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We’re going to need a bigger swingometer – politicalbetting.com
We’re going to need a bigger swingometer – politicalbetting.com
Also Reeves is *miles* ahead of Hunt in best chancellor polling which wasn't true of Clarke vs Brown. Clarke was the most popular Tory in 1997. Hunt is not…
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DavidL said:
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The better Scottish Universities did well in attracting English students willing to pay them £9k a year for courses that the SG was paying just over £5k for. Boris threatened to close that loophole but I don't think he did. The number of funded places available for Scottish student has been falling because the budget simply can't stretch to cover the cost of those who want to attend for this "free" education. Ironically, this has driven quite a lot of Scottish students south, willing to take on English fees to get a better education or a University place. One of these is my son.
But your friend is right. The likes of Edinburgh, Glasgow and St Andrews have balanced the books with ever increasing numbers of foreign students paying up to £20k a year for some courses. How the strand below that are coping is a mystery to me.
David insinuating that you have to go to England to get a decent education is pure bollox. There are brilliant universities in Scotland that are a match for anywhere in the world. Wanting to boast that you went to Oxford or Cambridge is not down to lack of good university courses in Scotland, just means you can buy a bragging place if you have lots of money.
Andy_JS said:
Why did all this trans stuff get politicised? It used to be a totally non-political topic.
Stonewall needed a new money making scheme and so it was trans, they conned all the woke halfwits, persuaded gullible idiots that they needed to use women's safe areas as a right and soon every weirdo and halfwit was promoting it , including thick politicians. There came a point when the public got sick of it and now
we see the results.
So the former would edge the BOE to an earlier rate cut , the latter makes things a bit more complicated .
He isn't very good at this campaigning malarkey is he?
As for the final score, it all depends on how late Rishi leaves it and how much support that costs.
Could you fuckers please keep posting snaps of some mountain/charming foreign town/lager and chips down to a bare minimum.
BUT
Mt Topping, please don’t post pictures like that. I wasn’t sure whether my eyesight was getting worse, my glasses needed cleaning or my brain was getting more confused.
Scottish Universities are also really struggling to compete because the money they receive from the SG per student is substantially less than the fees charged to students under the English system. The cream of Scottish Universities have compensated by having more foreign students and also (particularly in St Andrews and Edinburgh) having lots of English students paying the same as they would in England. But these options are not available for all or even most Universities. Their financial position is increasingly perilous.
If you are wanting to go to University it can be easier to get a place in a good English University paying the English fees (by borrowing) than getting an assisted place in Scotland. The "free" University option in Scotland seemed like a good idea but it has had negative consequences that will increase sharply if University fees go up again south of the border. Personally, I favour some form of graduate tax as a means of funding Universities.
I expect a 0.25% fall in base rates next month after better inflation figures but wage growth, driven by people playing catch up, is an issue.
I suspect that barrow boys would be back in fashion, in the City, by lunchtime.
This would mean that it would be the norm for students to work for 2 or more years before University, and thereby have a much better idea of what and why they want higher education.
The current plan seems to be starve universities of funding, and wait to see what
happens next.
But this is the thing - those 120 seats are because the Tory vote sits in the middle of the Precipice there 4-5 point range where seats results could easily be 200 seats or on a bad night with more tactical anti-tory voting 20....
Put it this way I wouldn't willingly buy or sell Tory seats at 120 or in fact at any level in this market.
If it were not obvious already, after yesterday’s openai release, it should be clear hat the capabilities of this tech are going to utterly shape the course of this century.
Occasionally I tune in and see the debates between professional politicians and those that consider themselves politically engaged. I’m blown away by the triviality. So much focus on minor differences in fiscal allocation. And almost no consideration of how the grand sweep of time renders those debates meaningless.
But please, post them.
Certainly hasn't filtered through to my corner of the economy.
It's still enough for LAB to govern for say 2 years maybe with some implicit LD support then it goes well go for another GE just like 1966!
I'd go for four (yes, I'm hoping for an early GE).
On 1 level he's right it's perfectly possible that AI will change the world as someone who uses it I don't think it will in the way Leon thinks it will.
Without them, the numbers just don't add up. And uni cuts will have a NIMBY dynamic; even those who want a hard rain for HE will scream blue murder if their local campus or (grand)child's course is in the firing line.
Writeup of new @JLPartnersPolls Nigel Farage poll in this morning's @politicoeu playbook
I suspect were a university to close (and many are likely to unless this idea is reversed) I expect it would impact Tory votes for a very long time in the area..
Anyway, the two-letter abbreviation that you-know-who must not mention will soon take care of all our productivity issues, shirley?
P.S. I also use AI in my day job (software development) and it is incredibly useful, but in the end it is still just a tool.
Like the lableak theory, he takes a possibility and turns it into certainty. Unfortunately for him, his past predictions are (ahem) rather poor, especially in this sector.He also all too often confuses AGI and AI, and sentience, consciousness and intelligence - perhaps purposefully.
As for your last line: that's my view. *If* current-methodology AI pans out as the hypers think (and that is *not* a certainty...), the social and political changes might not be what we think, or at the scale (they might be bigger or smaller). It's incredibly hard to come up with any prediction that isn't just waving your finger in the air, as much would depend on the capabilities of the AI and the way it is received.
I've had a few run-ins with AI, some work-related, others not.
For example, in both the 5e campaign I run and the Pathfinder 2e campaign I play in, I've used AI for art. This is not a cost to any artist as I just would draw it myself or use freely available images otherwise.
In work, some has been directly lost to AI writing text. However, for one aspect, the act of doing the work necessary to create very short (single sentence) AI text exceeded actually just writing the text so AI was not used for that. And one client is very much against AI-generated content, with some people seemingly very quick to spot that sort of thing.
Hard to say how much it'll alter things ultimately. One area I'm looking forward to is mixing voice and text generation so that video game companions can have an actual conversation with the player. Herika[sp] in Skyrim shows this is already possible, if a little clunky to set up.
Edited extra bit: I'm a freelance writer, for those interested in throwing some work my way.
To be fair, that's probably what most of us really want on a personal level too.
- I think it's going to be awful
- I'm still going to see it
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RU1QyAYa60gMeanwhile the UNRWA HQ has again been attacked by an Israeli mob in occupied al-Quds.
Oxfam say that Israeli attacks have caused $210m of damage to Gaza's water supply and sanitation system. (Note: water, roads, buildings, hospitals, schools, homes - these are what the Israelis call "the infrastructure of terror".)
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/liveblog/2024/5/14/israels-war-on-gaza-live-14-killed-in-israeli-attack-on-central-gaza-home?update=2898572
They also noted this didn't apply in London, where something silly like half of all universities in the UK are and where they could probably be closed easily enough without anyone really noticing.
I'm always worried when they produce forward projections that don't go very far into the future
Or, for images of text, maybe the actual text!
You're very presumptuous, too. Some AI may identify as non-binary
I went to what is now Sunderland to get away from the London area!
AI may be an obsession for Leon, but at least it's not a spiteful, hateful, obsession like the other thing seems to be for some on here.
Strikes me that if endless derailing of threads on the former topic is banned, the latter topic should be too.
Free the Leon One!
Many of the new-build houses near me are having solar panels put on their roofs. That is good.
However, although I am not sure, it seems some are being placed on the roof *instead* of tiles, with the tiles being placed around them on the rest of the roof. This instinctively seems wrong to me, and I was just wondering if it was now an accepted practice, or just another crass money-saving idea?
Incidentally, it also makes me feel old. When I was younger, there was a great program on the TV about its development, and now it is being retired.
Edit: this was it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VvsIYaRmRAM
The pterodactyl in the ointment is Reform. Voting intention + leadership ratings + relative issues competence + tactical voting + semi-proportional swing could well push the Tories down to 120 seats.
However, the 'worst case' scenario is that Reform's vote comes primarily from ex-2019 Tories (we know this is true at the moment: Deltapoll's most recent had about two-thirds of their current support coming from there; most of the rest, presumably was the Brexit Party), and holds up at current levels.
Now, I know there's a degree of double-counting there but I think there's also a widespread assumption that polls will tighten as we head to the election, as they usually do. And perhaps, probably, they will. But it's no guarantee. The usual pressures on minor-party squeeze aren't there in anything like the scale that they were in 2019. Labour isn't as extreme, the issues aren't as stark, the election isn't as close: and the Tories are really disliked. Swingback has usually started well before now whereas if anything, the Tories are still sinking in support. If Reform polls 10%+ it's possible that the 'worst case' is the Conservatives well down into double figures.
We shouldn't allow our thinking to be hemmed in by past events. I suspect that '120' is considered a minimum because it's ballpark within the worst-ever Tory experience; it cannot go lower because it has not gone lower.
Yet the Tories are polling 10% below where they were in 1997. True, Labour is also lower but then the polls also exaggerated their support then (a point often forgotten because of the landslide delivered and because tactical voting produced a result more consistent with the predictions of those bigger leads; the two effects cancelled each other out to an extent).
Even discounting black swans - and it does look as if Sunak is there for the duration and that the Tories won't accidentally re-elect Liz Truss or similar - we should take seriously the possibility, though not the probability, of a 1931-type outcome.
Almost like they had written the story before they got the figures......
The reason why most are on top of existing tiles is because retrofitting them into the roof is just a lot quicker and so a lot cheaper
The only way it makes sense to retrofit in the roof is if you need to reroof the house anyway
https://twitter.com/_PMCTraitor/status/1790063833198842175
I've no reason to believe that her conviction was unjust, or that a miscarriage of justice was involved. But I do think having dramas and documentaries made *whilst* the case is ongoing, with the active participation of people involved with the case, is troubling. As I've said before about other 'contemporary' or near-contemporary documentaries.
(Again, this post is not about the Letby case; it's about the media interactions with it.)
A lot of the malaise which currently affects this country is thanks to Tony Blair's stupid idea of sending 50% of young people to uni. This has now saddled half of a whole generation with debt, whilst wasting 3-4 productive years of their life out of the labour force. Then we've plugged this gap in the labour force with immigrants, forgetting that they still need houses, doctors, teacher, plumbers too.
I'm sure that most people do learn some useful skills at uni - but all the evidence suggests it's poor value for their money/time for most of them, and society in general.
But I wonder how much impact it would really have in a town with multiple universities e.g. Manchester, Leeds, Leicester, Bristol or even Cambridge, how damaging it would be? (obviously for Cambridge I'm thinking of Anglia Ruskin rather than King's College...)
Question: What is the minimum number of seats the Tories have to lose (from 365) to certainly be unable to form a government?
I also can't understand why a doctor who was a de facto prosecutor and presumably at one stage a possible suspect was allowed to give evidence anonymously. The whole thing looks very like the Post Office prosecutions.
The DUP *might* do another deal if there's enough cash on the table but I wouldn't assume it, by any means. I think they'd probably prefer to try their chances screwing Labour over instead (and would, of course, have equal leverage there as with the Tories). Every other party (bar SF, obviously) would vote against. Realistically, about 44. And that'd go with a by-election soon enough.
But with the SNP imploding, the Scottish Plod about to reveal what they know about the SNP finances (apparently), Labour look set for a decent haul of Scottish MPs, so they need proportionately fewer from rUK.
And as others have said (often repeatedly and at length) no-one is listening to the Tories now. They are done until they go away and rediscover centrist policies. If they ever do.
Of course, as this is an average, some will be doing better than others but this level of wage growth should sustain growth in the economy for the rest of the year.
If public for a public good then decide how many places we need and fund them, probably through general taxation, but focused on higher earners. Or a graduate tax, I'm not really too fussed. It may mean fewer undergrads - or more if we conclude that we need more as a country. It would probably lead to places per subject area rather than overall, so we get the mix of people we need.
If private, let them set their own fees and thrive or fail like other businesses and leave them well alone. Have a government loan scheme, potentially, but on realistic terms (can be revenue neutral, but should be on the basis that it will at least break even - enough people will repay in full to make that happen).
Personally, I prefer public and for the public good. That's one of the reasons I'm in academia. If we went the second route then I'd see it just like any other private enterprise and they'd need to compete for me on salary like any other employer.
I can easily see the Tories getting 200 seats, I can equally given a little bit of bad news see them getting few to none