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The woman who lost to a lettuce wants to comeback as Tory leader – politicalbetting.com

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  • Options
    FF43FF43 Posts: 15,749
    I would expect Israel to retaliate and I'm pretty sure the Iranians expect it as well. Their calculation I'm guessing is Israel won't do more against Iran than it does anyway, so Iran can book the psychological win of a mass missile strike on that country.
  • Options
    LeonLeon Posts: 47,352
    Nigelb said:

    Leon said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Leon said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Foxy said:

    I see Musk is making 10% of Tesla employees redundant too.

    Maybe chumming up to Putin and Trump isn't a sign of a great mind.
    PB's slowest poster and our visitors from Russia regularly used to eulogise about the brilliance of Musk.

    ***Chortle***
    Musk used to be a good leader. When he was actually paying attention to his businesses and supporting Ukraine.

    Then he went off the deep end. And like quicksand in an old film, the more he struggled, the more desperate and doomed he's become.
    From what I heard, Musk fell out with one of his children, who came out as trans. Musk blamed the school (Crossroads) for indoctrinating his child, and this became his "war on woke". Which has taken him in ever darker directions.

    What Musk should have done is simply said "I'll love you and call you by whatever pronoun you like." That being the right thing to do as a parent. Instead, he's estranged from his child. And angry with the wrong people.

    To quote the great MJ Hibbett: But to put the blame on agencies outside won't help. We’ve got to take responsibility for ourselves.
    Nonetheless Elon Musk has made a quadriplegic interact with the world, via Neuralink

    Don't succumb to Musk Derangement Syndrome, it's boring. He is a remarkable man with outsize talents - and outsize flaws to go with. But still a titanic figure
    Oh, and SpaceX and Starlink are changing the world.

    His *drive* is amazing. He gets people to work at an incredible rate.

    He - like almost every really successful person - understands the enormous impact of small cumulative changes over time. It's why he's "in" on solar and in home batteries: he understands that at some point other forms of energy generation simply won't be able to compete.

    But he's not perfect. No-one is.

    When he tweets about Pizzagate that "there's no smoke without fire", then he's demonstrating a wanton disregard for accuracy. (And when he sues MediaMatters, he's demonstrating that his belief in free speech is only skin deep.)

    And he exaggerates to the point of lying. Frequently.
    Well yes, as I say. He's a twat. Just like Churchill drinking whisky at dawn - "my mouthwash", Abe Lincoln wanting to deport all freed slaves as inferior beings, and Byron sodomising boys in Albania, yet he also wrote Don Juan and Beppo

    Musk is a mosaic of amazing achievement and real idiocy. But... amazing achievement

    "Trump Derangement Syndrome" is much more acceptable. Trump is a grifting charlatan with no great achievements at all. Trump has not done a Starlink or a Neuralink, Trump is an odious clown, and dangerous to boot
    Lincoln grew wiser with age, unlike the rest.
    AIUI there is no evidence he changed his mind on "the negro" within the USA. He came round to the idea of Total Emancipation (NOT what he wanted at first) but he always wanted them deported from the new slave-free USA. Or so I have read, I am happy to be schooled if I am wrong
  • Options
    MalmesburyMalmesbury Posts: 44,472
    A

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Foxy said:

    I see Musk is making 10% of Tesla employees redundant too.

    Maybe chumming up to Putin and Trump isn't a sign of a great mind.
    PB's slowest poster and our visitors from Russia regularly used to eulogise about the brilliance of Musk.

    ***Chortle***
    Musk used to be a good leader. When he was actually paying attention to his businesses and supporting Ukraine.

    Then he went off the deep end. And like quicksand in an old film, the more he struggled, the more desperate and doomed he's become.
    From what I heard, Musk fell out with one of his children, who came out as trans. Musk blamed the school (Crossroads) for indoctrinating his child, and this became his "war on woke". Which has taken him in ever darker directions.

    What Musk should have done is simply said "I'll love you and call you by whatever pronoun you like." That being the right thing to do as a parent. Instead, he's estranged from his child. And angry with the wrong people.

    To quote the great MJ Hibbett: But to put the blame on agencies outside won't help. We’ve got to take responsibility for ourselves.
    Nonetheless Elon Musk has made a quadriplegic interact with the world, via Neuralink

    Don't succumb to Musk Derangement Syndrome, it's boring. He is a remarkable man with outsize talents - and outsize flaws to go with. But still a titanic figure
    So was Howard Hughes.

    He's still remembered as an eccentric recluse, despite all the seriously impressive things he'd done before he went mad.
    I take your point, bit I think Musk is waaaaaaay more significant than a Howard Hughes. He's more like Tesla, his hero, or Brunel. A world changer
    Tesla ended his life penniless iirc.

    Tesla really worked at that -
    Nigelb said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Leon said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Foxy said:

    I see Musk is making 10% of Tesla employees redundant too.

    Maybe chumming up to Putin and Trump isn't a sign of a great mind.
    PB's slowest poster and our visitors from Russia regularly used to eulogise about the brilliance of Musk.

    ***Chortle***
    Musk used to be a good leader. When he was actually paying attention to his businesses and supporting Ukraine.

    Then he went off the deep end. And like quicksand in an old film, the more he struggled, the more desperate and doomed he's become.
    From what I heard, Musk fell out with one of his children, who came out as trans. Musk blamed the school (Crossroads) for indoctrinating his child, and this became his "war on woke". Which has taken him in ever darker directions.

    What Musk should have done is simply said "I'll love you and call you by whatever pronoun you like." That being the right thing to do as a parent. Instead, he's estranged from his child. And angry with the wrong people.

    To quote the great MJ Hibbett: But to put the blame on agencies outside won't help. We’ve got to take responsibility for ourselves.
    Nonetheless Elon Musk has made a quadriplegic interact with the world, via Neuralink

    Don't succumb to Musk Derangement Syndrome, it's boring. He is a remarkable man with outsize talents - and outsize flaws to go with. But still a titanic figure
    Oh, and SpaceX and Starlink are changing the world.

    His *drive* is amazing. He gets people to work at an incredible rate.

    He - like almost every really successful person - understands the enormous impact of small cumulative changes over time. It's why he's "in" on solar and in home batteries: he understands that at some point other forms of energy generation simply won't be able to compete.

    But he's not perfect. No-one is.

    When he tweets about Pizzagate that "there's no smoke without fire", then he's demonstrating a wanton disregard for accuracy. (And when he sues MediaMatters, he's demonstrating that his belief in free speech is only skin deep.)

    And he exaggerates to the point of lying. Frequently.
    The likely impact of solar is underestimated, I think. Perhaps because the Chinese have 80-90% of the manufacturing business ?

    The continuing progress in the technology, the manufacturing efficiencies, and the scale mean that it just going to keep slowly getting cheaper - and it’s already the cheapest power on the planet.

    What happens when the early adopters (ironically, Texas is among them) have a huge superabundance of power ? It’s not all that far off.
    Daniel Shipstone to the blue courtesy phone….
  • Options
    MJWMJW Posts: 1,359
    Leon said:

    Nigelb said:

    .

    Leon said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Foxy said:

    I see Musk is making 10% of Tesla employees redundant too.

    Maybe chumming up to Putin and Trump isn't a sign of a great mind.
    PB's slowest poster and our visitors from Russia regularly used to eulogise about the brilliance of Musk.

    ***Chortle***
    Musk used to be a good leader. When he was actually paying attention to his businesses and supporting Ukraine.

    Then he went off the deep end. And like quicksand in an old film, the more he struggled, the more desperate and doomed he's become.
    From what I heard, Musk fell out with one of his children, who came out as trans. Musk blamed the school (Crossroads) for indoctrinating his child, and this became his "war on woke". Which has taken him in ever darker directions.

    What Musk should have done is simply said "I'll love you and call you by whatever pronoun you like." That being the right thing to do as a parent. Instead, he's estranged from his child. And angry with the wrong people.

    To quote the great MJ Hibbett: But to put the blame on agencies outside won't help. We’ve got to take responsibility for ourselves.
    Nonetheless Elon Musk has made a quadriplegic interact with the world, via Neuralink

    Don't succumb to Musk Derangement Syndrome, it's boring. He is a remarkable man with outsize talents - and outsize flaws to go with. But still a titanic figure
    Obsessing over sunk costs ?
    People who claim Musk is somehow stupid or useless or a loser or unimportant - simply because they dislike his behaviour around TwiX and politix - are the most boringly midwitted fuckers on earth. I am trying to save what few I can on PB, and take them to the limited Titanic lifeboats of intellectual rescue

    And yes I accept Musk is a twat and makes horrendous errors, the same way Churchill was an alcoholic, Abe Lincoln was a racist, and Byron buggered 12 year old boys. Smart people often do bad stuff
    The interesting thing about Musk is why he's been incredibly successful in some areas and a complete fuckwit in others - as it says much about how tech is run, how it shapes our world, and what it gets right and wrong.

    Musk has generally been extremely successful at solving or adopting what you might call hardware problems. To take Tesla and SpaceX (PayPal he was largely ousted before it really took off) in both he saw an area where there was genuine demand (electric cars that people actually wanted to drive, cheaper space launches) and saw them as engineering problems that could be cracked if you overcame the barriers via investment, determination and marketing.

    To make a desirable electric car you had to invest a lot in clever people who wanted to work themselves to the bone to get the battery tech right. Make it cool. And whoever did that was on to a winner. SpaceX, NASA had endless things it wanted to do but didn't want to take the risk, and spaceflight has *huge* barriers to entry so there wasn't much innovation. So he took on the risk, realising if his engineers cracked it then huge contracts were available.

    Social media is different in that it's a humanities, rather than an engineering problem. It's about creating/building a community and establishing rules and functions users want that enable it to thrive. It's a complicated ecosystem rather than an engineering or coding problem to solve.

    The obvious ones with Twitter/X where he's been disastrous being free speech and blue ticks.

    On the former, annoying as previous policies could be, you can't have a free for all as it quickly descends into 4Chan and lots of people who gave the site its value leave or use it less. And eventually, rubbish goes in, rubbish comes out. If you reward disinformation, posts gravitate towards it.

    On blue ticks, Twitter's great selling point was that it allowed the hoi polloi to interact a lot with very influential people. But as it grew, it had to find a way of verifying and policing that.

    He screwed up both without thinking as he didn't understand that except perhaps from his own highly limited and odd perspective as a billionaire annoyed it didn't march to his tune as a very influential user - but importantly one among many.

    So he ends up looking like a complete dumbarse because people who have very successful in one area aren't geniuses in another. Rupert Murdoch couldn't do social media. Jeff Bezos doesn't bother. Even those who built their business on it struggle to manage the tension between monetising it and keeping its value.

    Taken generally, it should worry that you have a collection of people who have made a lot of money by being very good at building rocket engines, not realising that putting liquid hydrogen on a campfire doesn't make for a good night chatting and roasting marshmallows.

  • Options
    kle4kle4 Posts: 91,856
    I had not remembered that the Tories still won less than 200 seats 2 elections after 1997, in 2005. If they get close to 200 they will be ecstatic

    Falling short of a majority though Cameron did in 2010 it is easy to forget they were still coming back from a long long way. Even Starmer does not have quite so far to make up, though he looks set to do even better.
  • Options
    AnabobazinaAnabobazina Posts: 20,043

    ydoethur said:

    Excellent proof-reading failure:

    image

    https://x.com/joshfg/status/1779865469685477884

    BIRTHS: To Mr and Mrs George Brown, a son Thomas, a bother for Susan.
    Ok, I give up. I've read that several times and maybe it's the wine but I'm failing to spot anything wrong with it (ydoethur's post, not the Tory leaflet, which is amusing).
    Bother. Should be brother. Poor Susan.
    No. It says marred not married.
  • Options
    LeonLeon Posts: 47,352

    Leon said:

    TimS said:

    Two off topic points...

    Firstly, Wor Lass has received an email inviting her to get a Covid jab. High risk groups getting another shot.

    Secondly, I can confirm that the bottle sharing a shelf with three types of balsamic is indeed pomegranate molasses. Organic pomegranate molasses.

    But there us also Sarsons vinegar, HP Sauce, and Heinz Tomato Ketchup in there. So all is not lost.

    If it makes you feel better I have:

    Regular balsamic (organic) for use in vinaigrette

    Special balsamic my wife got me for salads

    Anciene balsamic reduction for dipped bread into
    Top tip (which I've only done once as the process really attacks your nostrils, but it worked a treat): buy a big bottle of normal cheap balsamic from Lidl, then boil it down in a pan until it's syrupy. Hey presto, posh syrupy balsamic reduction.
    Top tip: make loads of money, maybe £500k in a really good year, then just buy fancy shitloads of massively expensive balsamic vinegar
    Meh. £500k would kind of be a mediocre year to be honest.

    lol. Fair enough. £500k was my most amazing year. And not bad for a sole trader knapping artisanal sex flints. I still remember my tax bill for that year with sobbing anguish. I probably paid more tax than a large chunk of Brits pay in their entire lives

    I am happy to say that I have spent 90% of it. I had a TON OF FUN. What is money for, otherwise? Are you saving up for a solid gold wheelchair?
  • Options
    GIN1138GIN1138 Posts: 20,828
    edited April 15
    Andy_JS said:
    A good result for Lab but not exactly the complete and total Con wipe-out many people seem convinced is going to happen?
  • Options
    MalmesburyMalmesbury Posts: 44,472
    Nigelb said:

    Leon said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Leon said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Foxy said:

    I see Musk is making 10% of Tesla employees redundant too.

    Maybe chumming up to Putin and Trump isn't a sign of a great mind.
    PB's slowest poster and our visitors from Russia regularly used to eulogise about the brilliance of Musk.

    ***Chortle***
    Musk used to be a good leader. When he was actually paying attention to his businesses and supporting Ukraine.

    Then he went off the deep end. And like quicksand in an old film, the more he struggled, the more desperate and doomed he's become.
    From what I heard, Musk fell out with one of his children, who came out as trans. Musk blamed the school (Crossroads) for indoctrinating his child, and this became his "war on woke". Which has taken him in ever darker directions.

    What Musk should have done is simply said "I'll love you and call you by whatever pronoun you like." That being the right thing to do as a parent. Instead, he's estranged from his child. And angry with the wrong people.

    To quote the great MJ Hibbett: But to put the blame on agencies outside won't help. We’ve got to take responsibility for ourselves.
    Nonetheless Elon Musk has made a quadriplegic interact with the world, via Neuralink

    Don't succumb to Musk Derangement Syndrome, it's boring. He is a remarkable man with outsize talents - and outsize flaws to go with. But still a titanic figure
    Oh, and SpaceX and Starlink are changing the world.

    His *drive* is amazing. He gets people to work at an incredible rate.

    He - like almost every really successful person - understands the enormous impact of small cumulative changes over time. It's why he's "in" on solar and in home batteries: he understands that at some point other forms of energy generation simply won't be able to compete.

    But he's not perfect. No-one is.

    When he tweets about Pizzagate that "there's no smoke without fire", then he's demonstrating a wanton disregard for accuracy. (And when he sues MediaMatters, he's demonstrating that his belief in free speech is only skin deep.)

    And he exaggerates to the point of lying. Frequently.
    Well yes, as I say. He's a twat. Just like Churchill drinking whisky at dawn - "my mouthwash", Abe Lincoln wanting to deport all freed slaves as inferior beings, and Byron sodomising boys in Albania, yet he also wrote Don Juan and Beppo

    Musk is a mosaic of amazing achievement and real idiocy. But... amazing achievement

    "Trump Derangement Syndrome" is much more acceptable. Trump is a grifting charlatan with no great achievements at all. Trump has not done a Starlink or a Neuralink, Trump is an odious clown, and dangerous to boot
    Lincoln grew wiser with age, unlike the rest.
    Churchill certainly changed his views over his life.

    Lincoln did as well - in the case of the suggested colonisation idea, he dropped it. Largely because when he met the leaders of the black community in the US, they were against it.

    Lincoln was assassinated for advocating black suffrage as a good idea.
  • Options
    StonehengeStonehenge Posts: 80
    MJW said:

    Leon said:

    Nigelb said:

    .

    Leon said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Foxy said:

    I see Musk is making 10% of Tesla employees redundant too.

    Maybe chumming up to Putin and Trump isn't a sign of a great mind.
    PB's slowest poster and our visitors from Russia regularly used to eulogise about the brilliance of Musk.

    ***Chortle***
    Musk used to be a good leader. When he was actually paying attention to his businesses and supporting Ukraine.

    Then he went off the deep end. And like quicksand in an old film, the more he struggled, the more desperate and doomed he's become.
    From what I heard, Musk fell out with one of his children, who came out as trans. Musk blamed the school (Crossroads) for indoctrinating his child, and this became his "war on woke". Which has taken him in ever darker directions.

    What Musk should have done is simply said "I'll love you and call you by whatever pronoun you like." That being the right thing to do as a parent. Instead, he's estranged from his child. And angry with the wrong people.

    To quote the great MJ Hibbett: But to put the blame on agencies outside won't help. We’ve got to take responsibility for ourselves.
    Nonetheless Elon Musk has made a quadriplegic interact with the world, via Neuralink

    Don't succumb to Musk Derangement Syndrome, it's boring. He is a remarkable man with outsize talents - and outsize flaws to go with. But still a titanic figure
    Obsessing over sunk costs ?
    People who claim Musk is somehow stupid or useless or a loser or unimportant - simply because they dislike his behaviour around TwiX and politix - are the most boringly midwitted fuckers on earth. I am trying to save what few I can on PB, and take them to the limited Titanic lifeboats of intellectual rescue

    And yes I accept Musk is a twat and makes horrendous errors, the same way Churchill was an alcoholic, Abe Lincoln was a racist, and Byron buggered 12 year old boys. Smart people often do bad stuff
    The interesting thing about Musk is why he's been incredibly successful in some areas and a complete fuckwit in others - as it says much about how tech is run, how it shapes our world, and what it gets right and wrong.

    Musk has generally been extremely successful at solving or adopting what you might call hardware problems. To take Tesla and SpaceX (PayPal he was largely ousted before it really took off) in both he saw an area where there was genuine demand (electric cars that people actually wanted to drive, cheaper space launches) and saw them as engineering problems that could be cracked if you overcame the barriers via investment, determination and marketing.

    To make a desirable electric car you had to invest a lot in clever people who wanted to work themselves to the bone to get the battery tech right. Make it cool. And whoever did that was on to a winner. SpaceX, NASA had endless things it wanted to do but didn't want to take the risk, and spaceflight has *huge* barriers to entry so there wasn't much innovation. So he took on the risk, realising if his engineers cracked it then huge contracts were available.

    Social media is different in that it's a humanities, rather than an engineering problem. It's about creating/building a community and establishing rules and functions users want that enable it to thrive. It's a complicated ecosystem rather than an engineering or coding problem to solve.

    The obvious ones with Twitter/X where he's been disastrous being free speech and blue ticks.

    On the former, annoying as previous policies could be, you can't have a free for all as it quickly descends into 4Chan and lots of people who gave the site its value leave or use it less. And eventually, rubbish goes in, rubbish comes out. If you reward disinformation, posts gravitate towards it.

    On blue ticks, Twitter's great selling point was that it allowed the hoi polloi to interact a lot with very influential people. But as it grew, it had to find a way of verifying and policing that.

    He screwed up both without thinking as he didn't understand that except perhaps from his own highly limited and odd perspective as a billionaire annoyed it didn't march to his tune as a very influential user - but importantly one among many.

    So he ends up looking like a complete dumbarse because people who have very successful in one area aren't geniuses in another. Rupert Murdoch couldn't do social media. Jeff Bezos doesn't bother. Even those who built their business on it struggle to manage the tension between monetising it and keeping its value.

    Taken generally, it should worry that you have a collection of people who have made a lot of money by being very good at building rocket engines, not realising that putting liquid hydrogen on a campfire doesn't make for a good night chatting and roasting marshmallows.

    Often tech people have a very narrow sort of intelligence. Its obvious in guys like zuckerberg.
  • Options
    kle4kle4 Posts: 91,856
    MJW said:

    Leon said:

    Nigelb said:

    .

    Leon said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Foxy said:

    I see Musk is making 10% of Tesla employees redundant too.

    Maybe chumming up to Putin and Trump isn't a sign of a great mind.
    PB's slowest poster and our visitors from Russia regularly used to eulogise about the brilliance of Musk.

    ***Chortle***
    Musk used to be a good leader. When he was actually paying attention to his businesses and supporting Ukraine.

    Then he went off the deep end. And like quicksand in an old film, the more he struggled, the more desperate and doomed he's become.
    From what I heard, Musk fell out with one of his children, who came out as trans. Musk blamed the school (Crossroads) for indoctrinating his child, and this became his "war on woke". Which has taken him in ever darker directions.

    What Musk should have done is simply said "I'll love you and call you by whatever pronoun you like." That being the right thing to do as a parent. Instead, he's estranged from his child. And angry with the wrong people.

    To quote the great MJ Hibbett: But to put the blame on agencies outside won't help. We’ve got to take responsibility for ourselves.
    Nonetheless Elon Musk has made a quadriplegic interact with the world, via Neuralink

    Don't succumb to Musk Derangement Syndrome, it's boring. He is a remarkable man with outsize talents - and outsize flaws to go with. But still a titanic figure
    Obsessing over sunk costs ?
    People who claim Musk is somehow stupid or useless or a loser or unimportant - simply because they dislike his behaviour around TwiX and politix - are the most boringly midwitted fuckers on earth. I am trying to save what few I can on PB, and take them to the limited Titanic lifeboats of intellectual rescue

    And yes I accept Musk is a twat and makes horrendous errors, the same way Churchill was an alcoholic, Abe Lincoln was a racist, and Byron buggered 12 year old boys. Smart people often do bad stuff
    The interesting thing about Musk is why he's been incredibly successful in some areas and a complete fuckwit in others - as it says much about how tech is run, how it shapes our world, and what it gets right and wrong.

    Musk has generally been extremely successful at solving or adopting what you might call hardware problems. To take Tesla and SpaceX (PayPal he was largely ousted before it really took off) in both he saw an area where there was genuine demand (electric cars that people actually wanted to drive, cheaper space launches) and saw them as engineering problems that could be cracked if you overcame the barriers via investment, determination and marketing.

    To make a desirable electric car you had to invest a lot in clever people who wanted to work themselves to the bone to get the battery tech right. Make it cool. And whoever did that was on to a winner. SpaceX, NASA had endless things it wanted to do but didn't want to take the risk, and spaceflight has *huge* barriers to entry so there wasn't much innovation. So he took on the risk, realising if his engineers cracked it then huge contracts were available.

    Social media is different in that it's a humanities, rather than an engineering problem. It's about creating/building a community and establishing rules and functions users want that enable it to thrive. It's a complicated ecosystem rather than an engineering or coding problem to solve.

    The obvious ones with Twitter/X where he's been disastrous being free speech and blue ticks.

    On the former, annoying as previous policies could be, you can't have a free for all as it quickly descends into 4Chan and lots of people who gave the site its value leave or use it less. And eventually, rubbish goes in, rubbish comes out. If you reward disinformation, posts gravitate towards it.

    On blue ticks, Twitter's great selling point was that it allowed the hoi polloi to interact a lot with very influential people. But as it grew, it had to find a way of verifying and policing that.

    He screwed up both without thinking as he didn't understand that except perhaps from his own highly limited and odd perspective as a billionaire annoyed it didn't march to his tune as a very influential user - but importantly one among many.

    So he ends up looking like a complete dumbarse because people who have very successful in one area aren't geniuses in another. Rupert Murdoch couldn't do social media. Jeff Bezos doesn't bother. Even those who built their business on it struggle to manage the tension between monetising it and keeping its value.

    Taken generally, it should worry that you have a collection of people who have made a lot of money by being very good at building rocket engines, not realising that putting liquid hydrogen on a campfire doesn't make for a good night chatting and roasting marshmallows.

    I read a biography of Bezos and Amazon recently. Surprise surprise, it sounds like he's a complete arsehole to be around, but as a man of business he obviously knows his stuff (not that all his ideas paid off). I genuinely have no idea if Rupert Murdoch, despite also being a ruthless businessman, is actually a charming guy in person or not.
  • Options
    kle4kle4 Posts: 91,856

    MJW said:

    Leon said:

    Nigelb said:

    .

    Leon said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Foxy said:

    I see Musk is making 10% of Tesla employees redundant too.

    Maybe chumming up to Putin and Trump isn't a sign of a great mind.
    PB's slowest poster and our visitors from Russia regularly used to eulogise about the brilliance of Musk.

    ***Chortle***
    Musk used to be a good leader. When he was actually paying attention to his businesses and supporting Ukraine.

    Then he went off the deep end. And like quicksand in an old film, the more he struggled, the more desperate and doomed he's become.
    From what I heard, Musk fell out with one of his children, who came out as trans. Musk blamed the school (Crossroads) for indoctrinating his child, and this became his "war on woke". Which has taken him in ever darker directions.

    What Musk should have done is simply said "I'll love you and call you by whatever pronoun you like." That being the right thing to do as a parent. Instead, he's estranged from his child. And angry with the wrong people.

    To quote the great MJ Hibbett: But to put the blame on agencies outside won't help. We’ve got to take responsibility for ourselves.
    Nonetheless Elon Musk has made a quadriplegic interact with the world, via Neuralink

    Don't succumb to Musk Derangement Syndrome, it's boring. He is a remarkable man with outsize talents - and outsize flaws to go with. But still a titanic figure
    Obsessing over sunk costs ?
    People who claim Musk is somehow stupid or useless or a loser or unimportant - simply because they dislike his behaviour around TwiX and politix - are the most boringly midwitted fuckers on earth. I am trying to save what few I can on PB, and take them to the limited Titanic lifeboats of intellectual rescue

    And yes I accept Musk is a twat and makes horrendous errors, the same way Churchill was an alcoholic, Abe Lincoln was a racist, and Byron buggered 12 year old boys. Smart people often do bad stuff
    The interesting thing about Musk is why he's been incredibly successful in some areas and a complete fuckwit in others - as it says much about how tech is run, how it shapes our world, and what it gets right and wrong.

    Musk has generally been extremely successful at solving or adopting what you might call hardware problems. To take Tesla and SpaceX (PayPal he was largely ousted before it really took off) in both he saw an area where there was genuine demand (electric cars that people actually wanted to drive, cheaper space launches) and saw them as engineering problems that could be cracked if you overcame the barriers via investment, determination and marketing.

    To make a desirable electric car you had to invest a lot in clever people who wanted to work themselves to the bone to get the battery tech right. Make it cool. And whoever did that was on to a winner. SpaceX, NASA had endless things it wanted to do but didn't want to take the risk, and spaceflight has *huge* barriers to entry so there wasn't much innovation. So he took on the risk, realising if his engineers cracked it then huge contracts were available.

    Social media is different in that it's a humanities, rather than an engineering problem. It's about creating/building a community and establishing rules and functions users want that enable it to thrive. It's a complicated ecosystem rather than an engineering or coding problem to solve.

    The obvious ones with Twitter/X where he's been disastrous being free speech and blue ticks.

    On the former, annoying as previous policies could be, you can't have a free for all as it quickly descends into 4Chan and lots of people who gave the site its value leave or use it less. And eventually, rubbish goes in, rubbish comes out. If you reward disinformation, posts gravitate towards it.

    On blue ticks, Twitter's great selling point was that it allowed the hoi polloi to interact a lot with very influential people. But as it grew, it had to find a way of verifying and policing that.

    He screwed up both without thinking as he didn't understand that except perhaps from his own highly limited and odd perspective as a billionaire annoyed it didn't march to his tune as a very influential user - but importantly one among many.

    So he ends up looking like a complete dumbarse because people who have very successful in one area aren't geniuses in another. Rupert Murdoch couldn't do social media. Jeff Bezos doesn't bother. Even those who built their business on it struggle to manage the tension between monetising it and keeping its value.

    Taken generally, it should worry that you have a collection of people who have made a lot of money by being very good at building rocket engines, not realising that putting liquid hydrogen on a campfire doesn't make for a good night chatting and roasting marshmallows.

    Often tech people have a very narrow sort of intelligence. Its obvious in guys like zuckerberg.
    I don't doubt that is true to an extent, but part of me does wonder if it is also sometimes used as an excuse for the level it is trotted out.
  • Options
    StillWatersStillWaters Posts: 7,066

    ydoethur said:

    Excellent proof-reading failure:

    image

    https://x.com/joshfg/status/1779865469685477884

    BIRTHS: To Mr and Mrs George Brown, a son Thomas, a bother for Susan.
    Ok, I give up. I've read that several times and maybe it's the wine but I'm failing to spot anything wrong with it (ydoethur's post, not the Tory leaflet, which is amusing).
    Bother. Should be brother. Poor Susan.
    No. It says marred not married.
    @Benpointer ’s question was on @ydoethur ’s follow up post not the original picture

  • Options
    LeonLeon Posts: 47,352
    kle4 said:

    MJW said:

    Leon said:

    Nigelb said:

    .

    Leon said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Foxy said:

    I see Musk is making 10% of Tesla employees redundant too.

    Maybe chumming up to Putin and Trump isn't a sign of a great mind.
    PB's slowest poster and our visitors from Russia regularly used to eulogise about the brilliance of Musk.

    ***Chortle***
    Musk used to be a good leader. When he was actually paying attention to his businesses and supporting Ukraine.

    Then he went off the deep end. And like quicksand in an old film, the more he struggled, the more desperate and doomed he's become.
    From what I heard, Musk fell out with one of his children, who came out as trans. Musk blamed the school (Crossroads) for indoctrinating his child, and this became his "war on woke". Which has taken him in ever darker directions.

    What Musk should have done is simply said "I'll love you and call you by whatever pronoun you like." That being the right thing to do as a parent. Instead, he's estranged from his child. And angry with the wrong people.

    To quote the great MJ Hibbett: But to put the blame on agencies outside won't help. We’ve got to take responsibility for ourselves.
    Nonetheless Elon Musk has made a quadriplegic interact with the world, via Neuralink

    Don't succumb to Musk Derangement Syndrome, it's boring. He is a remarkable man with outsize talents - and outsize flaws to go with. But still a titanic figure
    Obsessing over sunk costs ?
    People who claim Musk is somehow stupid or useless or a loser or unimportant - simply because they dislike his behaviour around TwiX and politix - are the most boringly midwitted fuckers on earth. I am trying to save what few I can on PB, and take them to the limited Titanic lifeboats of intellectual rescue

    And yes I accept Musk is a twat and makes horrendous errors, the same way Churchill was an alcoholic, Abe Lincoln was a racist, and Byron buggered 12 year old boys. Smart people often do bad stuff
    The interesting thing about Musk is why he's been incredibly successful in some areas and a complete fuckwit in others - as it says much about how tech is run, how it shapes our world, and what it gets right and wrong.

    Musk has generally been extremely successful at solving or adopting what you might call hardware problems. To take Tesla and SpaceX (PayPal he was largely ousted before it really took off) in both he saw an area where there was genuine demand (electric cars that people actually wanted to drive, cheaper space launches) and saw them as engineering problems that could be cracked if you overcame the barriers via investment, determination and marketing.

    To make a desirable electric car you had to invest a lot in clever people who wanted to work themselves to the bone to get the battery tech right. Make it cool. And whoever did that was on to a winner. SpaceX, NASA had endless things it wanted to do but didn't want to take the risk, and spaceflight has *huge* barriers to entry so there wasn't much innovation. So he took on the risk, realising if his engineers cracked it then huge contracts were available.

    Social media is different in that it's a humanities, rather than an engineering problem. It's about creating/building a community and establishing rules and functions users want that enable it to thrive. It's a complicated ecosystem rather than an engineering or coding problem to solve.

    The obvious ones with Twitter/X where he's been disastrous being free speech and blue ticks.

    On the former, annoying as previous policies could be, you can't have a free for all as it quickly descends into 4Chan and lots of people who gave the site its value leave or use it less. And eventually, rubbish goes in, rubbish comes out. If you reward disinformation, posts gravitate towards it.

    On blue ticks, Twitter's great selling point was that it allowed the hoi polloi to interact a lot with very influential people. But as it grew, it had to find a way of verifying and policing that.

    He screwed up both without thinking as he didn't understand that except perhaps from his own highly limited and odd perspective as a billionaire annoyed it didn't march to his tune as a very influential user - but importantly one among many.

    So he ends up looking like a complete dumbarse because people who have very successful in one area aren't geniuses in another. Rupert Murdoch couldn't do social media. Jeff Bezos doesn't bother. Even those who built their business on it struggle to manage the tension between monetising it and keeping its value.

    Taken generally, it should worry that you have a collection of people who have made a lot of money by being very good at building rocket engines, not realising that putting liquid hydrogen on a campfire doesn't make for a good night chatting and roasting marshmallows.

    Often tech people have a very narrow sort of intelligence. Its obvious in guys like zuckerberg.
    I don't doubt that is true to an extent, but part of me does wonder if it is also sometimes used as an excuse for the level it is trotted out.
    Musk has admitted to Asperger's
  • Options
    StillWatersStillWaters Posts: 7,066
    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    TimS said:

    Two off topic points...

    Firstly, Wor Lass has received an email inviting her to get a Covid jab. High risk groups getting another shot.

    Secondly, I can confirm that the bottle sharing a shelf with three types of balsamic is indeed pomegranate molasses. Organic pomegranate molasses.

    But there us also Sarsons vinegar, HP Sauce, and Heinz Tomato Ketchup in there. So all is not lost.

    If it makes you feel better I have:

    Regular balsamic (organic) for use in vinaigrette

    Special balsamic my wife got me for salads

    Anciene balsamic reduction for dipped bread into
    Top tip (which I've only done once as the process really attacks your nostrils, but it worked a treat): buy a big bottle of normal cheap balsamic from Lidl, then boil it down in a pan until it's syrupy. Hey presto, posh syrupy balsamic reduction.
    Top tip: make loads of money, maybe £500k in a really good year, then just buy fancy shitloads of massively expensive balsamic vinegar
    Meh. £500k would kind of be a mediocre year to be honest.

    lol. Fair enough. £500k was my most amazing year. And not bad for a sole trader knapping artisanal sex flints. I still remember my tax bill for that year with sobbing anguish. I probably paid more tax than a large chunk of Brits pay in their entire lives

    I am happy to say that I have spent 90% of it. I had a TON OF FUN. What is money for,
    otherwise? Are you saving up for a solid gold wheelchair?
    Haven’t really figured that out. I hang out with the people and they give me money.
  • Options
    AnabobazinaAnabobazina Posts: 20,043

    ydoethur said:

    Excellent proof-reading failure:

    image

    https://x.com/joshfg/status/1779865469685477884

    BIRTHS: To Mr and Mrs George Brown, a son Thomas, a bother for Susan.
    Ok, I give up. I've read that several times and maybe it's the wine but I'm failing to spot anything wrong with it (ydoethur's post, not the Tory leaflet, which is amusing).
    Bother. Should be brother. Poor Susan.
    No. It says marred not married.
    @Benpointer ’s question was on @ydoethur ’s follow up post not the original picture

    Oh I see, apologies.
  • Options
    kjhkjh Posts: 10,654
    edited April 15

    kjh said:

    ...

    kjh said:

    ...

    She has gone full on Trumpite saying Trump must win in November. Other Tories saying Trump must not win and some saying nothing to do with us guv.

    The Tories are really idiotic if they think November is a good time to hold an election here. The main attention will go to Trump. The Tories are deeply and irreconcilably divided on Trump, so they will inevitably look like the divided party they are. And the Tories need attention domestically to somehow catch up in the polling.

    As they are indeed idiotic expect a November election.

    Trump is the Republican candidate, and the Republicans are the right of centre party. Furthermore, it is true that Biden has been one of the least supportive leaders to the UK, and that Trump has always been well-disposed toward the UK and has friends, business interests, and familial ties here. It seems a mark of polite society that we should all clutch our pearls at the very thought of him gaining the White House again - well that can fuck off.
    Not a question of politeness, more an indication of either a disdain for democratic norms or a lack of intelligence, or both, they often go together.
    Democratic norms dictate to me that we should accept whoever the Americans choose, not leave a puddle on the floor about how awful it all is.

    Furthermore Liz Truss is absolutely right to bring the argument back to who has been more supportive to the UK - that's the only dog we have in this fight, and something too many of us are utterly blind to, either because we feel the national interest is a dirty concept, or because we're the sort of thicko who defaces the cenotaph because an American policman killed someone.
    Bollocks. Should we accept whomever the Russians choose? Should we have accepted whom the 1930s Germans chose?

    FFS, the man is a genuine fascist, we have every right to condemn the vile piece of shite. As for him being "more supportive to the UK" that is highly arguable, and even if it were true it does not make him remotely appropriate.

    Oh, and I forgot to add that to his very long list of puke inducing vileness we should add that he sucks up to Putin. For what reasons, we can only guess.
    Yes, and yes - if they're elected legitimately.
    I guess it depends on your definition of "accept". It seems that you and the lettuce do not "accept" Joe Biden. Although perhaps as an apologist for the orange Mussolini maybe you buy the Big Lie that Biden isn't legit?

    Personally I do not and never will "accept" fascists, whether they have hoodwinked their electorates or not. I do not "accept" racists. I do not "accept" rapists. If politicians this side of the Atlantic wish to accept such scumbags then they are, in effect, endorsing their vile behaviour, and are low-life human beings.
    It has not been proven in a court of law that Trump raped anyone, and the circumstances detailed in the allegation seem exceedingly improbable.
    So balance of probability = exceedingly improbable?

    I must not have been concentrating in my maths lectures.
    No, I came up with 'exceedingly improbable' by actually reading the allegations and using my own brain to see if I believed them to be probable or not. Thinking - it may have been a while but I'm sure you can remember doing it.
    Well that is not logical is it? You keep insisting he isn't guilty of rape because no criminal court has found him guilty beyond reasonable doubt, even though no court has been asked to so (beyond reasonable doubt)

    So you are happy to use the court as your defining point of judgement here.

    Yet when it comes to a court deciding on balance of probability he did you then ignore a court as being the defining point of judgement and use your own judgement.

    You can't have it both ways. Pick one or the other. Don't quote that courts haven't found him 'actually' guilty if you refuse to accept that he was found 'probably' guilty by a court.

    Honestly.
    All lovely, but you seem to be responding to something I didn't write. I introduced two separate concepts, hence the use of the non-subordinating conjunction. Donald Trump has not been found guilty of rape AND the allegations against him don't seem probable, not SO the allegations against him don't seem probable or THEREFORE the allegations against him don't seem probable.

    Honestly.
    This is utter gibberish and a desperate attempt to dig yourself out of a hole. Two separate concepts my arse.

    This is what you actually said:

    "It has not been proven in a court of law that Trump raped anyone, and the circumstances detailed in the allegation seem exceedingly improbable."

    The first part of the sentence is true. The second is your honest opinion. So far so good.

    But what is the point in writing the first part of the sentence if you didn't mean something by it? Why write it? Of course you meant something by it. Otherwise you might well have written 'Bees have black and yellow stripes'. True but a pointless statement in the context.

    So let's stop this bollocks of the two being separate. You stated the first for a reason and it is related to the second, otherwise why state random facts.

    So he is not guilty of rape because a court has not found him guilty of rape. That is you are relying on a court (although one has never sat). Fair enough.

    You then decided to abandon completely your reliance on what a court decides in the next part of the sentence because balance of probability does not equal exceedingly improbable.

    Yes honestly is the correct exclamation because what you wrote was in fact utter bollocks.
  • Options
    kle4kle4 Posts: 91,856
    edited April 15
    Leon said:

    kle4 said:

    MJW said:

    Leon said:

    Nigelb said:

    .

    Leon said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Foxy said:

    I see Musk is making 10% of Tesla employees redundant too.

    Maybe chumming up to Putin and Trump isn't a sign of a great mind.
    PB's slowest poster and our visitors from Russia regularly used to eulogise about the brilliance of Musk.

    ***Chortle***
    Musk used to be a good leader. When he was actually paying attention to his businesses and supporting Ukraine.

    Then he went off the deep end. And like quicksand in an old film, the more he struggled, the more desperate and doomed he's become.
    From what I heard, Musk fell out with one of his children, who came out as trans. Musk blamed the school (Crossroads) for indoctrinating his child, and this became his "war on woke". Which has taken him in ever darker directions.

    What Musk should have done is simply said "I'll love you and call you by whatever pronoun you like." That being the right thing to do as a parent. Instead, he's estranged from his child. And angry with the wrong people.

    To quote the great MJ Hibbett: But to put the blame on agencies outside won't help. We’ve got to take responsibility for ourselves.
    Nonetheless Elon Musk has made a quadriplegic interact with the world, via Neuralink

    Don't succumb to Musk Derangement Syndrome, it's boring. He is a remarkable man with outsize talents - and outsize flaws to go with. But still a titanic figure
    Obsessing over sunk costs ?
    People who claim Musk is somehow stupid or useless or a loser or unimportant - simply because they dislike his behaviour around TwiX and politix - are the most boringly midwitted fuckers on earth. I am trying to save what few I can on PB, and take them to the limited Titanic lifeboats of intellectual rescue

    And yes I accept Musk is a twat and makes horrendous errors, the same way Churchill was an alcoholic, Abe Lincoln was a racist, and Byron buggered 12 year old boys. Smart people often do bad stuff
    The interesting thing about Musk is why he's been incredibly successful in some areas and a complete fuckwit in others - as it says much about how tech is run, how it shapes our world, and what it gets right and wrong.

    Musk has generally been extremely successful at solving or adopting what you might call hardware problems. To take Tesla and SpaceX (PayPal he was largely ousted before it really took off) in both he saw an area where there was genuine demand (electric cars that people actually wanted to drive, cheaper space launches) and saw them as engineering problems that could be cracked if you overcame the barriers via investment, determination and marketing.

    To make a desirable electric car you had to invest a lot in clever people who wanted to work themselves to the bone to get the battery tech right. Make it cool. And whoever did that was on to a winner. SpaceX, NASA had endless things it wanted to do but didn't want to take the risk, and spaceflight has *huge* barriers to entry so there wasn't much innovation. So he took on the risk, realising if his engineers cracked it then huge contracts were available.

    Social media is different in that it's a humanities, rather than an engineering problem. It's about creating/building a community and establishing rules and functions users want that enable it to thrive. It's a complicated ecosystem rather than an engineering or coding problem to solve.

    The obvious ones with Twitter/X where he's been disastrous being free speech and blue ticks.

    On the former, annoying as previous policies could be, you can't have a free for all as it quickly descends into 4Chan and lots of people who gave the site its value leave or use it less. And eventually, rubbish goes in, rubbish comes out. If you reward disinformation, posts gravitate towards it.

    On blue ticks, Twitter's great selling point was that it allowed the hoi polloi to interact a lot with very influential people. But as it grew, it had to find a way of verifying and policing that.

    He screwed up both without thinking as he didn't understand that except perhaps from his own highly limited and odd perspective as a billionaire annoyed it didn't march to his tune as a very influential user - but importantly one among many.

    So he ends up looking like a complete dumbarse because people who have very successful in one area aren't geniuses in another. Rupert Murdoch couldn't do social media. Jeff Bezos doesn't bother. Even those who built their business on it struggle to manage the tension between monetising it and keeping its value.

    Taken generally, it should worry that you have a collection of people who have made a lot of money by being very good at building rocket engines, not realising that putting liquid hydrogen on a campfire doesn't make for a good night chatting and roasting marshmallows.

    Often tech people have a very narrow sort of intelligence. Its obvious in guys like zuckerberg.
    I don't doubt that is true to an extent, but part of me does wonder if it is also sometimes used as an excuse for the level it is trotted out.
    Musk has admitted to Asperger's
    I have no reason to doubt those people who state a specific situation or condition, but I do think a general awkwardness of people in tech being ascribed to a certain narrowness of intellect is a bit of a crutch. Like assuming all nerds are shy just because many are. It's even a bit patronising toward them as a whole, in assuming they probably have some kind of condition or narrowness.
  • Options
    FlatlanderFlatlander Posts: 3,896
    edited April 15
    kle4 said:

    MJW said:

    Leon said:

    Nigelb said:

    .

    Leon said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Foxy said:

    I see Musk is making 10% of Tesla employees redundant too.

    Maybe chumming up to Putin and Trump isn't a sign of a great mind.
    PB's slowest poster and our visitors from Russia regularly used to eulogise about the brilliance of Musk.

    ***Chortle***
    Musk used to be a good leader. When he was actually paying attention to his businesses and supporting Ukraine.

    Then he went off the deep end. And like quicksand in an old film, the more he struggled, the more desperate and doomed he's become.
    From what I heard, Musk fell out with one of his children, who came out as trans. Musk blamed the school (Crossroads) for indoctrinating his child, and this became his "war on woke". Which has taken him in ever darker directions.

    What Musk should have done is simply said "I'll love you and call you by whatever pronoun you like." That being the right thing to do as a parent. Instead, he's estranged from his child. And angry with the wrong people.

    To quote the great MJ Hibbett: But to put the blame on agencies outside won't help. We’ve got to take responsibility for ourselves.
    Nonetheless Elon Musk has made a quadriplegic interact with the world, via Neuralink

    Don't succumb to Musk Derangement Syndrome, it's boring. He is a remarkable man with outsize talents - and outsize flaws to go with. But still a titanic figure
    Obsessing over sunk costs ?
    People who claim Musk is somehow stupid or useless or a loser or unimportant - simply because they dislike his behaviour around TwiX and politix - are the most boringly midwitted fuckers on earth. I am trying to save what few I can on PB, and take them to the limited Titanic lifeboats of intellectual rescue

    And yes I accept Musk is a twat and makes horrendous errors, the same way Churchill was an alcoholic, Abe Lincoln was a racist, and Byron buggered 12 year old boys. Smart people often do bad stuff
    The interesting thing about Musk is why he's been incredibly successful in some areas and a complete fuckwit in others - as it says much about how tech is run, how it shapes our world, and what it gets right and wrong.

    Musk has generally been extremely successful at solving or adopting what you might call hardware problems. To take Tesla and SpaceX (PayPal he was largely ousted before it really took off) in both he saw an area where there was genuine demand (electric cars that people actually wanted to drive, cheaper space launches) and saw them as engineering problems that could be cracked if you overcame the barriers via investment, determination and marketing.

    To make a desirable electric car you had to invest a lot in clever people who wanted to work themselves to the bone to get the battery tech right. Make it cool. And whoever did that was on to a winner. SpaceX, NASA had endless things it wanted to do but didn't want to take the risk, and spaceflight has *huge* barriers to entry so there wasn't much innovation. So he took on the risk, realising if his engineers cracked it then huge contracts were available.

    Social media is different in that it's a humanities, rather than an engineering problem. It's about creating/building a community and establishing rules and functions users want that enable it to thrive. It's a complicated ecosystem rather than an engineering or coding problem to solve.

    The obvious ones with Twitter/X where he's been disastrous being free speech and blue ticks.

    On the former, annoying as previous policies could be, you can't have a free for all as it quickly descends into 4Chan and lots of people who gave the site its value leave or use it less. And eventually, rubbish goes in, rubbish comes out. If you reward disinformation, posts gravitate towards it.

    On blue ticks, Twitter's great selling point was that it allowed the hoi polloi to interact a lot with very influential people. But as it grew, it had to find a way of verifying and policing that.

    He screwed up both without thinking as he didn't understand that except perhaps from his own highly limited and odd perspective as a billionaire annoyed it didn't march to his tune as a very influential user - but importantly one among many.

    So he ends up looking like a complete dumbarse because people who have very successful in one area aren't geniuses in another. Rupert Murdoch couldn't do social media. Jeff Bezos doesn't bother. Even those who built their business on it struggle to manage the tension between monetising it and keeping its value.

    Taken generally, it should worry that you have a collection of people who have made a lot of money by being very good at building rocket engines, not realising that putting liquid hydrogen on a campfire doesn't make for a good night chatting and roasting marshmallows.

    Often tech people have a very narrow sort of intelligence. Its obvious in guys like zuckerberg.
    I don't doubt that is true to an extent, but part of me does wonder if it is also sometimes used as an excuse for the level it is trotted out.
    Perhaps TwiX is Musk's artistic piece.

    Once everyone has left the final remaining server will be taken to the Isle of Jura and set on fire in an old bothy.
  • Options
    MJWMJW Posts: 1,359
    kle4 said:

    MJW said:

    Leon said:

    Nigelb said:

    .

    Leon said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Foxy said:

    I see Musk is making 10% of Tesla employees redundant too.

    Maybe chumming up to Putin and Trump isn't a sign of a great mind.
    PB's slowest poster and our visitors from Russia regularly used to eulogise about the brilliance of Musk.

    ***Chortle***
    Musk used to be a good leader. When he was actually paying attention to his businesses and supporting Ukraine.

    Then he went off the deep end. And like quicksand in an old film, the more he struggled, the more desperate and doomed he's become.
    From what I heard, Musk fell out with one of his children, who came out as trans. Musk blamed the school (Crossroads) for indoctrinating his child, and this became his "war on woke". Which has taken him in ever darker directions.

    What Musk should have done is simply said "I'll love you and call you by whatever pronoun you like." That being the right thing to do as a parent. Instead, he's estranged from his child. And angry with the wrong people.

    To quote the great MJ Hibbett: But to put the blame on agencies outside won't help. We’ve got to take responsibility for ourselves.
    Nonetheless Elon Musk has made a quadriplegic interact with the world, via Neuralink

    Don't succumb to Musk Derangement Syndrome, it's boring. He is a remarkable man with outsize talents - and outsize flaws to go with. But still a titanic figure
    Obsessing over sunk costs ?
    People who claim Musk is somehow stupid or useless or a loser or unimportant - simply because they dislike his behaviour around TwiX and politix - are the most boringly midwitted fuckers on earth. I am trying to save what few I can on PB, and take them to the limited Titanic lifeboats of intellectual rescue

    And yes I accept Musk is a twat and makes horrendous errors, the same way Churchill was an alcoholic, Abe Lincoln was a racist, and Byron buggered 12 year old boys. Smart people often do bad stuff
    The interesting thing about Musk is why he's been incredibly successful in some areas and a complete fuckwit in others - as it says much about how tech is run, how it shapes our world, and what it gets right and wrong.

    Musk has generally been extremely successful at solving or adopting what you might call hardware problems. To take Tesla and SpaceX (PayPal he was largely ousted before it really took off) in both he saw an area where there was genuine demand (electric cars that people actually wanted to drive, cheaper space launches) and saw them as engineering problems that could be cracked if you overcame the barriers via investment, determination and marketing.

    To make a desirable electric car you had to invest a lot in clever people who wanted to work themselves to the bone to get the battery tech right. Make it cool. And whoever did that was on to a winner. SpaceX, NASA had endless things it wanted to do but didn't want to take the risk, and spaceflight has *huge* barriers to entry so there wasn't much innovation. So he took on the risk, realising if his engineers cracked it then huge contracts were available.

    Social media is different in that it's a humanities, rather than an engineering problem. It's about creating/building a community and establishing rules and functions users want that enable it to thrive. It's a complicated ecosystem rather than an engineering or coding problem to solve.

    The obvious ones with Twitter/X where he's been disastrous being free speech and blue ticks.

    On the former, annoying as previous policies could be, you can't have a free for all as it quickly descends into 4Chan and lots of people who gave the site its value leave or use it less. And eventually, rubbish goes in, rubbish comes out. If you reward disinformation, posts gravitate towards it.

    On blue ticks, Twitter's great selling point was that it allowed the hoi polloi to interact a lot with very influential people. But as it grew, it had to find a way of verifying and policing that.

    He screwed up both without thinking as he didn't understand that except perhaps from his own highly limited and odd perspective as a billionaire annoyed it didn't march to his tune as a very influential user - but importantly one among many.

    So he ends up looking like a complete dumbarse because people who have very successful in one area aren't geniuses in another. Rupert Murdoch couldn't do social media. Jeff Bezos doesn't bother. Even those who built their business on it struggle to manage the tension between monetising it and keeping its value.

    Taken generally, it should worry that you have a collection of people who have made a lot of money by being very good at building rocket engines, not realising that putting liquid hydrogen on a campfire doesn't make for a good night chatting and roasting marshmallows.

    I read a biography of Bezos and Amazon recently. Surprise surprise, it sounds like he's a complete arsehole to be around, but as a man of business he obviously knows his stuff (not that all his ideas paid off). I genuinely have no idea if Rupert Murdoch, despite also being a ruthless businessman, is actually a charming guy in person or not.
    Yeah. I mean it was a sidepoint. That was that people who are business geniuses - whatever they are like as people - either failed (Murdoch) or don't bother (Bezos). It's arguably not the same set of problems. Which is one reason Musk makes a complete arse of himself trying while being very successful - up till now (hubris may well bring him down) - in other areas. It may just require different skills and knowledge from even related industries.
  • Options

    Amount of unfunded tax cuts in Truss's minibudget: £45bn

    Amount that the Treasury has spent so far paying the Bank of England's losses on its disastrous bond selloff: £50bn, could be further £40bn spent this year.

    Amount of PBers furiously wanking themselves off about how disastrously awful Truss was and what personality disorders she must have not to realise it and go into permanent hiding: 534

    Amount of PBers questioning the Bank's actions and the Treasury's bizarre policy of indemnifying them: 3

    You don’t understand accounting do you?

    I’m surprised that you want an inflated money supply given you appear to be a redwood fan.
    I was against the Bank printing far too much money when it didn't need to. I am now against taking an equally reckless swerve in the other direction when we are staring into the barrel of a recession.

    I'll hold my hand up to not wanting £50bn to be disappeared from the public accounts whilst our finances are so severely constrained - I'm sure you have a great reasons for thinking it's a wonderful idea.

    I think I'm in good company not understanding accounting, given that the US Government is not indemnifying the Fed's losses on its bond sell-off, and the ECB is not selling off bonds before they
    reach maturity at all. I'm sure you and Andrew Bailey know much better.
    It’s not real money.

    1) Bank decides one day it has £10. It creates this on a spreadsheet
    2) Bank buy bond from government for £10
    3) Time passes
    3) Bank sells bond to pension fund for £5
    4) Bank deletes £5 from its spreadsheet

    Net effect: money supply has gone up by £5 of invented money. Bank has a loss on its balance sheet. Government transfers £5 to government to balance the books.

    It’s a monetary action not a fiscal action. You keep muddling the two.


    It wouldn't be real money except the Bank is realising the sales and the Government is actually paying our taxes to the Bank. That's a fiscal action.


    Other Central Banks aren't doing this in the same way and are doing it as you say. The BoE is actually realising the debts though, and our taxes are actually going to paying them off.
    The money was invented in the first place.

    Sterilisation (which is what the Bank is doing) reduces the money supply. The ECB isn’t doing it because the risk of deflation.

    There no actual loss.

    We had £10. One day we decided we had £20. Now we have decided we have £15. It’s all make believe
    No, you're completely wrong. There is a real loss and our taxes are going to pay for it.

    Yes sterilisation reduces money supply, but its doing so at a real fiscal cost, paid for by taxes.
  • Options
    MalmesburyMalmesbury Posts: 44,472
    edited April 15
    MJW said:

    Leon said:

    Nigelb said:

    .

    Leon said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Foxy said:

    I see Musk is making 10% of Tesla employees redundant too.

    Maybe chumming up to Putin and Trump isn't a sign of a great mind.
    PB's slowest poster and our visitors from Russia regularly used to eulogise about the brilliance of Musk.

    ***Chortle***
    Musk used to be a good leader. When he was actually paying attention to his businesses and supporting Ukraine.

    Then he went off the deep end. And like quicksand in an old film, the more he struggled, the more desperate and doomed he's become.
    From what I heard, Musk fell out with one of his children, who came out as trans. Musk blamed the school (Crossroads) for indoctrinating his child, and this became his "war on woke". Which has taken him in ever darker directions.

    What Musk should have done is simply said "I'll love you and call you by whatever pronoun you like." That being the right thing to do as a parent. Instead, he's estranged from his child. And angry with the wrong people.

    To quote the great MJ Hibbett: But to put the blame on agencies outside won't help. We’ve got to take responsibility for ourselves.
    Nonetheless Elon Musk has made a quadriplegic interact with the world, via Neuralink

    Don't succumb to Musk Derangement Syndrome, it's boring. He is a remarkable man with outsize talents - and outsize flaws to go with. But still a titanic figure
    Obsessing over sunk costs ?
    People who claim Musk is somehow stupid or useless or a loser or unimportant - simply because they dislike his behaviour around TwiX and politix - are the most boringly midwitted fuckers on earth. I am trying to save what few I can on PB, and take them to the limited Titanic lifeboats of intellectual rescue

    And yes I accept Musk is a twat and makes horrendous errors, the same way Churchill was an alcoholic, Abe Lincoln was a racist, and Byron buggered 12 year old boys. Smart people often do bad stuff
    The interesting thing about Musk is why he's been incredibly successful in some areas and a complete fuckwit in others - as it says much about how tech is run, how it shapes our world, and what it gets right and wrong.

    Musk has generally been extremely successful at solving or adopting what you might call hardware problems. To take Tesla and SpaceX (PayPal he was largely ousted before it really took off) in both he saw an area where there was genuine demand (electric cars that people actually wanted to drive, cheaper space launches) and saw them as engineering problems that could be cracked if you overcame the barriers via investment, determination and marketing.

    To make a desirable electric car you had to invest a lot in clever people who wanted to work themselves to the bone to get the battery tech right. Make it cool. And whoever did that was on to a winner. SpaceX, NASA had endless things it wanted to do but didn't want to take the risk, and spaceflight has *huge* barriers to entry so there wasn't much innovation. So he took on the risk, realising if his engineers cracked it then huge contracts were available.

    Social media is different in that it's a humanities, rather than an engineering problem. It's about creating/building a community and establishing rules and functions users want that enable it to thrive. It's a complicated ecosystem rather than an engineering or coding problem to solve.

    The obvious ones with Twitter/X where he's been disastrous being free speech and blue ticks.

    On the former, annoying as previous policies could be, you can't have a free for all as it quickly descends into 4Chan and lots of people who gave the site its value leave or use it less. And eventually, rubbish goes in, rubbish comes out. If you reward disinformation, posts gravitate towards it.

    On blue ticks, Twitter's great selling point was that it allowed the hoi polloi to interact a lot with very influential people. But as it grew, it had to find a way of verifying and policing that.

    He screwed up both without thinking as he didn't understand that except perhaps from his own highly limited and odd perspective as a billionaire annoyed it didn't march to his tune as a very influential user - but importantly one among many.

    So he ends up looking like a complete dumbarse because people who have very successful in one area aren't geniuses in another. Rupert Murdoch couldn't do social media. Jeff Bezos doesn't bother. Even those who built their business on it struggle to manage the tension between monetising it and keeping its value.

    Taken generally, it should worry that you have a collection of people who have made a lot of money by being very good at building rocket engines, not realising that putting liquid hydrogen on a campfire doesn't make for a good night chatting and roasting marshmallows.

    The other thing that gets missed, repeatedly, is that Musk isn’t “the inventor”. But the invention isn’t the tricky bit.

    There is a persistent idea that technology works like this

    1) Genius in a lab coat goes “aha!”
    2) Everyone buys it
    3) Profit!

    In reality, there is a long, long road, taking years and billions between 1) and 2)

    It also requires deep engineering skills from a trained workforce and immense commitment from management. Big risks.

    NASA calls this Technology Readiness Levels.




    A classic example is vertically landing an orbital rocket first stage. Then reusing it easily. Lots of people drew diagrams of that. Planned it. DC-X did some test hops. A Russian science fiction film in the 50s showed it. Blue Origin tried to patent it.

    SpaceX got it from TRL-2 to TRL-9

    Why is this of interest to the UK? One thing that we are not good at is this process of turning an invention into a product.

    Consider the childish nonsense of BritVolt - not even invention there. Just getting existing technology to market. So TRL-7 to TRL-9.

    Which died because no one involved had any idea of the technology or manufacturing.
  • Options
    LeonLeon Posts: 47,352
    kle4 said:

    Leon said:

    kle4 said:

    MJW said:

    Leon said:

    Nigelb said:

    .

    Leon said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Foxy said:

    I see Musk is making 10% of Tesla employees redundant too.

    Maybe chumming up to Putin and Trump isn't a sign of a great mind.
    PB's slowest poster and our visitors from Russia regularly used to eulogise about the brilliance of Musk.

    ***Chortle***
    Musk used to be a good leader. When he was actually paying attention to his businesses and supporting Ukraine.

    Then he went off the deep end. And like quicksand in an old film, the more he struggled, the more desperate and doomed he's become.
    From what I heard, Musk fell out with one of his children, who came out as trans. Musk blamed the school (Crossroads) for indoctrinating his child, and this became his "war on woke". Which has taken him in ever darker directions.

    What Musk should have done is simply said "I'll love you and call you by whatever pronoun you like." That being the right thing to do as a parent. Instead, he's estranged from his child. And angry with the wrong people.

    To quote the great MJ Hibbett: But to put the blame on agencies outside won't help. We’ve got to take responsibility for ourselves.
    Nonetheless Elon Musk has made a quadriplegic interact with the world, via Neuralink

    Don't succumb to Musk Derangement Syndrome, it's boring. He is a remarkable man with outsize talents - and outsize flaws to go with. But still a titanic figure
    Obsessing over sunk costs ?
    People who claim Musk is somehow stupid or useless or a loser or unimportant - simply because they dislike his behaviour around TwiX and politix - are the most boringly midwitted fuckers on earth. I am trying to save what few I can on PB, and take them to the limited Titanic lifeboats of intellectual rescue

    And yes I accept Musk is a twat and makes horrendous errors, the same way Churchill was an alcoholic, Abe Lincoln was a racist, and Byron buggered 12 year old boys. Smart people often do bad stuff
    The interesting thing about Musk is why he's been incredibly successful in some areas and a complete fuckwit in others - as it says much about how tech is run, how it shapes our world, and what it gets right and wrong.

    Musk has generally been extremely successful at solving or adopting what you might call hardware problems. To take Tesla and SpaceX (PayPal he was largely ousted before it really took off) in both he saw an area where there was genuine demand (electric cars that people actually wanted to drive, cheaper space launches) and saw them as engineering problems that could be cracked if you overcame the barriers via investment, determination and marketing.

    To make a desirable electric car you had to invest a lot in clever people who wanted to work themselves to the bone to get the battery tech right. Make it cool. And whoever did that was on to a winner. SpaceX, NASA had endless things it wanted to do but didn't want to take the risk, and spaceflight has *huge* barriers to entry so there wasn't much innovation. So he took on the risk, realising if his engineers cracked it then huge contracts were available.

    Social media is different in that it's a humanities, rather than an engineering problem. It's about creating/building a community and establishing rules and functions users want that enable it to thrive. It's a complicated ecosystem rather than an engineering or coding problem to solve.

    The obvious ones with Twitter/X where he's been disastrous being free speech and blue ticks.

    On the former, annoying as previous policies could be, you can't have a free for all as it quickly descends into 4Chan and lots of people who gave the site its value leave or use it less. And eventually, rubbish goes in, rubbish comes out. If you reward disinformation, posts gravitate towards it.

    On blue ticks, Twitter's great selling point was that it allowed the hoi polloi to interact a lot with very influential people. But as it grew, it had to find a way of verifying and policing that.

    He screwed up both without thinking as he didn't understand that except perhaps from his own highly limited and odd perspective as a billionaire annoyed it didn't march to his tune as a very influential user - but importantly one among many.

    So he ends up looking like a complete dumbarse because people who have very successful in one area aren't geniuses in another. Rupert Murdoch couldn't do social media. Jeff Bezos doesn't bother. Even those who built their business on it struggle to manage the tension between monetising it and keeping its value.

    Taken generally, it should worry that you have a collection of people who have made a lot of money by being very good at building rocket engines, not realising that putting liquid hydrogen on a campfire doesn't make for a good night chatting and roasting marshmallows.

    Often tech people have a very narrow sort of intelligence. Its obvious in guys like zuckerberg.
    I don't doubt that is true to an extent, but part of me does wonder if it is also sometimes used as an excuse for the level it is trotted out.
    Musk has admitted to Asperger's
    I have no reason to doubt those people who state a specific situation or condition, but I do think a general awkwardness of people in tech being ascribed to a certain narrowness of intellect is a bit of a crutch. Like assuming all nerds are shy just because many are. It's even a bit patronising toward them as a whole, in assuming they probably have some kind of condition or narrowness.
    I have Aspie people close to me in my fam and friends, Musk is - to me - quite obviously like them. Very bright and high functioning, but sociallly awkward, conversationally hesitant, and prone to dreadful social errors and misconstruals that lead to shunning and/or conflict

    That's Musk
  • Options
    kjhkjh Posts: 10,654
    kjh said:

    kjh said:

    ...

    kjh said:

    ...

    She has gone full on Trumpite saying Trump must win in November. Other Tories saying Trump must not win and some saying nothing to do with us guv.

    The Tories are really idiotic if they think November is a good time to hold an election here. The main attention will go to Trump. The Tories are deeply and irreconcilably divided on Trump, so they will inevitably look like the divided party they are. And the Tories need attention domestically to somehow catch up in the polling.

    As they are indeed idiotic expect a November election.

    Trump is the Republican candidate, and the Republicans are the right of centre party. Furthermore, it is true that Biden has been one of the least supportive leaders to the UK, and that Trump has always been well-disposed toward the UK and has friends, business interests, and familial ties here. It seems a mark of polite society that we should all clutch our pearls at the very thought of him gaining the White House again - well that can fuck off.
    Not a question of politeness, more an indication of either a disdain for democratic norms or a lack of intelligence, or both, they often go together.
    Democratic norms dictate to me that we should accept whoever the Americans choose, not leave a puddle on the floor about how awful it all is.

    Furthermore Liz Truss is absolutely right to bring the argument back to who has been more supportive to the UK - that's the only dog we have in this fight, and something too many of us are utterly blind to, either because we feel the national interest is a dirty concept, or because we're the sort of thicko who defaces the cenotaph because an American policman killed someone.
    Bollocks. Should we accept whomever the Russians choose? Should we have accepted whom the 1930s Germans chose?

    FFS, the man is a genuine fascist, we have every right to condemn the vile piece of shite. As for him being "more supportive to the UK" that is highly arguable, and even if it were true it does not make him remotely appropriate.

    Oh, and I forgot to add that to his very long list of puke inducing vileness we should add that he sucks up to Putin. For what reasons, we can only guess.
    Yes, and yes - if they're elected legitimately.
    I guess it depends on your definition of "accept". It seems that you and the lettuce do not "accept" Joe Biden. Although perhaps as an apologist for the orange Mussolini maybe you buy the Big Lie that Biden isn't legit?

    Personally I do not and never will "accept" fascists, whether they have hoodwinked their electorates or not. I do not "accept" racists. I do not "accept" rapists. If politicians this side of the Atlantic wish to accept such scumbags then they are, in effect, endorsing their vile behaviour, and are low-life human beings.
    It has not been proven in a court of law that Trump raped anyone, and the circumstances detailed in the allegation seem exceedingly improbable.
    So balance of probability = exceedingly improbable?

    I must not have been concentrating in my maths lectures.
    No, I came up with 'exceedingly improbable' by actually reading the allegations and using my own brain to see if I believed them to be probable or not. Thinking - it may have been a while but I'm sure you can remember doing it.
    Well that is not logical is it? You keep insisting he isn't guilty of rape because no criminal court has found him guilty beyond reasonable doubt, even though no court has been asked to so (beyond reasonable doubt)

    So you are happy to use the court as your defining point of judgement here.

    Yet when it comes to a court deciding on balance of probability he did you then ignore a court as being the defining point of judgement and use your own judgement.

    You can't have it both ways. Pick one or the other. Don't quote that courts haven't found him 'actually' guilty if you refuse to accept that he was found 'probably' guilty by a court.

    Honestly.
    All lovely, but you seem to be responding to something I didn't write. I introduced two separate concepts, hence the use of the non-subordinating conjunction. Donald Trump has not been found guilty of rape AND the allegations against him don't seem probable, not SO the allegations against him don't seem probable or THEREFORE the allegations against him don't seem probable.

    Honestly.
    This is utter gibberish and a desperate attempt to dig yourself out of a hole. Two separate concepts my arse.

    This is what you actually said:

    "It has not been proven in a court of law that Trump raped anyone, and the circumstances detailed in the allegation seem exceedingly improbable."

    The first part of the sentence is true. The second is your honest opinion. So far so good.

    But what is the point in writing the first part of the sentence if you didn't mean something by it? Why write it? Of course you meant something by it. Otherwise you might well have written 'Bees have black and yellow stripes'. True but a pointless statement in the context.

    So let's stop this bollocks of the two being separate. You stated the first for a reason and it is related to the second, otherwise why state random facts.

    So he is not guilty of rape because a court has not found him guilty of rape. That is you are relying on a court (although one has never sat). Fair enough.

    You then decided to abandon completely your reliance on what a court decides in the next part of the sentence because balance of probability does not equal exceedingly improbable.

    Yes honestly is the correct exclamation because what you wrote was in fact utter bollocks.
    So just to clarify - On a balance of probability he has been found to have committed rape, however in your opinion it is exceedingly unlikely. That is fair enough opinion. BUT then why say also 'It has not been proven in a court of law that Trump raped anyone'. Again a true statement, but why say both in the same sentence if you are not linking the 2 statements.

    Say one, say the other, say both in different contexts, but to say both in the same context, in the same sentence, implies a relationship and if so the logic fails because you rely on the court in one statement and dismiss the courts in the other statement all in the same sentence.
  • Options
    kle4kle4 Posts: 91,856
    Leon said:

    kle4 said:

    Leon said:

    kle4 said:

    MJW said:

    Leon said:

    Nigelb said:

    .

    Leon said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Foxy said:

    I see Musk is making 10% of Tesla employees redundant too.

    Maybe chumming up to Putin and Trump isn't a sign of a great mind.
    PB's slowest poster and our visitors from Russia regularly used to eulogise about the brilliance of Musk.

    ***Chortle***
    Musk used to be a good leader. When he was actually paying attention to his businesses and supporting Ukraine.

    Then he went off the deep end. And like quicksand in an old film, the more he struggled, the more desperate and doomed he's become.
    From what I heard, Musk fell out with one of his children, who came out as trans. Musk blamed the school (Crossroads) for indoctrinating his child, and this became his "war on woke". Which has taken him in ever darker directions.

    What Musk should have done is simply said "I'll love you and call you by whatever pronoun you like." That being the right thing to do as a parent. Instead, he's estranged from his child. And angry with the wrong people.

    To quote the great MJ Hibbett: But to put the blame on agencies outside won't help. We’ve got to take responsibility for ourselves.
    Nonetheless Elon Musk has made a quadriplegic interact with the world, via Neuralink

    Don't succumb to Musk Derangement Syndrome, it's boring. He is a remarkable man with outsize talents - and outsize flaws to go with. But still a titanic figure
    Obsessing over sunk costs ?
    People who claim Musk is somehow stupid or useless or a loser or unimportant - simply because they dislike his behaviour around TwiX and politix - are the most boringly midwitted fuckers on earth. I am trying to save what few I can on PB, and take them to the limited Titanic lifeboats of intellectual rescue

    And yes I accept Musk is a twat and makes horrendous errors, the same way Churchill was an alcoholic, Abe Lincoln was a racist, and Byron buggered 12 year old boys. Smart people often do bad stuff
    The interesting thing about Musk is why he's been incredibly successful in some areas and a complete fuckwit in others - as it says much about how tech is run, how it shapes our world, and what it gets right and wrong.

    Musk has generally been extremely successful at solving or adopting what you might call hardware problems. To take Tesla and SpaceX (PayPal he was largely ousted before it really took off) in both he saw an area where there was genuine demand (electric cars that people actually wanted to drive, cheaper space launches) and saw them as engineering problems that could be cracked if you overcame the barriers via investment, determination and marketing.

    To make a desirable electric car you had to invest a lot in clever people who wanted to work themselves to the bone to get the battery tech right. Make it cool. And whoever did that was on to a winner. SpaceX, NASA had endless things it wanted to do but didn't want to take the risk, and spaceflight has *huge* barriers to entry so there wasn't much innovation. So he took on the risk, realising if his engineers cracked it then huge contracts were available.

    Social media is different in that it's a humanities, rather than an engineering problem. It's about creating/building a community and establishing rules and functions users want that enable it to thrive. It's a complicated ecosystem rather than an engineering or coding problem to solve.

    The obvious ones with Twitter/X where he's been disastrous being free speech and blue ticks.

    On the former, annoying as previous policies could be, you can't have a free for all as it quickly descends into 4Chan and lots of people who gave the site its value leave or use it less. And eventually, rubbish goes in, rubbish comes out. If you reward disinformation, posts gravitate towards it.

    On blue ticks, Twitter's great selling point was that it allowed the hoi polloi to interact a lot with very influential people. But as it grew, it had to find a way of verifying and policing that.

    He screwed up both without thinking as he didn't understand that except perhaps from his own highly limited and odd perspective as a billionaire annoyed it didn't march to his tune as a very influential user - but importantly one among many.

    So he ends up looking like a complete dumbarse because people who have very successful in one area aren't geniuses in another. Rupert Murdoch couldn't do social media. Jeff Bezos doesn't bother. Even those who built their business on it struggle to manage the tension between monetising it and keeping its value.

    Taken generally, it should worry that you have a collection of people who have made a lot of money by being very good at building rocket engines, not realising that putting liquid hydrogen on a campfire doesn't make for a good night chatting and roasting marshmallows.

    Often tech people have a very narrow sort of intelligence. Its obvious in guys like zuckerberg.
    I don't doubt that is true to an extent, but part of me does wonder if it is also sometimes used as an excuse for the level it is trotted out.
    Musk has admitted to Asperger's
    I have no reason to doubt those people who state a specific situation or condition, but I do think a general awkwardness of people in tech being ascribed to a certain narrowness of intellect is a bit of a crutch. Like assuming all nerds are shy just because many are. It's even a bit patronising toward them as a whole, in assuming they probably have some kind of condition or narrowness.
    I have Aspie people close to me in my fam and friends, Musk is - to me - quite obviously like them. Very bright and high functioning, but sociallly awkward, conversationally hesitant, and prone to dreadful social errors and misconstruals that lead to shunning and/or conflict

    That's Musk
    As I say I have no reason to doubt his word about himself on that.
  • Options
    MJWMJW Posts: 1,359
    kle4 said:

    Leon said:

    kle4 said:

    MJW said:

    Leon said:

    Nigelb said:

    .

    Leon said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Foxy said:

    I see Musk is making 10% of Tesla employees redundant too.

    Maybe chumming up to Putin and Trump isn't a sign of a great mind.
    PB's slowest poster and our visitors from Russia regularly used to eulogise about the brilliance of Musk.

    ***Chortle***
    Musk used to be a good leader. When he was actually paying attention to his businesses and supporting Ukraine.

    Then he went off the deep end. And like quicksand in an old film, the more he struggled, the more desperate and doomed he's become.
    From what I heard, Musk fell out with one of his children, who came out as trans. Musk blamed the school (Crossroads) for indoctrinating his child, and this became his "war on woke". Which has taken him in ever darker directions.

    What Musk should have done is simply said "I'll love you and call you by whatever pronoun you like." That being the right thing to do as a parent. Instead, he's estranged from his child. And angry with the wrong people.

    To quote the great MJ Hibbett: But to put the blame on agencies outside won't help. We’ve got to take responsibility for ourselves.
    Nonetheless Elon Musk has made a quadriplegic interact with the world, via Neuralink

    Don't succumb to Musk Derangement Syndrome, it's boring. He is a remarkable man with outsize talents - and outsize flaws to go with. But still a titanic figure
    Obsessing over sunk costs ?
    People who claim Musk is somehow stupid or useless or a loser or unimportant - simply because they dislike his behaviour around TwiX and politix - are the most boringly midwitted fuckers on earth. I am trying to save what few I can on PB, and take them to the limited Titanic lifeboats of intellectual rescue

    And yes I accept Musk is a twat and makes horrendous errors, the same way Churchill was an alcoholic, Abe Lincoln was a racist, and Byron buggered 12 year old boys. Smart people often do bad stuff
    The interesting thing about Musk is why he's been incredibly successful in some areas and a complete fuckwit in others - as it says much about how tech is run, how it shapes our world, and what it gets right and wrong.

    Musk has generally been extremely successful at solving or adopting what you might call hardware problems. To take Tesla and SpaceX (PayPal he was largely ousted before it really took off) in both he saw an area where there was genuine demand (electric cars that people actually wanted to drive, cheaper space launches) and saw them as engineering problems that could be cracked if you overcame the barriers via investment, determination and marketing.

    To make a desirable electric car you had to invest a lot in clever people who wanted to work themselves to the bone to get the battery tech right. Make it cool. And whoever did that was on to a winner. SpaceX, NASA had endless things it wanted to do but didn't want to take the risk, and spaceflight has *huge* barriers to entry so there wasn't much innovation. So he took on the risk, realising if his engineers cracked it then huge contracts were available.

    Social media is different in that it's a humanities, rather than an engineering problem. It's about creating/building a community and establishing rules and functions users want that enable it to thrive. It's a complicated ecosystem rather than an engineering or coding problem to solve.

    The obvious ones with Twitter/X where he's been disastrous being free speech and blue ticks.

    On the former, annoying as previous policies could be, you can't have a free for all as it quickly descends into 4Chan and lots of people who gave the site its value leave or use it less. And eventually, rubbish goes in, rubbish comes out. If you reward disinformation, posts gravitate towards it.

    On blue ticks, Twitter's great selling point was that it allowed the hoi polloi to interact a lot with very influential people. But as it grew, it had to find a way of verifying and policing that.

    He screwed up both without thinking as he didn't understand that except perhaps from his own highly limited and odd perspective as a billionaire annoyed it didn't march to his tune as a very influential user - but importantly one among many.

    So he ends up looking like a complete dumbarse because people who have very successful in one area aren't geniuses in another. Rupert Murdoch couldn't do social media. Jeff Bezos doesn't bother. Even those who built their business on it struggle to manage the tension between monetising it and keeping its value.

    Taken generally, it should worry that you have a collection of people who have made a lot of money by being very good at building rocket engines, not realising that putting liquid hydrogen on a campfire doesn't make for a good night chatting and roasting marshmallows.

    Often tech people have a very narrow sort of intelligence. Its obvious in guys like zuckerberg.
    I don't doubt that is true to an extent, but part of me does wonder if it is also sometimes used as an excuse for the level it is trotted out.
    Musk has admitted to Asperger's
    I have no reason to doubt those people who state a specific situation or condition, but I do think a general awkwardness of people in tech being ascribed to a certain narrowness of intellect is a bit of a crutch. Like assuming all nerds are shy just because many are. It's even a bit patronising toward them as a whole, in assuming they probably have some kind of condition or narrowness.
    There's also a broader point about companies that last in the long-term moving from the model of having a driven, inspirational but flawed founder, to becoming corporations and institutions that can self-correct and listen to new perspectives when they mess up.

    Those that don't eventually evolve tend to burn out. We may even see it with Tesla, that is now facing intense competition it seems less than sure what to do about.
  • Options
    MarqueeMarkMarqueeMark Posts: 50,125
    GIN1138 said:

    Andy_JS said:
    A good result for Lab but not exactly the complete and total Con wipe-out many people seem convinced is going to happen?
    A lot of 35/35. 36/36, 37/37 being given to Labour though. It doesn't need much of a Tory revival and incumbency for that Labour majority to start heading south quite rapidly.
  • Options
    Luckyguy1983Luckyguy1983 Posts: 25,482
    edited April 15

    Amount of unfunded tax cuts in Truss's minibudget: £45bn

    Amount that the Treasury has spent so far paying the Bank of England's losses on its disastrous bond selloff: £50bn, could be further £40bn spent this year.

    Amount of PBers furiously wanking themselves off about how disastrously awful Truss was and what personality disorders she must have not to realise it and go into permanent hiding: 534

    Amount of PBers questioning the Bank's actions and the Treasury's bizarre policy of indemnifying them: 3

    You don’t understand accounting do you?

    I’m surprised that you want an inflated money supply given you appear to be a redwood fan.
    I was against the Bank printing far too much money when it didn't need to. I am now against taking an equally reckless swerve in the other direction when we are staring into the barrel of a recession.

    I'll hold my hand up to not wanting £50bn to be disappeared from the public accounts whilst our finances are so severely constrained - I'm sure you have a great reasons for thinking it's a wonderful idea.

    I think I'm in good company not understanding accounting, given that the US Government is not indemnifying the Fed's losses on its bond sell-off, and the ECB is not selling off bonds before they
    reach maturity at all. I'm sure you and Andrew Bailey know much better.
    It’s not real money.

    1) Bank decides one day it has £10. It creates this on a spreadsheet
    2) Bank buy bond from government for £10
    3) Time passes
    3) Bank sells bond to pension fund for £5
    4) Bank deletes £5 from its spreadsheet

    Net effect: money supply has gone up by £5 of invented money. Bank has a loss on its balance sheet. Government transfers £5 to government to balance the books.

    It’s a monetary action not a fiscal action. You keep muddling the two.

    It is a monetary action with a fiscal outcome. The money transferred to make good the bank's loss is real Government spend, just as real as spending it on schools n' hospitals. Offering a soliloquy on the unreality of money is irrelevant to the current issue.

    It is also worth noting (as I've just discovered) that this isn't just a question of partial repayment at an inconvenient time as you suggest. Interest rate rises will mean the Treasury pays far more than it ever gained from the purchase of Government bonds by the Bank. This is described below:
    As the Bank of England raises its base rate, the amount paid remunerating reserves exceeds the income received from the bonds the Bank acquired when interest rates were lower. Alongside the capital losses discussed in 1.2, any shortfall in this interest flow is also covered by HMT, which indemnifies the Asset Purchase Facility, impacting the government’s fiscal position. The fiscal cost of reserve remuneration will be significant as the Bank raises interest rates, with the New Economics Foundation estimating that the central bank is set to pay banks around £150bn in interest on their risk-free reserves between 2022 and 2028. This estimate is consistent with the figures published by the OBR in November 2022.[18]
    https://committees.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/119319/html/

    The entire submission is worth a read, and it is exceedingly damning of the Bank's actions, which amount to aggressively cleaning its own house, using other peoples' money.
  • Options
    GIN1138GIN1138 Posts: 20,828
    TRUSS being all over the media today has got to be worth another 2% of the CON share at the weekend polls.
  • Options
    StillWatersStillWaters Posts: 7,066

    Amount of unfunded tax cuts in Truss's minibudget: £45bn

    Amount that the Treasury has spent so far paying the Bank of England's losses on its disastrous bond selloff: £50bn, could be further £40bn spent this year.

    Amount of PBers furiously wanking themselves off about how disastrously awful Truss was and what personality disorders she must have not to realise it and go into permanent hiding: 534

    Amount of PBers questioning the Bank's actions and the Treasury's bizarre policy of indemnifying them: 3

    You don’t understand accounting do you?

    I’m surprised that you want an inflated money supply given you appear to be a redwood fan.
    I was against the Bank printing far too much money when it didn't need to. I am now against taking an equally reckless swerve in the other direction when we are staring into the barrel of a recession.

    I'll hold my hand up to not wanting £50bn to be disappeared from the public accounts whilst our finances are so severely constrained - I'm sure you have a great reasons for thinking it's a wonderful idea.

    I think I'm in good company not understanding accounting, given that the US Government is not indemnifying the Fed's losses on its bond sell-off, and the ECB is not selling off bonds before they
    reach maturity at all. I'm sure you and Andrew Bailey know much better.
    It’s not real money.

    1) Bank decides one day it has £10. It creates this on a spreadsheet
    2) Bank buy bond from government for £10
    3) Time passes
    3) Bank sells bond to pension fund for £5
    4) Bank deletes £5 from its spreadsheet

    Net effect: money supply has gone up by £5 of invented money. Bank has a loss on its balance sheet. Government transfers £5 to government to balance the books.

    It’s a monetary action not a fiscal action. You keep muddling the two.


    It wouldn't be real money except the Bank is realising the sales and the Government is actually paying our taxes to the Bank. That's a fiscal action.


    Other Central Banks aren't doing this in the same way and are doing it as you say. The BoE is actually realising the debts though, and our taxes are actually going to paying them off.
    The money was invented in the first place.

    Sterilisation (which is what the Bank is doing) reduces the money supply. The ECB isn’t doing it because the risk of deflation.

    There no actual loss.

    We had £10. One day we decided we had £20. Now we have decided we have £15. It’s all make believe

    No, you're completely wrong. There is a real loss and our taxes are going to pay for it.

    Yes sterilisation reduces money supply, but its doing so at a real fiscal cost, paid for by taxes.
    Where did the money to inflate the money supply come from?

    Clue: the Bank bought the bonds directly from the government
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    Luckyguy1983Luckyguy1983 Posts: 25,482
    kjh said:

    kjh said:

    kjh said:

    ...

    kjh said:

    ...

    She has gone full on Trumpite saying Trump must win in November. Other Tories saying Trump must not win and some saying nothing to do with us guv.

    The Tories are really idiotic if they think November is a good time to hold an election here. The main attention will go to Trump. The Tories are deeply and irreconcilably divided on Trump, so they will inevitably look like the divided party they are. And the Tories need attention domestically to somehow catch up in the polling.

    As they are indeed idiotic expect a November election.

    Trump is the Republican candidate, and the Republicans are the right of centre party. Furthermore, it is true that Biden has been one of the least supportive leaders to the UK, and that Trump has always been well-disposed toward the UK and has friends, business interests, and familial ties here. It seems a mark of polite society that we should all clutch our pearls at the very thought of him gaining the White House again - well that can fuck off.
    Not a question of politeness, more an indication of either a disdain for democratic norms or a lack of intelligence, or both, they often go together.
    Democratic norms dictate to me that we should accept whoever the Americans choose, not leave a puddle on the floor about how awful it all is.

    Furthermore Liz Truss is absolutely right to bring the argument back to who has been more supportive to the UK - that's the only dog we have in this fight, and something too many of us are utterly blind to, either because we feel the national interest is a dirty concept, or because we're the sort of thicko who defaces the cenotaph because an American policman killed someone.
    Bollocks. Should we accept whomever the Russians choose? Should we have accepted whom the 1930s Germans chose?

    FFS, the man is a genuine fascist, we have every right to condemn the vile piece of shite. As for him being "more supportive to the UK" that is highly arguable, and even if it were true it does not make him remotely appropriate.

    Oh, and I forgot to add that to his very long list of puke inducing vileness we should add that he sucks up to Putin. For what reasons, we can only guess.
    Yes, and yes - if they're elected legitimately.
    I guess it depends on your definition of "accept". It seems that you and the lettuce do not "accept" Joe Biden. Although perhaps as an apologist for the orange Mussolini maybe you buy the Big Lie that Biden isn't legit?

    Personally I do not and never will "accept" fascists, whether they have hoodwinked their electorates or not. I do not "accept" racists. I do not "accept" rapists. If politicians this side of the Atlantic wish to accept such scumbags then they are, in effect, endorsing their vile behaviour, and are low-life human beings.
    It has not been proven in a court of law that Trump raped anyone, and the circumstances detailed in the allegation seem exceedingly improbable.
    So balance of probability = exceedingly improbable?

    I must not have been concentrating in my maths lectures.
    No, I came up with 'exceedingly improbable' by actually reading the allegations and using my own brain to see if I believed them to be probable or not. Thinking - it may have been a while but I'm sure you can remember doing it.
    Well that is not logical is it? You keep insisting he isn't guilty of rape because no criminal court has found him guilty beyond reasonable doubt, even though no court has been asked to so (beyond reasonable doubt)

    So you are happy to use the court as your defining point of judgement here.

    Yet when it comes to a court deciding on balance of probability he did you then ignore a court as being the defining point of judgement and use your own judgement.

    You can't have it both ways. Pick one or the other. Don't quote that courts haven't found him 'actually' guilty if you refuse to accept that he was found 'probably' guilty by a court.

    Honestly.
    All lovely, but you seem to be responding to something I didn't write. I introduced two separate concepts, hence the use of the non-subordinating conjunction. Donald Trump has not been found guilty of rape AND the allegations against him don't seem probable, not SO the allegations against him don't seem probable or THEREFORE the allegations against him don't seem probable.

    Honestly.
    This is utter gibberish and a desperate attempt to dig yourself out of a hole. Two separate concepts my arse.

    This is what you actually said:

    "It has not been proven in a court of law that Trump raped anyone, and the circumstances detailed in the allegation seem exceedingly improbable."

    The first part of the sentence is true. The second is your honest opinion. So far so good.

    But what is the point in writing the first part of the sentence if you didn't mean something by it? Why write it? Of course you meant something by it. Otherwise you might well have written 'Bees have black and yellow stripes'. True but a pointless statement in the context.

    So let's stop this bollocks of the two being separate. You stated the first for a reason and it is related to the second, otherwise why state random facts.

    So he is not guilty of rape because a court has not found him guilty of rape. That is you are relying on a court (although one has never sat). Fair enough.

    You then decided to abandon completely your reliance on what a court decides in the next part of the sentence because balance of probability does not equal exceedingly improbable.

    Yes honestly is the correct exclamation because what you wrote was in fact utter bollocks.
    So just to clarify - On a balance of probability he has been found to have committed rape, however in your opinion it is exceedingly unlikely. That is fair enough opinion. BUT then why say also 'It has not been proven in a court of law that Trump raped anyone'. Again a true statement, but why say both in the same sentence if you are not linking the 2 statements.

    Say one, say the other, say both in different contexts, but to say both in the same context, in the same sentence, implies a relationship and if so the logic fails because you rely on the court in one statement and dismiss the courts in the other statement all in the same sentence.
    Because both are reasons why glibly classifying Donald Trump as a rapist is not justified.
  • Options
    kyf_100kyf_100 Posts: 3,957
  • Options
    LeonLeon Posts: 47,352
    kyf_100 said:
    Fab
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    MexicanpeteMexicanpete Posts: 25,266
    ...
    Leon said:

    kle4 said:

    Leon said:

    kle4 said:

    MJW said:

    Leon said:

    Nigelb said:

    .

    Leon said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Foxy said:

    I see Musk is making 10% of Tesla employees redundant too.

    Maybe chumming up to Putin and Trump isn't a sign of a great mind.
    PB's slowest poster and our visitors from Russia regularly used to eulogise about the brilliance of Musk.

    ***Chortle***
    Musk used to be a good leader. When he was actually paying attention to his businesses and supporting Ukraine.

    Then he went off the deep end. And like quicksand in an old film, the more he struggled, the more desperate and doomed he's become.
    From what I heard, Musk fell out with one of his children, who came out as trans. Musk blamed the school (Crossroads) for indoctrinating his child, and this became his "war on woke". Which has taken him in ever darker directions.

    What Musk should have done is simply said "I'll love you and call you by whatever pronoun you like." That being the right thing to do as a parent. Instead, he's estranged from his child. And angry with the wrong people.

    To quote the great MJ Hibbett: But to put the blame on agencies outside won't help. We’ve got to take responsibility for ourselves.
    Nonetheless Elon Musk has made a quadriplegic interact with the world, via Neuralink

    Don't succumb to Musk Derangement Syndrome, it's boring. He is a remarkable man with outsize talents - and outsize flaws to go with. But still a titanic figure
    Obsessing over sunk costs ?
    People who claim Musk is somehow stupid or useless or a loser or unimportant - simply because they dislike his behaviour around TwiX and politix - are the most boringly midwitted fuckers on earth. I am trying to save what few I can on PB, and take them to the limited Titanic lifeboats of intellectual rescue

    And yes I accept Musk is a twat and makes horrendous errors, the same way Churchill was an alcoholic, Abe Lincoln was a racist, and Byron buggered 12 year old boys. Smart people often do bad stuff
    The interesting thing about Musk is why he's been incredibly successful in some areas and a complete fuckwit in others - as it says much about how tech is run, how it shapes our world, and what it gets right and wrong.

    Musk has generally been extremely successful at solving or adopting what you might call hardware problems. To take Tesla and SpaceX (PayPal he was largely ousted before it really took off) in both he saw an area where there was genuine demand (electric cars that people actually wanted to drive, cheaper space launches) and saw them as engineering problems that could be cracked if you overcame the barriers via investment, determination and marketing.

    To make a desirable electric car you had to invest a lot in clever people who wanted to work themselves to the bone to get the battery tech right. Make it cool. And whoever did that was on to a winner. SpaceX, NASA had endless things it wanted to do but didn't want to take the risk, and spaceflight has *huge* barriers to entry so there wasn't much innovation. So he took on the risk, realising if his engineers cracked it then huge contracts were available.

    Social media is different in that it's a humanities, rather than an engineering problem. It's about creating/building a community and establishing rules and functions users want that enable it to thrive. It's a complicated ecosystem rather than an engineering or coding problem to solve.

    The obvious ones with Twitter/X where he's been disastrous being free speech and blue ticks.

    On the former, annoying as previous policies could be, you can't have a free for all as it quickly descends into 4Chan and lots of people who gave the site its value leave or use it less. And eventually, rubbish goes in, rubbish comes out. If you reward disinformation, posts gravitate towards it.

    On blue ticks, Twitter's great selling point was that it allowed the hoi polloi to interact a lot with very influential people. But as it grew, it had to find a way of verifying and policing that.

    He screwed up both without thinking as he didn't understand that except perhaps from his own highly limited and odd perspective as a billionaire annoyed it didn't march to his tune as a very influential user - but importantly one among many.

    So he ends up looking like a complete dumbarse because people who have very successful in one area aren't geniuses in another. Rupert Murdoch couldn't do social media. Jeff Bezos doesn't bother. Even those who built their business on it struggle to manage the tension between monetising it and keeping its value.

    Taken generally, it should worry that you have a collection of people who have made a lot of money by being very good at building rocket engines, not realising that putting liquid hydrogen on a campfire doesn't make for a good night chatting and roasting marshmallows.

    Often tech people have a very narrow sort of intelligence. Its obvious in guys like zuckerberg.
    I don't doubt that is true to an extent, but part of me does wonder if it is also sometimes used as an excuse for the level it is trotted out.
    Musk has admitted to Asperger's
    I have no reason to doubt those people who state a specific situation or condition, but I do think a general awkwardness of people in tech being ascribed to a certain narrowness of intellect is a bit of a crutch. Like assuming all nerds are shy just because many are. It's even a bit patronising toward them as a whole, in assuming they probably have some kind of condition or narrowness.
    I have Aspie people close to me in my fam and friends, Musk is - to me - quite obviously like them. Very bright and high functioning, but sociallly awkward, conversationally hesitant, and prone to dreadful social errors and misconstruals that lead to shunning and/or conflict

    That's Musk
    Thank you Doctor. I'd foolishly misremembered your ASD expertise.

    My son is high functioning autistic, as you are aware, he is never likely to strike up an intimate relationship with Tallulah Riley or Grimes.

    Musk is not some autistic wallflower, he's a bloody Bond villain.
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    DumbosaurusDumbosaurus Posts: 147
    Donkeys said:

    Heathener said:

    Heathener said:

    Heathener said:

    Heathener said:

    Afternoon everyone. When this happened a week ago, along came two polls to mess it up but this time I think it will stand:

    As of today 5 consecutive opinion polls have been published with Labour leads of 20%+ which is the first time this sequence has occurred since last September. The steady trend away from the Conservatives continues. For Rishi ‘things can only get worser’




    This is silly. There's no huge change in the lead, and as soon as one of the pollsters who report a smaller lead than the other firms releases a new poll then your pattern will be broken.

    If Opinium, or Savanta, release a poll with a >20% lead then that would be a change and would indicate a new pattern.
    I made no great claims about it. I merely noted that it’s the first time since last September that 5 consecutive polls have given Labour a 20%+ lead.

    So I don’t think it is “silly”. Sometimes when the pattern begins to form it takes a while for everyone to see it. Put more empirically, the Conservatives dropped another 2% in March. https://www.electoralcalculus.co.uk/prediction_main.html
    I would just comment that the polls seem remarkably steady with little overall change and Labour about 20% ahead

    I see no reason for them to change before the election is called in the autumn
    Hi Big G.

    Based on recent polling, the continuing slide in their support, and the weakness of Sunak I think this Conservative slide is quite possibly going to continue.
    There will be a floor of conservative support and the key, as it always has been, is the effect Reform will have on that support in a GE
    I mean, given that you would imagine that Sunak and his wife will vote for themselves, the floor is 2 votes nationally. At which point I’ll take the charge of being silly.
    If his wife has a vote, that would be representation without taxation.
    This deserved more likes
  • Options
    AnabobazinaAnabobazina Posts: 20,043
    GIN1138 said:

    TRUSS being all over the media today has got to be worth another 2% of the CON share at the weekend polls.

    Many think the TRUSS bounce will be ten times that, nearer 20pts. Mother Mary has been ubiquitous today, spreading the word far and wide. Elizabeth, our Queen Over the Water, wants to come home. And who are we to argue?

    TRUSS. Say the word.
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    Luckyguy1983Luckyguy1983 Posts: 25,482
    edited April 15
    For those longing for even more Liz, the long interview she gives to Fraser Nelson is quite good - Nelson seems to think Liz is a bit of a nutter from his previous pronouncement, and he does challenge her strongly on the 'deep state' and a number of other things. She's Liz, but she does OK.
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fPwqsrI0L8Y
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    LeonLeon Posts: 47,352

    ...

    Leon said:

    kle4 said:

    Leon said:

    kle4 said:

    MJW said:

    Leon said:

    Nigelb said:

    .

    Leon said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Foxy said:

    I see Musk is making 10% of Tesla employees redundant too.

    Maybe chumming up to Putin and Trump isn't a sign of a great mind.
    PB's slowest poster and our visitors from Russia regularly used to eulogise about the brilliance of Musk.

    ***Chortle***
    Musk used to be a good leader. When he was actually paying attention to his businesses and supporting Ukraine.

    Then he went off the deep end. And like quicksand in an old film, the more he struggled, the more desperate and doomed he's become.
    From what I heard, Musk fell out with one of his children, who came out as trans. Musk blamed the school (Crossroads) for indoctrinating his child, and this became his "war on woke". Which has taken him in ever darker directions.

    What Musk should have done is simply said "I'll love you and call you by whatever pronoun you like." That being the right thing to do as a parent. Instead, he's estranged from his child. And angry with the wrong people.

    To quote the great MJ Hibbett: But to put the blame on agencies outside won't help. We’ve got to take responsibility for ourselves.
    Nonetheless Elon Musk has made a quadriplegic interact with the world, via Neuralink

    Don't succumb to Musk Derangement Syndrome, it's boring. He is a remarkable man with outsize talents - and outsize flaws to go with. But still a titanic figure
    Obsessing over sunk costs ?
    People who claim Musk is somehow stupid or useless or a loser or unimportant - simply because they dislike his behaviour around TwiX and politix - are the most boringly midwitted fuckers on earth. I am trying to save what few I can on PB, and take them to the limited Titanic lifeboats of intellectual rescue

    And yes I accept Musk is a twat and makes horrendous errors, the same way Churchill was an alcoholic, Abe Lincoln was a racist, and Byron buggered 12 year old boys. Smart people often do bad stuff
    The interesting thing about Musk is why he's been incredibly successful in some areas and a complete fuckwit in others - as it says much about how tech is run, how it shapes our world, and what it gets right and wrong.

    Musk has generally been extremely successful at solving or adopting what you might call hardware problems. To take Tesla and SpaceX (PayPal he was largely ousted before it really took off) in both he saw an area where there was genuine demand (electric cars that people actually wanted to drive, cheaper space launches) and saw them as engineering problems that could be cracked if you overcame the barriers via investment, determination and marketing.

    To make a desirable electric car you had to invest a lot in clever people who wanted to work themselves to the bone to get the battery tech right. Make it cool. And whoever did that was on to a winner. SpaceX, NASA had endless things it wanted to do but didn't want to take the risk, and spaceflight has *huge* barriers to entry so there wasn't much innovation. So he took on the risk, realising if his engineers cracked it then huge contracts were available.

    Social media is different in that it's a humanities, rather than an engineering problem. It's about creating/building a community and establishing rules and functions users want that enable it to thrive. It's a complicated ecosystem rather than an engineering or coding problem to solve.

    The obvious ones with Twitter/X where he's been disastrous being free speech and blue ticks.

    On the former, annoying as previous policies could be, you can't have a free for all as it quickly descends into 4Chan and lots of people who gave the site its value leave or use it less. And eventually, rubbish goes in, rubbish comes out. If you reward disinformation, posts gravitate towards it.

    On blue ticks, Twitter's great selling point was that it allowed the hoi polloi to interact a lot with very influential people. But as it grew, it had to find a way of verifying and policing that.

    He screwed up both without thinking as he didn't understand that except perhaps from his own highly limited and odd perspective as a billionaire annoyed it didn't march to his tune as a very influential user - but importantly one among many.

    So he ends up looking like a complete dumbarse because people who have very successful in one area aren't geniuses in another. Rupert Murdoch couldn't do social media. Jeff Bezos doesn't bother. Even those who built their business on it struggle to manage the tension between monetising it and keeping its value.

    Taken generally, it should worry that you have a collection of people who have made a lot of money by being very good at building rocket engines, not realising that putting liquid hydrogen on a campfire doesn't make for a good night chatting and roasting marshmallows.

    Often tech people have a very narrow sort of intelligence. Its obvious in guys like zuckerberg.
    I don't doubt that is true to an extent, but part of me does wonder if it is also sometimes used as an excuse for the level it is trotted out.
    Musk has admitted to Asperger's
    I have no reason to doubt those people who state a specific situation or condition, but I do think a general awkwardness of people in tech being ascribed to a certain narrowness of intellect is a bit of a crutch. Like assuming all nerds are shy just because many are. It's even a bit patronising toward them as a whole, in assuming they probably have some kind of condition or narrowness.
    I have Aspie people close to me in my fam and friends, Musk is - to me - quite obviously like them. Very bright and high functioning, but sociallly awkward, conversationally hesitant, and prone to dreadful social errors and misconstruals that lead to shunning and/or conflict

    That's Musk
    Thank you Doctor. I'd foolishly misremembered your ASD expertise.

    My son is high functioning autistic, as you are aware, he is never likely to strike up an intimate relationship with Tallulah Riley or Grimes.

    Musk is not some autistic wallflower, he's a bloody Bond villain.
    CAN YOU NOT FUCKING READ

    I have people close to me, very close to me, extremely close to me, that are diagnosed ASD, and Asperger's, tho doctors are these days hesitant to give this diagnosis as it is contentious. So SHUT THE FUCK UP
  • Options
    Andy_JSAndy_JS Posts: 26,745
    Economist model predicts Truss to hold her seat by 45% to 29%.
  • Options
    AnabobazinaAnabobazina Posts: 20,043

    For those longing for even more Liz, the long interview she gives to Fraser Nelson is quite good - Nelson seems to think Liz is a bit of a nutter from his previous pronouncement, and he does challenge her strongly on the 'deep state' and a number of other things. She's Liz, but she does OK.
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fPwqsrI0L8Y

    An exceptional woman.

    Truly one of a kind.

    Wonderful.
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    Jim_MillerJim_Miller Posts: 2,512
    edited April 15
    Dr. Foxy - Iran has many minority groups -- how large the shares they have are is much debated.
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran#Demographics

    Including some Arabs, perhaps about 2 percent.
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran#Demographics
  • Options
    AnabobazinaAnabobazina Posts: 20,043
    Andy_JS said:

    Economist model predicts Truss to hold her seat by 45% to 29%.

    TRUSS 💪
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    kjhkjh Posts: 10,654
    edited April 15

    kjh said:

    kjh said:

    kjh said:

    ...

    kjh said:

    ...

    She has gone full on Trumpite saying Trump must win in November. Other Tories saying Trump must not win and some saying nothing to do with us guv.

    The Tories are really idiotic if they think November is a good time to hold an election here. The main attention will go to Trump. The Tories are deeply and irreconcilably divided on Trump, so they will inevitably look like the divided party they are. And the Tories need attention domestically to somehow catch up in the polling.

    As they are indeed idiotic expect a November election.

    Trump is the Republican candidate, and the Republicans are the right of centre party. Furthermore, it is true that Biden has been one of the least supportive leaders to the UK, and that Trump has always been well-disposed toward the UK and has friends, business interests, and familial ties here. It seems a mark of polite society that we should all clutch our pearls at the very thought of him gaining the White House again - well that can fuck off.
    Not a question of politeness, more an indication of either a disdain for democratic norms or a lack of intelligence, or both, they often go together.
    Democratic norms dictate to me that we should accept whoever the Americans choose, not leave a puddle on the floor about how awful it all is.

    Furthermore Liz Truss is absolutely right to bring the argument back to who has been more supportive to the UK - that's the only dog we have in this fight, and something too many of us are utterly blind to, either because we feel the national interest is a dirty concept, or because we're the sort of thicko who defaces the cenotaph because an American policman killed someone.
    Bollocks. Should we accept whomever the Russians choose? Should we have accepted whom the 1930s Germans chose?

    FFS, the man is a genuine fascist, we have every right to condemn the vile piece of shite. As for him being "more supportive to the UK" that is highly arguable, and even if it were true it does not make him remotely appropriate.

    Oh, and I forgot to add that to his very long list of puke inducing vileness we should add that he sucks up to Putin. For what reasons, we can only guess.
    Yes, and yes - if they're elected legitimately.
    I guess it depends on your definition of "accept". It seems that you and the lettuce do not "accept" Joe Biden. Although perhaps as an apologist for the orange Mussolini maybe you buy the Big Lie that Biden isn't legit?

    Personally I do not and never will "accept" fascists, whether they have hoodwinked their electorates or not. I do not "accept" racists. I do not "accept" rapists. If politicians this side of the Atlantic wish to accept such scumbags then they are, in effect, endorsing their vile behaviour, and are low-life human beings.
    It has not been proven in a court of law that Trump raped anyone, and the circumstances detailed in the allegation seem exceedingly improbable.
    So balance of probability = exceedingly improbable?

    I must not have been concentrating in my maths lectures.
    No, I came up with 'exceedingly improbable' by actually reading the allegations and using my own brain to see if I believed them to be probable or not. Thinking - it may have been a while but I'm sure you can remember doing it.
    Well that is not logical is it? You keep insisting he isn't guilty of rape because no criminal court has found him guilty beyond reasonable doubt, even though no court has been asked to so (beyond reasonable doubt)

    So you are happy to use the court as your defining point of judgement here.

    Yet when it comes to a court deciding on balance of probability he did you then ignore a court as being the defining point of judgement and use your own judgement.

    You can't have it both ways. Pick one or the other. Don't quote that courts haven't found him 'actually' guilty if you refuse to accept that he was found 'probably' guilty by a court.

    Honestly.
    All lovely, but you seem to be responding to something I didn't write. I introduced two separate concepts, hence the use of the non-subordinating conjunction. Donald Trump has not been found guilty of rape AND the allegations against him don't seem probable, not SO the allegations against him don't seem probable or THEREFORE the allegations against him don't seem probable.

    Honestly.
    This is utter gibberish and a desperate attempt to dig yourself out of a hole. Two separate concepts my arse.

    This is what you actually said:

    "It has not been proven in a court of law that Trump raped anyone, and the circumstances detailed in the allegation seem exceedingly improbable."

    The first part of the sentence is true. The second is your honest opinion. So far so good.

    But what is the point in writing the first part of the sentence if you didn't mean something by it? Why write it? Of course you meant something by it. Otherwise you might well have written 'Bees have black and yellow stripes'. True but a pointless statement in the context.

    So let's stop this bollocks of the two being separate. You stated the first for a reason and it is related to the second, otherwise why state random facts.

    So he is not guilty of rape because a court has not found him guilty of rape. That is you are relying on a court (although one has never sat). Fair enough.

    You then decided to abandon completely your reliance on what a court decides in the next part of the sentence because balance of probability does not equal exceedingly improbable.

    Yes honestly is the correct exclamation because what you wrote was in fact utter bollocks.
    So just to clarify - On a balance of probability he has been found to have committed rape, however in your opinion it is exceedingly unlikely. That is fair enough opinion. BUT then why say also 'It has not been proven in a court of law that Trump raped anyone'. Again a true statement, but why say both in the same sentence if you are not linking the 2 statements.

    Say one, say the other, say both in different contexts, but to say both in the same context, in the same sentence, implies a relationship and if so the logic fails because you rely on the court in one statement and dismiss the courts in the other statement all in the same sentence.
    Because both are reasons why glibly classifying Donald Trump as a rapist is not justified.
    Not the point. I have no idea if he is a rapist or not. I am simply pointing out the irrationality of the two statements linked in the same sentence. If you think the court was wrong in the actual case why make a point of saying he has never been found guilty in a (nonexistent) criminal case. If you aren't happy with the result in a real case why are you happy to rely on another case (which didn't even happen).

    PS I would also like to apologise for being rude. I could have discussed that in a more civilised manner. It's not like me. Don't know why I wasn't more polite.
  • Options

    Amount of unfunded tax cuts in Truss's minibudget: £45bn

    Amount that the Treasury has spent so far paying the Bank of England's losses on its disastrous bond selloff: £50bn, could be further £40bn spent this year.

    Amount of PBers furiously wanking themselves off about how disastrously awful Truss was and what personality disorders she must have not to realise it and go into permanent hiding: 534

    Amount of PBers questioning the Bank's actions and the Treasury's bizarre policy of indemnifying them: 3

    You don’t understand accounting do you?

    I’m surprised that you want an inflated money supply given you appear to be a redwood fan.
    I was against the Bank printing far too much money when it didn't need to. I am now against taking an equally reckless swerve in the other direction when we are staring into the barrel of a recession.

    I'll hold my hand up to not wanting £50bn to be disappeared from the public accounts whilst our finances are so severely constrained - I'm sure you have a great reasons for thinking it's a wonderful idea.

    I think I'm in good company not understanding accounting, given that the US Government is not indemnifying the Fed's losses on its bond sell-off, and the ECB is not selling off bonds before they
    reach maturity at all. I'm sure you and Andrew Bailey know much better.
    It’s not real money.

    1) Bank decides one day it has £10. It creates this on a spreadsheet
    2) Bank buy bond from government for £10
    3) Time passes
    3) Bank sells bond to pension fund for £5
    4) Bank deletes £5 from its spreadsheet

    Net effect: money supply has gone up by £5 of invented money. Bank has a loss on its balance sheet. Government transfers £5 to government to balance the books.

    It’s a monetary action not a fiscal action. You keep muddling the two.

    It is a monetary action with a fiscal outcome. The money transferred to make good the bank's loss is real Government spend, just as real as spending it on schools n' hospitals. Offering a soliloquy on the unreality of money is irrelevant to the current issue.

    It is also worth noting (as I've just discovered) that this isn't just a question of partial repayment at an inconvenient time as you suggest. Interest rate rises will mean the Treasury pays far more than it ever gained from the purchase of Government bonds by the Bank. This is described below:
    As the Bank of England raises its base rate, the amount paid remunerating reserves exceeds the income received from the bonds the Bank acquired when interest rates were lower. Alongside the capital losses discussed in 1.2, any shortfall in this interest flow is also covered by HMT, which indemnifies the Asset Purchase Facility, impacting the government’s fiscal position. The fiscal cost of reserve remuneration will be significant as the Bank raises interest rates, with the New Economics Foundation estimating that the central bank is set to pay banks around £150bn in interest on their risk-free reserves between 2022 and 2028. This estimate is consistent with the figures published by the OBR in November 2022.[18]
    https://committees.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/119319/html/

    The entire submission is worth a read, and it is exceedingly damning of the Bank's actions, which amount to aggressively cleaning its own house, using other peoples' money.
    Indeed.

    Creating money and then moving bits is one thing, but to enact change upon the market you need to get third parties involved and the moment you do that, then it becomes real.

    Billions are being paid to Banks because of the BoE's mistakes. Real billions, not fictional billions.

    If it was fictional billions, then the Bank could just write it off, and that would be that. But its not, so the taxpayer is bailing out the Bank for its policies. Which makes it a fiscal policy, not simply a monetary one.
  • Options
    timpletimple Posts: 118

    GIN1138 said:

    Andy_JS said:
    A good result for Lab but not exactly the complete and total Con wipe-out many people seem convinced is going to happen?
    A lot of 35/35. 36/36, 37/37 being given to Labour though. It doesn't need much of a Tory revival and incumbency for that Labour majority to start heading south quite rapidly.
    Just had a quick look at some seats and it seems the Economist doesn't think Brits are going to be able to work out Tactical voting......
  • Options
    MightyAlexMightyAlex Posts: 1,449
    edited April 15
    kyf_100 said:
    At least wait until Tony & George die before we do this again.

    Shitty Israeli dossiers, 45 minute warnings, shock and awe. dodgy military contractors and finally Shia ISIS. We can speed run the last two decades. Completely fuck the region and make big Bart pay half his salary to fill up the Yaris.
  • Options
    Jim_MillerJim_Miller Posts: 2,512
    In important American trials, when TV coverage is not allowed, news organizations sometimes send artists, to capture important pictures, ('d love to see a good drawing of Trump snoozing in court.)

    And, of course, cartoonists can do the same, without even being in court.
  • Options
    Luckyguy1983Luckyguy1983 Posts: 25,482
    edited April 15
    kjh said:

    kjh said:

    kjh said:

    kjh said:

    ...

    kjh said:

    ...

    She has gone full on Trumpite saying Trump must win in November. Other Tories saying Trump must not win and some saying nothing to do with us guv.

    The Tories are really idiotic if they think November is a good time to hold an election here. The main attention will go to Trump. The Tories are deeply and irreconcilably divided on Trump, so they will inevitably look like the divided party they are. And the Tories need attention domestically to somehow catch up in the polling.

    As they are indeed idiotic expect a November election.

    Trump is the Republican candidate, and the Republicans are the right of centre party. Furthermore, it is true that Biden has been one of the least supportive leaders to the UK, and that Trump has always been well-disposed toward the UK and has friends, business interests, and familial ties here. It seems a mark of polite society that we should all clutch our pearls at the very thought of him gaining the White House again - well that can fuck off.
    Not a question of politeness, more an indication of either a disdain for democratic norms or a lack of intelligence, or both, they often go together.
    Democratic norms dictate to me that we should accept whoever the Americans choose, not leave a puddle on the floor about how awful it all is.

    Furthermore Liz Truss is absolutely right to bring the argument back to who has been more supportive to the UK - that's the only dog we have in this fight, and something too many of us are utterly blind to, either because we feel the national interest is a dirty concept, or because we're the sort of thicko who defaces the cenotaph because an American policman killed someone.
    Bollocks. Should we accept whomever the Russians choose? Should we have accepted whom the 1930s Germans chose?

    FFS, the man is a genuine fascist, we have every right to condemn the vile piece of shite. As for him being "more supportive to the UK" that is highly arguable, and even if it were true it does not make him remotely appropriate.

    Oh, and I forgot to add that to his very long list of puke inducing vileness we should add that he sucks up to Putin. For what reasons, we can only guess.
    Yes, and yes - if they're elected legitimately.
    I guess it depends on your definition of "accept". It seems that you and the lettuce do not "accept" Joe Biden. Although perhaps as an apologist for the orange Mussolini maybe you buy the Big Lie that Biden isn't legit?

    Personally I do not and never will "accept" fascists, whether they have hoodwinked their electorates or not. I do not "accept" racists. I do not "accept" rapists. If politicians this side of the Atlantic wish to accept such scumbags then they are, in effect, endorsing their vile behaviour, and are low-life human beings.
    It has not been proven in a court of law that Trump raped anyone, and the circumstances detailed in the allegation seem exceedingly improbable.
    So balance of probability = exceedingly improbable?

    I must not have been concentrating in my maths lectures.
    No, I came up with 'exceedingly improbable' by actually reading the allegations and using my own brain to see if I believed them to be probable or not. Thinking - it may have been a while but I'm sure you can remember doing it.
    Well that is not logical is it? You keep insisting he isn't guilty of rape because no criminal court has found him guilty beyond reasonable doubt, even though no court has been asked to so (beyond reasonable doubt)

    So you are happy to use the court as your defining point of judgement here.

    Yet when it comes to a court deciding on balance of probability he did you then ignore a court as being the defining point of judgement and use your own judgement.

    You can't have it both ways. Pick one or the other. Don't quote that courts haven't found him 'actually' guilty if you refuse to accept that he was found 'probably' guilty by a court.

    Honestly.
    All lovely, but you seem to be responding to something I didn't write. I introduced two separate concepts, hence the use of the non-subordinating conjunction. Donald Trump has not been found guilty of rape AND the allegations against him don't seem probable, not SO the allegations against him don't seem probable or THEREFORE the allegations against him don't seem probable.

    Honestly.
    This is utter gibberish and a desperate attempt to dig yourself out of a hole. Two separate concepts my arse.

    This is what you actually said:

    "It has not been proven in a court of law that Trump raped anyone, and the circumstances detailed in the allegation seem exceedingly improbable."

    The first part of the sentence is true. The second is your honest opinion. So far so good.

    But what is the point in writing the first part of the sentence if you didn't mean something by it? Why write it? Of course you meant something by it. Otherwise you might well have written 'Bees have black and yellow stripes'. True but a pointless statement in the context.

    So let's stop this bollocks of the two being separate. You stated the first for a reason and it is related to the second, otherwise why state random facts.

    So he is not guilty of rape because a court has not found him guilty of rape. That is you are relying on a court (although one has never sat). Fair enough.

    You then decided to abandon completely your reliance on what a court decides in the next part of the sentence because balance of probability does not equal exceedingly improbable.

    Yes honestly is the correct exclamation because what you wrote was in fact utter bollocks.
    So just to clarify - On a balance of probability he has been found to have committed rape, however in your opinion it is exceedingly unlikely. That is fair enough opinion. BUT then why say also 'It has not been proven in a court of law that Trump raped anyone'. Again a true statement, but why say both in the same sentence if you are not linking the 2 statements.

    Say one, say the other, say both in different contexts, but to say both in the same context, in the same sentence, implies a relationship and if so the logic fails because you rely on the court in one statement and dismiss the courts in the other statement all in the same sentence.
    Because both are reasons why glibly classifying Donald Trump as a rapist is not justified.
    Not the point. I have no idea if he is a rapist or not. I am simply pointing out the irrationality of the two statements linked in the same sentence. If you think the court was wrong in the actual case why make a point of saying he has never been found guilty in a (nonexistent) criminal case. If you aren't happy with the result in a real case why are you happy to rely on another case (which didn't even happen).
    It's getting very hard not to be insulting here.

    I wasn't replying to you when I made that statement, I was replying to someone who had said the following - "I do not "accept" rapists. If politicians this side of the Atlantic wish to accept such scumbags then they are, in effect, endorsing their vile behaviour, and are low-life human beings."

    The sentence I replied with, as I've now explained at great length, introduced two reasons why that was not a wise or justified statement, two separate reasons which did not depend on each other or alter each other, but sat quite happily together in the same sentence because they both mildly rebuke the statement I responded to. It's plain English, and I'm sorry you seem to be struggling so much with it.
  • Options
    kyf_100kyf_100 Posts: 3,957

    kyf_100 said:
    At least wait until Tony & George die before we do this again.

    Shitty Israeli dossiers, 45 minute warnings, shock and awe. dodgy military contractors and finally Shia ISIS. We can speed run the last two decades. Completely fuck the region and make big Bart pay half his salary to fill up the Yaris.
    Except the dodgy dossier was made up by the west, whereas this is the Iranian government itself saying "we've got a weapon we've not told you about, can you guess what it is?"
  • Options
    Andy_JSAndy_JS Posts: 26,745
    "Liz Truss: ‘The people who claim I crashed the economy are either very stupid or very malevolent’"

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2024/04/15/liz-truss-interview-ten-years-to-save-the-west/
  • Options
    Andy_JSAndy_JS Posts: 26,745

    In important American trials, when TV coverage is not allowed, news organizations sometimes send artists, to capture important pictures, ('d love to see a good drawing of Trump snoozing in court.)

    And, of course, cartoonists can do the same, without even being in court.

    We have court artists in the UK, although I believe they can't actually draw in the courtroom, they have to do it from memory in an adjoining room. (But that may have changed since someone informed me).
  • Options
    kjhkjh Posts: 10,654

    kjh said:

    kjh said:

    kjh said:

    kjh said:

    ...

    kjh said:

    ...

    She has gone full on Trumpite saying Trump must win in November. Other Tories saying Trump must not win and some saying nothing to do with us guv.

    The Tories are really idiotic if they think November is a good time to hold an election here. The main attention will go to Trump. The Tories are deeply and irreconcilably divided on Trump, so they will inevitably look like the divided party they are. And the Tories need attention domestically to somehow catch up in the polling.

    As they are indeed idiotic expect a November election.

    Trump is the Republican candidate, and the Republicans are the right of centre party. Furthermore, it is true that Biden has been one of the least supportive leaders to the UK, and that Trump has always been well-disposed toward the UK and has friends, business interests, and familial ties here. It seems a mark of polite society that we should all clutch our pearls at the very thought of him gaining the White House again - well that can fuck off.
    Not a question of politeness, more an indication of either a disdain for democratic norms or a lack of intelligence, or both, they often go together.
    Democratic norms dictate to me that we should accept whoever the Americans choose, not leave a puddle on the floor about how awful it all is.

    Furthermore Liz Truss is absolutely right to bring the argument back to who has been more supportive to the UK - that's the only dog we have in this fight, and something too many of us are utterly blind to, either because we feel the national interest is a dirty concept, or because we're the sort of thicko who defaces the cenotaph because an American policman killed someone.
    Bollocks. Should we accept whomever the Russians choose? Should we have accepted whom the 1930s Germans chose?

    FFS, the man is a genuine fascist, we have every right to condemn the vile piece of shite. As for him being "more supportive to the UK" that is highly arguable, and even if it were true it does not make him remotely appropriate.

    Oh, and I forgot to add that to his very long list of puke inducing vileness we should add that he sucks up to Putin. For what reasons, we can only guess.
    Yes, and yes - if they're elected legitimately.
    I guess it depends on your definition of "accept". It seems that you and the lettuce do not "accept" Joe Biden. Although perhaps as an apologist for the orange Mussolini maybe you buy the Big Lie that Biden isn't legit?

    Personally I do not and never will "accept" fascists, whether they have hoodwinked their electorates or not. I do not "accept" racists. I do not "accept" rapists. If politicians this side of the Atlantic wish to accept such scumbags then they are, in effect, endorsing their vile behaviour, and are low-life human beings.
    It has not been proven in a court of law that Trump raped anyone, and the circumstances detailed in the allegation seem exceedingly improbable.
    So balance of probability = exceedingly improbable?

    I must not have been concentrating in my maths lectures.
    No, I came up with 'exceedingly improbable' by actually reading the allegations and using my own brain to see if I believed them to be probable or not. Thinking - it may have been a while but I'm sure you can remember doing it.
    Well that is not logical is it? You keep insisting he isn't guilty of rape because no criminal court has found him guilty beyond reasonable doubt, even though no court has been asked to so (beyond reasonable doubt)

    So you are happy to use the court as your defining point of judgement here.

    Yet when it comes to a court deciding on balance of probability he did you then ignore a court as being the defining point of judgement and use your own judgement.

    You can't have it both ways. Pick one or the other. Don't quote that courts haven't found him 'actually' guilty if you refuse to accept that he was found 'probably' guilty by a court.

    Honestly.
    All lovely, but you seem to be responding to something I didn't write. I introduced two separate concepts, hence the use of the non-subordinating conjunction. Donald Trump has not been found guilty of rape AND the allegations against him don't seem probable, not SO the allegations against him don't seem probable or THEREFORE the allegations against him don't seem probable.

    Honestly.
    This is utter gibberish and a desperate attempt to dig yourself out of a hole. Two separate concepts my arse.

    This is what you actually said:

    "It has not been proven in a court of law that Trump raped anyone, and the circumstances detailed in the allegation seem exceedingly improbable."

    The first part of the sentence is true. The second is your honest opinion. So far so good.

    But what is the point in writing the first part of the sentence if you didn't mean something by it? Why write it? Of course you meant something by it. Otherwise you might well have written 'Bees have black and yellow stripes'. True but a pointless statement in the context.

    So let's stop this bollocks of the two being separate. You stated the first for a reason and it is related to the second, otherwise why state random facts.

    So he is not guilty of rape because a court has not found him guilty of rape. That is you are relying on a court (although one has never sat). Fair enough.

    You then decided to abandon completely your reliance on what a court decides in the next part of the sentence because balance of probability does not equal exceedingly improbable.

    Yes honestly is the correct exclamation because what you wrote was in fact utter bollocks.
    So just to clarify - On a balance of probability he has been found to have committed rape, however in your opinion it is exceedingly unlikely. That is fair enough opinion. BUT then why say also 'It has not been proven in a court of law that Trump raped anyone'. Again a true statement, but why say both in the same sentence if you are not linking the 2 statements.

    Say one, say the other, say both in different contexts, but to say both in the same context, in the same sentence, implies a relationship and if so the logic fails because you rely on the court in one statement and dismiss the courts in the other statement all in the same sentence.
    Because both are reasons why glibly classifying Donald Trump as a rapist is not justified.
    Not the point. I have no idea if he is a rapist or not. I am simply pointing out the irrationality of the two statements linked in the same sentence. If you think the court was wrong in the actual case why make a point of saying he has never been found guilty in a (nonexistent) criminal case. If you aren't happy with the result in a real case why are you happy to rely on another case (which didn't even happen).
    It's getting very hard not to be insulting here.

    I wasn't replying to you when I made that statement, I was replying to someone who had said the following - "I do not "accept" rapists. If politicians this side of the Atlantic wish to accept such scumbags then they are, in effect, endorsing their vile behaviour, and are low-life human beings."

    The sentence I replied with, as I've now explained at great length, introduced two reasons why that was not a wise or justified statement, two separate reasons which did not depend on each other or alter each other, but sat quite happily together in the same sentence because they both mildly rebuke the statement I responded to. It's plain English, and I'm sorry you seem to be struggling so much with it.
    I assume you haven't read my amended post before replying.
  • Options
    rcs1000rcs1000 Posts: 54,024
    kyf_100 said:
    Having a nuclear bomb and having the ability to deliver it are two very different things.
  • Options
    MightyAlexMightyAlex Posts: 1,449
    kyf_100 said:

    kyf_100 said:
    At least wait until Tony & George die before we do this again.

    Shitty Israeli dossiers, 45 minute warnings, shock and awe. dodgy military contractors and finally Shia ISIS. We can speed run the last two decades. Completely fuck the region and make big Bart pay half his salary to fill up the Yaris.
    Except the dodgy dossier was made up by the west, whereas this is the Iranian government itself saying "we've got a weapon we've not told you about, can you guess what it is?"
    Say they have it, now what? They're a nasty regime who do nasty things. So are Saudi, NK, Russia, China and we live with them. The idea that the Iranian government are suicidal is fatuous, they know exactly what would happen if Israel was vaporised.

    For sure no one wants a nuclear armed Iran but much like NK we'd have to learn to co-exist.
  • Options
    Luckyguy1983Luckyguy1983 Posts: 25,482
    kjh said:

    kjh said:

    kjh said:

    kjh said:

    kjh said:

    ...

    kjh said:

    ...

    She has gone full on Trumpite saying Trump must win in November. Other Tories saying Trump must not win and some saying nothing to do with us guv.

    The Tories are really idiotic if they think November is a good time to hold an election here. The main attention will go to Trump. The Tories are deeply and irreconcilably divided on Trump, so they will inevitably look like the divided party they are. And the Tories need attention domestically to somehow catch up in the polling.

    As they are indeed idiotic expect a November election.

    Trump is the Republican candidate, and the Republicans are the right of centre party. Furthermore, it is true that Biden has been one of the least supportive leaders to the UK, and that Trump has always been well-disposed toward the UK and has friends, business interests, and familial ties here. It seems a mark of polite society that we should all clutch our pearls at the very thought of him gaining the White House again - well that can fuck off.
    Not a question of politeness, more an indication of either a disdain for democratic norms or a lack of intelligence, or both, they often go together.
    Democratic norms dictate to me that we should accept whoever the Americans choose, not leave a puddle on the floor about how awful it all is.

    Furthermore Liz Truss is absolutely right to bring the argument back to who has been more supportive to the UK - that's the only dog we have in this fight, and something too many of us are utterly blind to, either because we feel the national interest is a dirty concept, or because we're the sort of thicko who defaces the cenotaph because an American policman killed someone.
    Bollocks. Should we accept whomever the Russians choose? Should we have accepted whom the 1930s Germans chose?

    FFS, the man is a genuine fascist, we have every right to condemn the vile piece of shite. As for him being "more supportive to the UK" that is highly arguable, and even if it were true it does not make him remotely appropriate.

    Oh, and I forgot to add that to his very long list of puke inducing vileness we should add that he sucks up to Putin. For what reasons, we can only guess.
    Yes, and yes - if they're elected legitimately.
    I guess it depends on your definition of "accept". It seems that you and the lettuce do not "accept" Joe Biden. Although perhaps as an apologist for the orange Mussolini maybe you buy the Big Lie that Biden isn't legit?

    Personally I do not and never will "accept" fascists, whether they have hoodwinked their electorates or not. I do not "accept" racists. I do not "accept" rapists. If politicians this side of the Atlantic wish to accept such scumbags then they are, in effect, endorsing their vile behaviour, and are low-life human beings.
    It has not been proven in a court of law that Trump raped anyone, and the circumstances detailed in the allegation seem exceedingly improbable.
    So balance of probability = exceedingly improbable?

    I must not have been concentrating in my maths lectures.
    No, I came up with 'exceedingly improbable' by actually reading the allegations and using my own brain to see if I believed them to be probable or not. Thinking - it may have been a while but I'm sure you can remember doing it.
    Well that is not logical is it? You keep insisting he isn't guilty of rape because no criminal court has found him guilty beyond reasonable doubt, even though no court has been asked to so (beyond reasonable doubt)

    So you are happy to use the court as your defining point of judgement here.

    Yet when it comes to a court deciding on balance of probability he did you then ignore a court as being the defining point of judgement and use your own judgement.

    You can't have it both ways. Pick one or the other. Don't quote that courts haven't found him 'actually' guilty if you refuse to accept that he was found 'probably' guilty by a court.

    Honestly.
    All lovely, but you seem to be responding to something I didn't write. I introduced two separate concepts, hence the use of the non-subordinating conjunction. Donald Trump has not been found guilty of rape AND the allegations against him don't seem probable, not SO the allegations against him don't seem probable or THEREFORE the allegations against him don't seem probable.

    Honestly.
    This is utter gibberish and a desperate attempt to dig yourself out of a hole. Two separate concepts my arse.

    This is what you actually said:

    "It has not been proven in a court of law that Trump raped anyone, and the circumstances detailed in the allegation seem exceedingly improbable."

    The first part of the sentence is true. The second is your honest opinion. So far so good.

    But what is the point in writing the first part of the sentence if you didn't mean something by it? Why write it? Of course you meant something by it. Otherwise you might well have written 'Bees have black and yellow stripes'. True but a pointless statement in the context.

    So let's stop this bollocks of the two being separate. You stated the first for a reason and it is related to the second, otherwise why state random facts.

    So he is not guilty of rape because a court has not found him guilty of rape. That is you are relying on a court (although one has never sat). Fair enough.

    You then decided to abandon completely your reliance on what a court decides in the next part of the sentence because balance of probability does not equal exceedingly improbable.

    Yes honestly is the correct exclamation because what you wrote was in fact utter bollocks.
    So just to clarify - On a balance of probability he has been found to have committed rape, however in your opinion it is exceedingly unlikely. That is fair enough opinion. BUT then why say also 'It has not been proven in a court of law that Trump raped anyone'. Again a true statement, but why say both in the same sentence if you are not linking the 2 statements.

    Say one, say the other, say both in different contexts, but to say both in the same context, in the same sentence, implies a relationship and if so the logic fails because you rely on the court in one statement and dismiss the courts in the other statement all in the same sentence.
    Because both are reasons why glibly classifying Donald Trump as a rapist is not justified.
    Not the point. I have no idea if he is a rapist or not. I am simply pointing out the irrationality of the two statements linked in the same sentence. If you think the court was wrong in the actual case why make a point of saying he has never been found guilty in a (nonexistent) criminal case. If you aren't happy with the result in a real case why are you happy to rely on another case (which didn't even happen).
    It's getting very hard not to be insulting here.

    I wasn't replying to you when I made that statement, I was replying to someone who had said the following - "I do not "accept" rapists. If politicians this side of the Atlantic wish to accept such scumbags then they are, in effect, endorsing their vile behaviour, and are low-life human beings."

    The sentence I replied with, as I've now explained at great length, introduced two reasons why that was not a wise or justified statement, two separate reasons which did not depend on each other or alter each other, but sat quite happily together in the same sentence because they both mildly rebuke the statement I responded to. It's plain English, and I'm sorry you seem to be struggling so much with it.
    I assume you haven't read my amended post before replying.
    I appreciate your apology - it's absolutely fine, no offence was taken, and please forgive heated language from me. Donald Trump always raises peoples' hackles.
  • Options

    kyf_100 said:

    kyf_100 said:
    At least wait until Tony & George die before we do this again.

    Shitty Israeli dossiers, 45 minute warnings, shock and awe. dodgy military contractors and finally Shia ISIS. We can speed run the last two decades. Completely fuck the region and make big Bart pay half his salary to fill up the Yaris.
    Except the dodgy dossier was made up by the west, whereas this is the Iranian government itself saying "we've got a weapon we've not told you about, can you guess what it is?"
    Say they have it, now what? They're a nasty regime who do nasty things. So are Saudi, NK, Russia, China and we live with them. The idea that the Iranian government are suicidal is fatuous, they know exactly what would happen if Israel was vaporised.

    For sure no one wants a nuclear armed Iran but much like NK we'd have to learn to co-exist.
    But they don't have a nuclear bomb.

    Better to take out the regime now, before it does, than leave it until too late.
  • Options
    MightyAlexMightyAlex Posts: 1,449

    kyf_100 said:

    kyf_100 said:
    At least wait until Tony & George die before we do this again.

    Shitty Israeli dossiers, 45 minute warnings, shock and awe. dodgy military contractors and finally Shia ISIS. We can speed run the last two decades. Completely fuck the region and make big Bart pay half his salary to fill up the Yaris.
    Except the dodgy dossier was made up by the west, whereas this is the Iranian government itself saying "we've got a weapon we've not told you about, can you guess what it is?"
    Say they have it, now what? They're a nasty regime who do nasty things. So are Saudi, NK, Russia, China and we live with them. The idea that the Iranian government are suicidal is fatuous, they know exactly what would happen if Israel was vaporised.

    For sure no one wants a nuclear armed Iran but much like NK we'd have to learn to co-exist.
    But they don't have a nuclear bomb.

    Better to take out the regime now, before it does, than leave it until too late.
    How?
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    Andy_JSAndy_JS Posts: 26,745
    Just realised I had a major brain fade for about 6 weeks. I totally forgot about 3 online magazines I used to regularly read: Quillette, UnHerd, and Spiked. But since the beginning of March I'd totally forgotten to visit their websites. A bit concerning, from a memory point of view.
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    carnforthcarnforth Posts: 3,230
    Andy_JS said:

    Just realised I had a major brain fade for about 6 weeks. I totally forgot about 3 online magazines I used to regularly read: Quillette, UnHerd, and Spiked. But since the beginning of March I'd totally forgotten to visit their websites. A bit concerning, from a memory point of view.

    Could be a positive. Maybe you were only visitig them out of habit.
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    viewcodeviewcode Posts: 18,880
    Andy_JS said:

    Just realised I had a major brain fade for about 6 weeks. I totally forgot about 3 online magazines I used to regularly read: Quillette, UnHerd, and Spiked. But since the beginning of March I'd totally forgotten to visit their websites. A bit concerning, from a memory point of view.

    It is not necessarily a bad thing to spend less time online reading websites, especially those full of people with odd political views... :)
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    DecrepiterJohnLDecrepiterJohnL Posts: 24,436
    New thread.
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