being an "honest liar", coming out of the big house and telling everybody you know the games rigged, because I used it, and so did all of those people and their donors...
I think Cyclefree has the potential to be an excellent public servant, but I'd like her to add to her repertoire of being outraged at problems, an ability to point to more solutions - simple and effective solutions based on a knowledge of human beings.
Straw in the wind of general slow down.
....
Whole of London to be hit by new Ulez expansion ordered by Sadiq Khan
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2022/11/25/whole-london-hit-ulez-expansion-ordered-sadiq-khan/
Always find it interesting that some of the talking heads very quick to always talk about any other tax rises as regressive, never say anything about this. Yes a lot of poor people use public transport, but there is also a big chunk who need a car (especially now we aren't just talking central London) and can't afford a new one. Where as rich people, likely to use things like leasing, so they turn them over every 2-3 years.
The Serious Farce Office and HMRC are doing brilliantly.
1) Prosecuting people is difficult and can fail
2) Prosecuting people upsets them
3) Prosecuting politicians would be very upsetting for Important People. Like, er, Politicians.
So not finding corruption is brilliant, career wise for people at the SFO etc.
It's not like they will lose their jobs for not finding corruption, is it?
Everyone is happy, yes?
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2022/11/25/labour-will-cut-taxes-working-people-vows-sir-keir-starmer/
Always makes me chuckle when politicians talk about working people...as if richer people don't work....
As to the police - Lessons Will Be Learned. Which means they never really bother to understand the problem. Just a superficial nod and on they go.
hisother peoples money at Dems, there was another FTX guy who splashed at the GOP.As times get tighter there is only so much people will pay.
Also, we are already seeing elsewhere, once in place, they quickly change the criteria e.g Bath already doing it after one year. So I imagine a particular your one man van businesses bought vehicles that met the criteria, now screwed.
Competing and overlapping agencies is a good thing. Make them compete for budgets. If the police do badly, the next year they lose millions in budgets to the sheriffs.
That looks as if about 30-40% of diesels and 70-80% of petrols are exempt. 40% of diesels are 6 years old or less; 80% of petrols are 13 years old or less. 2020 numbers, assuming similar age profiles.
(https://www.nimblefins.co.uk/cheap-car-insurance/average-age-cars-great-britain#nogo)
That will have a good and fairly rapid impact on toxic emissions, but it's going to become tighter quite rapidly, I'd say.
My relatives are currently celebrating that they live half a mile outside Londinium.
Bands from the 80s can always price themselves a bit higher becauae their demographic has a bit more money.
I sometimes think about the relative price of live music v recorded music. Back in the early 90s, a gig was about half the price of an album. Nowadays, it's about sux times the price of an album. I used to go to a gig most weekends when I was a student - you could get into the Leadmill for a fiver, see a couple of bands you'd heard of - Sleeper, Madder Rose, that sort of level - and get the indie disco afterwards for free.
I could see every home Lancashire match of the T20 season for the price of a night watching a band at the Ritz.
But to develop this now as a rounded, self-aware, seasoned adult, I think the recruitment needs to identify 2 main strands of sentiment in applicants: wanting to protect the public and wanting to wield power over the public.
You reject the 2nd group and hire the 1st.
Ashfield (Hucknall Central): Ashfield Independent Hold
Bassetlaw (Sutton): Lab GAIN from Con
Isle of Wight (Brighstone, Calbourne & Shalfleet): LDm GAIN from Con
Sefton (Linacre): Lab Hold
Warrington (Rixton & Woolston): Con Hold
Good Week/Bad Week Index
Lab +115
LDm +81
Grn -11
Con -45
Adjusted Seat Value
Lab +1.9
LDm +1.3
Grn -0.2
Con -0.8
(Mine is currently on a driving ban for 5 speeding offences, and has refused to step down.)
I see them here every week but have no idea what they mean (other than that positive must be good and negative bad!). I suspect I might not be alone.
https://www2.politicalbetting.com/index.php/archives/2022/02/11/what-should-the-met-do-now/
I provided some answers back in February based on my experience of just this sort of culture change in the City and my understanding of why it is that people find themselves doing the wrong thing, even if they don't really mean to.
If you came to any of my talks you would know that I focus far more on the human element than on just fiddling with processes and systems. The latter is needed but it is human behaviour - getting people to understand why this matters, making them want to change and making them unafraid to admit to mistakes and learn from them - which are really key.
The police failings are very very similar to the failings which so disgraced the City.
I did apply for a role on one of the police watchdogs because I felt that my perspective might be useful. But they didn't want it.
I would love to share what I have learnt. I do not have the complete answers, of course. But I do have some answers and ideas. The problem is not that. It is whether those in charge are really willing to listen and learn and change. And the point of my header is that, if you have endless reports which are never actioned, you don't have that basic element, without which the rest cannot work.
Brando in The Chase was an impressive sheriff tbf but we're in 'exception that proves the rule' territory there imo.
And I say this as someone who had to buy a new car last year to comply.
Its a big objection I have to any voting systems where you aren't voting directly for one individual, it makes it much harder to flush the turds, as the greasy pole climbers will be ranked #1/#2 on any "list system" and can then get in by default.
And one of the main problems with solving this, and improving the Met, is that the latter is 'too big to fail', and therefore too big to fix.
Based on govt stats from September 2020, the total staffing (FTE) of the police forces in red on the above map is 32,218.
The forces in green total slightly more: 32,343.
The forces in yellow slightly more again: 33,919.
And the forces in blue - the Met and City of London - even more than that: 33,988.
Bringing in any one individual, even any top group - hell, even the entire management of any other police force - to fix things is never going to be able to shift the culture, how ever long they are allowed: they wouldn't have the experience and reach to achieve any significant change. It would, in very real terms, be like a massive urban secondary school going in to special measures and deciding to ask the management team from a single-class entry rural village school to sort it out.
The Met needs to be broken up, not only to break the networks of problem officers, but also to make it into units that can have new management teams imposed with a degree of ease that is currently not possible.
Firstly, the national functions should be taken away from the Met. Then, the geographic policing could be split down into say five areas.
It's difficult to say exactly how big this would be without a deeper dive into the staffing numbers, but based on the most recent reporting of how the Met breaks down its subunits, each of these six forces would rank in the top 10 forces, alongside Greater Manchester, West Midlands, West Yorkshire and Thames Valley. Leaving aside any issues with those forces (and boy, are there issues there too), it would more importantly give five geographic forces in London each between 1.5 and 2 times the size of the larger shire forces. - a much more manageable transfer in the event of 'special measures' being required. And it would also mean that, should it be necessary, each of those five London forces would border on two or three of the others, allowing management responsibility for parts of a problem force to be shifted 'next door' without over-impacting their own responsibilities.
Which at one point was committing the majority of serious crimes in the West Midlands.
Sir Harry Esson might have put it thus - “By God, this Squad is well-named!”
EDIT: You point is well made - the current system is "too big to fail". Which always fails. And just like in banking, we need more failure. Lots of small banks that go out of business for being shit. And other to take their place. Smaller police forces, so every now and then we can send one to the knackers... Yard. Ha.
Headline: Missing Not in action - 10% of the Met's personnel is being paid to stay off the beat
Summary para: 3,600 of the Met's police officers are off work due to stress, injury or lack of ability (3000), suspended for alleged misconduct (500), or on restricted duties (100) because, in the words of Met Commissioner Mark Rowley 'frankly we don’t trust them to talk to members of the public'. Rowley's frankness is commendable, but his frustration - 'It’s completely mad that I have to employ people like that as police officers.' rings fairly hollow given the litany of reports on police conduct that have been ignored wholesale by the Met over the course of the last decade.
Then I'd have listed the reports thus:
-Report name & context 'The XX report commissioned after the XX scandal'
-Key findings and recommendations
-Action taken following the report - 'none'
Then some vaguely hopeful concluding para 'If Mark Rowley is to improve the current 'completely mad' situation, he must match words with deeds - dusting down these reports and implementing a version of their recommendations would not be a bad start.
As I've said, you are a good writer with an excellent command of the language but format is key. The headline needs to say everything and grab attention, then a bit more, then a bit more, then more, etc.
'Gold check for companies, grey check for governments, blue for individuals (celebrities or not). Painful, but necessary,' Musk said in a tweet.
All verified accounts will be manually authenticated before the check is activated, Musk said.
-----
How long before you get platinum, black and red ticks for only many $100s a month :-)
What will Eddie Izzard's pronouns be when she's acting as Sherlock?
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-11467379/Trans-star-Eddie-Izzard-lands-Sherlock-role-don-famous-sleuths-cape-new-drama-series.html
The Educational Institute of Scotland (EIS) said the consecutive days of action - split across every council in the country - would take place in January and February next year.
What has he done to "fix" search though? I feel like I'm going mad.
He pops up search metadata token when you start typing. That's it. All those metadata fields are available already - no extra power has been added to the search functionality. There was even a nice "advanced search for dummies" popup you can access already ( https://twitter.com/search-advanced ).
Rather than size, I'd say one problem the Met has is that, as a corollary of building central, specialist units, there is a dearth of expertise at the local level, which is the most common police/public/crime interface. And that is without wading through the reports Cyclefree enumerates in the header.
I decided it was a bit close to the bone, and not strictly necessary to be that pointed in the post.
George Hotz is tasked with "fixing search" / making it more powerful, which he isn't claiming he has done yet (but Elon, Hotz and others say it doesn't work properly).
He then also asked the community for people to come up with ideas to improve the front end experience when it comes to searching, which is what this other dev has prototyped.
I should also say that my wife was a police officer for thirty years, in Sussex Police. Sussex, like a lot of forces around the south east, gets raided periodically by the met for officers, offering them sizeable bonuses to transfer over. I have known quite a few over the years who have gone, and whether or not they come back they uniformly report how bad the Met is in comparison to what they've known.
Remember way way back in the day this was really WhatsApp play, they had a small dedicated dev team and you paid 99c for access. They had revenue for $350m with 20 devs.
Now obviously twitter isn't a start-up, etc etc etc, but this is my guess in terms of pay your $8 for verification approach. Get away from total dependence on advertisers, start to nudge people to subbing for "premium" tier goodies. However, its much harder to go from free to paid, than starting your app from scratch with micro-payments.
Controversial opinion, Brazil are better without his over-inflated ego, poor work rate and take willingness to play as a cog in the machine.
It might well be a bit of both. However, he definitely massively overpaid either way. Its certainly going to be a Netflix series in the future of the crazy billionaire buying a social media company and all the insanity that followed.
https://twitter.com/Mylovanov/status/1596050892327129090
The distributed graph update problems that Twitter has are much harder than WhatsApp’s. WA could just shard servers across client groups & add more individual servers as necessary - for them load increased basically in linearly with user numbers & that per user load was low to start with. Twitter can’t do that.
This is not to say that Twitter is necessarily well structured, or maximally efficient, just that you can’t extrapolate WhatsApp’s cost structure to Twitter because WhatsApp was solving a much easier problem. Twitter’s issues are algorithmically much more difficult & & require more complex solutions.
I think what Elon is trying to repeat the trick here and diversify the income streams and softening everybody with pay to play for people who make money off being on the platform...there is a certain amount of "strong arming" here in terms of no company will want to not have their blue checkmark.
I am certainly not saying that twitter is going to turn into Whatsapp with 10s of employees and $8 / month blue checkmarks will keep the lights on.
But as I said, it is much harder to go from something you always paid for then the costs increase e.g. Netflix compared to it was free, now give us some money.
We don't have general and constant individual vehicle monitoring yet (as far as I know :-) ), which seems to me to be the next big jump.
I think mayor Sadiq has got the politics of expansion of the ULEZ badly wrong, as I don't see how a flat charge which equates those driving around in Z1/2 all day with those who drive from a mile inside the London boundary in Neasden or Wembley to Watford is defensible, due to the vastly different contributions they make to emissions in London.
The analogue would be the whole of the London area being Zone 6 for fare purposes.
To something graduated for Z2 / North-South Circular / London boundary at £15 / £10 / £5 would be far more rational.
I'm getting a sense of resentment about 'rule for Inner London by Sadiq' about the Ulez from those ourside the N/S circular who never go into Inner London. I'm not clear whether there will be a political impact.
Not that she had any likelihood of winning the seat.
NEW: And a younger Tory MP still standing down- Dehenna Davison, only elected in 2019 says she won't stand again. Feels symbolically important. Elected in Bishop Auckland, first ever Tory in the seat.
https://twitter.com/TomSheldrickITV/status/1596171999197671425?s=20&t=svuAeCV8craJFp6h7Qxwww
On the Sarah Everard policing being unlawful, from what I read this is due to the right to free speech and assembly. However when the government imposed their lockdowns (rightly or wrongly) I don't remember them pointing this out? And neither do I remember many rights enthusiasts defending Piers Corbyn when he got a £10,000 fine.
This is the problem with our approach to the enormous plethora of rights nowadays. Clearly there are so many of them that they can't be treated as absolute. And so you have to weigh up the balance. But all that generally does is allow people to find excuses for why the things they support should be permitted and the things they don't should not be. The whole point about rights is you are supposed to support them for people you don't agree with.
Good for Manchester International.
https://twitter.com/EISUnion/status/1596168682803183623?ref_src=twsrc^tfw|twcamp^tweetembed|twterm^1596168682803183623|twgr^6e8e2d2b23843193d6aec311c034199ad918557e|twcon^s1_&ref_url=https://www.thenational.scot/news/23150563.teachers-scotland-announce-major-16-day-strike-2023/
That was an initial 5-6 fold or so increase over the revenue from the previous zone.
https://eandt.theiet.org/content/articles/2022/10/tfls-income-increased-by-100m-from-the-expansion-of-londons-ulez/#:~:text=TfL's income increased by £100m from the expansion of London's Ulez,-By E&T editorial&text=The move to make the,drivers, according to official figures.
Full statement here... https://twitter.com/TomSheldrickITV/status/1596171999197671425/photo/1