It's lazy ... much like the Frank Gardner one we were talking about.
Their material consists of a quote from one person from a group of 4 interviewed in a local park. I think it's one of the costs of having a prominent, noisy MP. No analysis to back it up, or thinking about overall demographics, or realising that with generally lower living costs here the pressure is perhaps likely to be on expensive places.
We had it when the Graun took a picture of three shops being refurbed in the square, ignored all the others, and ran a story about delapidated town centres.
And again when Novara came and did some public interviews at the times when everybody is at work.
Very weird. Massive drop in employment rate in Ashfield since 2021- otherwise was actually doing quite well. Anyone local know why?
Picking up this "Economic Inactivity in Ashfield" = 31.3% claim by Sky we discussed yesterday.
After a bit of digging, I'm going with lazy, incompetent journalist after a story, not carrying out the basics of journalism such fact checking , and making sure that the stats quoted are up to date an din context. It's a disgrace.
The 31.3% economic inactivity number is for 2022-2023. The more recent number 2023-2024 is 22.9%. The one for the year before is also low 20s. That looks like a Covid exception, but other similar places have a 30%+ outlier in 2021/2 or 2023/4, and the others in the low 20s. There is even data published in early 2025 on the ONS site.
"Ashfield is ..." with old data, when recent date is everywhere including the canonical ONS site, is horribly amateurish.
And that puts a question over the data series, which is very lumpy (which I did not know until More or Less this morning).
A change of 10% (8000 people) in one year is absurd (Covid excepted), and in normal stats Ashfield is usually in the 20% to 70% on the scale - balanced economy and things don't change rapidly.
Checking all of that is just the most basic of journalistic skills, which I would expect from a blogger in short trousers.
I've already posted this week's More or Less, which has a segment about how unreliable the Labour Force has been for a number of years. Why does a journo not know this?
I think I would give the journalist a pass here. This is on the ONS website under the relevant section.
No.
The journalist should have checked the most recent version of the data if they are going to take 2 years old stuff and make it present tense. I would also expect them to do the easy check on the sensitivity of the data, before they hang their whole article on it.
They reported 2022-2023 data. In 2023-2024 it is back down by 10%.
Apart from always stuffing his suppliers, how did this guy ever survive in business for more than six months ?
TRUMP: “Putin actually said to me, ‘If you don’t mind, friend, I hate to see you as my enemy.’ He said it very strongly. I had a very good relationship with Putin. I had a very good relationship with President Xi. A very good relationship with Kim Jong Un”.. https://x.com/PolymarketIntel/status/1902320166483931553
Family inheritance, bailouts from dodgy entities, and tv appearance fees.
It's lazy ... much like the Frank Gardner one we were talking about.
Their material consists of a quote from one person from a group of 4 interviewed in a local park. I think it's one of the costs of having a prominent, noisy MP. No analysis to back it up, or thinking about overall demographics, or realising that with generally lower living costs here the pressure is perhaps likely to be on expensive places.
We had it when the Graun took a picture of three shops being refurbed in the square, ignored all the others, and ran a story about delapidated town centres.
And again when Novara came and did some public interviews at the times when everybody is at work.
Very weird. Massive drop in employment rate in Ashfield since 2021- otherwise was actually doing quite well. Anyone local know why?
Picking up this "Economic Inactivity in Ashfield" = 31.3% claim by Sky we discussed yesterday.
After a bit of digging, I'm going with lazy, incompetent journalist after a story, not carrying out the basics of journalism such fact checking , and making sure that the stats quoted are up to date an din context. It's a disgrace.
The 31.3% economic inactivity number is for 2022-2023. The more recent number 2023-2024 is 22.9%. The one for the year before is also low 20s. That looks like a Covid exception, but other similar places have a 30%+ outlier in 2021/2 or 2023/4, and the others in the low 20s. There is even data published in early 2025 on the ONS site.
"Ashfield is ..." with old data, when recent date is everywhere including the canonical ONS site, is horribly amateurish.
And that puts a question over the data series, which is very lumpy (which I did not know until More or Less this morning).
A change of 10% (8000 people) in one year is absurd (Covid excepted), and in normal stats Ashfield is usually in the 20% to 70% on the scale - balanced economy and things don't change rapidly.
Checking all of that is just the most basic of journalistic skills, which I would expect from a blogger in short trousers.
I've already posted this week's More or Less, which has a segment about how unreliable the Labour Force has been for a number of years. Why does a journo not know this?
I think I would give the journalist a pass here. This is on the ONS website under the relevant section.
No.
The journalist should have checked the most recent version of the data if they are going to take 2 years old stuff and make it present tense. I would also expect them to do the easy check on the sensitivity of the data, before they hang their whole article on it.
They reported 2022-2023 data. In 2023-2024 it is back down by 10%.
My personal gripe is that 99% of the piece is just vox pops, as is pretty much all of the BBC coverage of this story. Anybody can find a case or two that steers the story one way or another. A better bit of journalism would be a deep dive into who claims what, for how long have they claimed etc.
Fraser Nelson original piece several years ago exposing the scale of the economic inactivity was pure data.
Apart from always stuffing his suppliers, how did this guy ever survive in business for more than six months ?
TRUMP: “Putin actually said to me, ‘If you don’t mind, friend, I hate to see you as my enemy.’ He said it very strongly. I had a very good relationship with Putin. I had a very good relationship with President Xi. A very good relationship with Kim Jong Un”.. https://x.com/PolymarketIntel/status/1902320166483931553
... I also have a great relationship with Swiss Tony and the ghosts of Hitler, Stalin, PolPot, Al Capone and John Dillinger.
The sad thing is that in the news report about him on the Today programme yesterday they felt the need to explain what the Battle of Britain was.
It felt somewhat strange that the reporters/editors of Today think that people who listen to their programme need to have the BoB explained to them.
I noted that, too. The sad thing is that we're getting old. Battle of Britain is no longer the piece of universal popular culture that it was a generation back.
The Battle of Britain was 85 years ago.
That's like me learning about the Boer Wars when I was 10. OK, the BoB is much more important an event than that, but some of my contemporaries' fathers had fought in WW2 and it had finished only 30 years previously, which is like, er, 1995 is now (can't think of anything that happened then)
So while WW2 was an epoch-making event and the ever-present background to the world many of us grew up in, it is now fairly ancient history
Morning, PB.
And the real worry is that the new right are now beginning to normalise Nazism. Twitter is increasingly full of very large amounts of normalised, extreme antisemitism, and earlier this week the central Maga figure Tucker Carlson implied it might have been better if Hitler had occupied Europe.
I think that is wrong. Twitter is not full of anything. Your twitter feed might be full of this, that or the other, but that is on account of your browsing habits (similar to the proverbial Thai hooker story).
Each person creates their own twitter universe. Not many stories pop up on your feed, I imagine, about miniature railways. Would not be the case if you were a miniature railways fan.
That used to be the case, but is no longer. The algorithm pushes Muskoid facist views, and paid for blue tick trolls.
If you want to choose your own content then BlueSky is the place.
IIUC Bluesky is subscription driven: you subscribe to people and then get fed people who subscribed to those, and so on. Various block lists are available and can be shared. This leads to the "walled gardens" that Twitter folx criticise but is more pleasant and less insane.
Twitter is algorithm driven: you spend time looking at subject X and then get fed more about subject X and associated subjects. Blocking is more difficult. This leads to the "down the rabbit hole" that affects so many people. The effect is exacerbated by i) Elon being in charge of the algorithm and able to drive whatever nonsense pricks his fancy to millions of people in minutes, and ii) bots driving the algorithm further and faster and nastier/pornier.
It's obvious at this point that algorithm-driven social media is driving us collectively nuts, but nobody is doing anything about it, aaaargh.
It’s not true that “nobody is doing anything about social media.”
The Government is busy demolishing cycling fora which makes @kinabalu happy.
Do stop being so puerile ffs.
I tell you what, the next time a teenager commits suicide or murder because of some poisonous shit they've read online I'll pop on here and say "well at least that'll make @Malmesbury happy".
Fair enough?
The idea that the OSA is going to prevent terrible shit being available online is for the birds.
It’s the triumph of bureaucracy - the true purpose is to entrench the power of the bureaucratic state by making arbitrary enforcement powers available to an unelected body which can be used as a club against anyone that doesn’t have a political roof (as the Russians like to put it) to protect them.
The idea it's a sinister mechanism to close down speech which is 'difficult' for The Authorities is far more for the birds than the assumption that it's a good faith initiative intended (with jury out on effectiveness) to do more good than harm.
Your take (widely shared on here, I know) reminds me a little of people who were convinced government relished Lockdown and would hang on to the special powers they assumed long after the pandemic went away. That view was also widely shared on here fwiw.
The consensus is rather that it's a ham fisted measure which fails to achieve its (laudable) aims, while imposing disproportionate burdens on those who aren't big business.
Yup.
Reminds me of IR35 - when Blair was challenged on it, he acted puzzled and said the big consultancies didn’t have a problem.
Of course they didn’t. IR35 didn’t touch them - it was about one man band contractors. Who were competition to Accenture et al.
It's lazy ... much like the Frank Gardner one we were talking about.
Their material consists of a quote from one person from a group of 4 interviewed in a local park. I think it's one of the costs of having a prominent, noisy MP. No analysis to back it up, or thinking about overall demographics, or realising that with generally lower living costs here the pressure is perhaps likely to be on expensive places.
We had it when the Graun took a picture of three shops being refurbed in the square, ignored all the others, and ran a story about delapidated town centres.
And again when Novara came and did some public interviews at the times when everybody is at work.
Very weird. Massive drop in employment rate in Ashfield since 2021- otherwise was actually doing quite well. Anyone local know why?
Picking up this "Economic Inactivity in Ashfield" = 31.3% claim by Sky we discussed yesterday.
After a bit of digging, I'm going with lazy, incompetent journalist after a story, not carrying out the basics of journalism such fact checking , and making sure that the stats quoted are up to date an din context. It's a disgrace.
The 31.3% economic inactivity number is for 2022-2023. The more recent number 2023-2024 is 22.9%. The one for the year before is also low 20s. That looks like a Covid exception, but other similar places have a 30%+ outlier in 2021/2 or 2023/4, and the others in the low 20s. There is even data published in early 2025 on the ONS site.
"Ashfield is ..." with old data, when recent date is everywhere including the canonical ONS site, is horribly amateurish.
And that puts a question over the data series, which is very lumpy (which I did not know until More or Less this morning).
A change of 10% (8000 people) in one year is absurd (Covid excepted), and in normal stats Ashfield is usually in the 20% to 70% on the scale - balanced economy and things don't change rapidly.
Checking all of that is just the most basic of journalistic skills, which I would expect from a blogger in short trousers.
I've already posted this week's More or Less, which has a segment about how unreliable the Labour Force has been for a number of years. Why does a journo not know this?
I think I would give the journalist a pass here. This is on the ONS website under the relevant section.
No.
The journalist should have checked the most recent version of the data if they are going to take 2 years old stuff and make it present tense. I would also expect them to do the easy check on the sensitivity of the data, before they hang their whole article on it.
They reported 2022-2023 data. In 2023-2024 it is back down by 10%.
My personal gripe is that 99% of the piece is just vox pops, as is pretty much all of the BBC coverage of this story. Anybody can find a case or two that steers the story one way or another. A better bit of journalism would be a deep dive into who claims what, for how long have they claimed etc.
Fraser Nelson original piece several years ago exposing the scale of the economic inactivity was pure data.
A better bit of journalism would be to make it about Newark and blame Blowjob Bob .
Having had a look at this, I may push it to More or Less.
I supported Jenrick, and have been pretty disparaging on Kemi, but yesterday she gave probably her best intervention so far, and did it in an authentically 'Kemi' way - that is to say a modern 'Ted Talk' sort of feel.
The response seems to have been very good, and it opens up a fruitful avenue of opposition as Labour begins to inflict increasing hardship to meet the Net Zero target.
The environmental and climate justification for moving to Net Zero isn’t going to go away and is likely going to get more immediate and obvious in the next decade and a half.
We can argue about how we get to Net Zero but not about whether we should and Badenoch’s response was more about pandering to the climate change deniers than dealing with the real world.
Conservatives have traditionally been pragmatic types and have adapted to a changing world when required - oddly enough I take the view Conservatives could probably get us to Net Zero quicker and easier than Labour but to pander to those unwilling or unable to accept the world is changing isn’t Conservative at all and is part of the reason why the likes of Badenoch and Jenrick are seen as irrelevant to the current debate.
Sorry but that is a total misreading of Kemi's intervention (I take it you didn't listen to the speech) and in my opinion of the debate in general.
There is no environmental and/or climate justification for the UK adopting Net Zero in isolation, if it means simply displacing economic activity to other nations who have a more carbon-intensive production methods (like coal burning China), or importing energy that has been produced in a more carbon-intensive way (like American or Saudi LNG). The only variable in those scenarios is the impoverishment of the UK. We absolutely can and should argue about it, and sensible Governments like Sweden's have been upfront about their emissions rising and explained why. Kemi's central sell is to join the ranks of the sensible, and not subject the country to crippling future hardship just to get a round of applause at COP with no underlying plan. That is conservative pragmatism.
Kemi also never questioned the validity of the climate change drive - I do question it, but she didn't.
As for 'the need' for Net Zero becoming more apparent in the years ahead, that is questionable. These things are media events. If you read in detail the causes of the Californian wildfires, they have nothing to do with climate change. Likewise floods and droughts in the UK. In both instances, the causes are traced back to decisions (lack of water infrastructure and river maintenance in one case, scrub growing out of control in the other) of the green lobby iself. If the green lobby is tackled and the media moves on, so will the events.
Events like the Californian wildfires are complex and affected by many factors, but it is undoubtedly the case that climate change is a key root cause of such events becoming commoner and more severe. Attempting to blame the on the green lobby is the sort of thing that will lead people to dismiss you as a mad conspiracy theorist… well, in your case, people already dismiss you as a mad conspiracy theorist, so perhaps it won’t make any difference.
Due process “is how any of us can have confidence that the folks being packed onto airplanes and whisked off to El Salvador are members of TdA—as opposed to US citizens; political dissidents; or others whom the Trump admin. would just as soon be rid of.” https://x.com/steve_vladeck/status/1902330130883658155
The excellent David Allen Green on CJ Roberts's two sentence contribution to the USA discussion on whether judges should be sacked at the whim of the POTUS. Containing a glimmer of hope in dark times.
Apart from always stuffing his suppliers, how did this guy ever survive in business for more than six months ?
TRUMP: “Putin actually said to me, ‘If you don’t mind, friend, I hate to see you as my enemy.’ He said it very strongly. I had a very good relationship with Putin. I had a very good relationship with President Xi. A very good relationship with Kim Jong Un”.. https://x.com/PolymarketIntel/status/1902320166483931553
... I also have a great relationship with Swiss Tony and the ghosts of Hitler, Stalin, PolPot, Al Capone and John Dillinger.
The sad thing is that in the news report about him on the Today programme yesterday they felt the need to explain what the Battle of Britain was.
It felt somewhat strange that the reporters/editors of Today think that people who listen to their programme need to have the BoB explained to them.
I noted that, too. The sad thing is that we're getting old. Battle of Britain is no longer the piece of universal popular culture that it was a generation back.
The Battle of Britain was 85 years ago.
That's like me learning about the Boer Wars when I was 10. OK, the BoB is much more important an event than that, but some of my contemporaries' fathers had fought in WW2 and it had finished only 30 years previously, which is like, er, 1995 is now (can't think of anything that happened then)
So while WW2 was an epoch-making event and the ever-present background to the world many of us grew up in, it is now fairly ancient history
Morning, PB.
And the real worry is that the new right are now beginning to normalise Nazism. Twitter is increasingly full of very large amounts of normalised, extreme antisemitism, and earlier this week the central Maga figure Tucker Carlson implied it might have been better if Hitler had occupied Europe.
I think that is wrong. Twitter is not full of anything. Your twitter feed might be full of this, that or the other, but that is on account of your browsing habits (similar to the proverbial Thai hooker story).
Each person creates their own twitter universe. Not many stories pop up on your feed, I imagine, about miniature railways. Would not be the case if you were a miniature railways fan.
That used to be the case, but is no longer. The algorithm pushes Muskoid facist views, and paid for blue tick trolls.
If you want to choose your own content then BlueSky is the place.
IIUC Bluesky is subscription driven: you subscribe to people and then get fed people who subscribed to those, and so on. Various block lists are available and can be shared. This leads to the "walled gardens" that Twitter folx criticise but is more pleasant and less insane.
Twitter is algorithm driven: you spend time looking at subject X and then get fed more about subject X and associated subjects. Blocking is more difficult. This leads to the "down the rabbit hole" that affects so many people. The effect is exacerbated by i) Elon being in charge of the algorithm and able to drive whatever nonsense pricks his fancy to millions of people in minutes, and ii) bots driving the algorithm further and faster and nastier/pornier.
It's obvious at this point that algorithm-driven social media is driving us collectively nuts, but nobody is doing anything about it, aaaargh.
It’s not true that “nobody is doing anything about social media.”
The Government is busy demolishing cycling fora which makes @kinabalu happy.
Do stop being so puerile ffs.
I tell you what, the next time a teenager commits suicide or murder because of some poisonous shit they've read online I'll pop on here and say "well at least that'll make @Malmesbury happy".
Fair enough?
The idea that the OSA is going to prevent terrible shit being available online is for the birds.
It’s the triumph of bureaucracy - the true purpose is to entrench the power of the bureaucratic state by making arbitrary enforcement powers available to an unelected body which can be used as a club against anyone that doesn’t have a political roof (as the Russians like to put it) to protect them.
The idea it's a sinister mechanism to close down speech which is 'difficult' for The Authorities is far more for the birds than the assumption that it's a good faith initiative intended (with jury out on effectiveness) to do more good than harm.
Your take (widely shared on here, I know) reminds me a little of people who were convinced government relished Lockdown and would hang on to the special powers they assumed long after the pandemic went away. That view was also widely shared on here fwiw.
The consensus is rather that it's a ham fisted measure which fails to achieve its (laudable) aims, while imposing disproportionate burdens on those who aren't big business.
Stripped of the "out to get free speech" nonsense the view becomes perfectly reasonable if not necessarily (imo) correct. As for its practical impact I think we need to assess that once it's been operational for a while. If it truly does lead to lots of small benign sites closing down with little or no noticeable benefits elsewhere then ok it's a fail.
More in Common have Lab 25%, Ref 25%, Con 24%, Lib Dem 12%, Green 7%.
EC translate that into 182 seats, 168, 186, 57.
So Kemi PM with Reform confidence and supply, ironically despite the thread header
My view is that a Grand Coalition, Con, Lab, perhaps Lib Dems would be more likely.
Zero chance of any Con deal with Labour, that really would see Tories defect en masse to Reform certainly unless Starmer scrapped the family farm tax, rise in NI employers allowance and WFA cut (which the LDs would likely demand too)
No government is going to bring back WFA.
The only thing that's going to change is that those on pension credits will lose it as well at some point.
The Tories, LDs and Reform all back restoring WFA so they would all no confidence a Starmer minority government unless it restored it, at least on a means tested basis so more pensioners kept it
So you think the great issue of 2029 will be WFA ?
You have a very welfarist mentality and think its the priority of every government to hand out borrowed money to favoured demographics.
Well its going into reverse now and the discussions will be which groups will lose out and by how much.
For pensioners certainly WFA cuts are the big issue and they make up over a third of voters, for farmers it will be the family farm tax, for business owners the rise in NI, for those on welfare the cuts they face (especially if disabled), for those in NHS England the fact they have been scrapped, for the white working class immigration etc
Most of the above won't be voting Labour and for any party that backs Labour on the above
The country will care about other things in 4 years time. That is the last battle.
The voters affected won't, they won't forget and will want their revenge on Labour
Trouble is, the memory of 14 years (certainly the last eight) of your government will remain fresh in the mind for a few more years yet.
They don't need to vote Tory, they can vote Reform, LD or Green or SNP rather than Labour
True, but in most cases to do so would only facilitate the return of a Conservative government.
This is why like so many I have for many elections past voted tactically, and will continue to do so until the electoral system changes. That will probably not be in my lifetime.
The sad thing is that in the news report about him on the Today programme yesterday they felt the need to explain what the Battle of Britain was.
It felt somewhat strange that the reporters/editors of Today think that people who listen to their programme need to have the BoB explained to them.
I noted that, too. The sad thing is that we're getting old. Battle of Britain is no longer the piece of universal popular culture that it was a generation back.
The Battle of Britain was 85 years ago.
That's like me learning about the Boer Wars when I was 10. OK, the BoB is much more important an event than that, but some of my contemporaries' fathers had fought in WW2 and it had finished only 30 years previously, which is like, er, 1995 is now (can't think of anything that happened then)
So while WW2 was an epoch-making event and the ever-present background to the world many of us grew up in, it is now fairly ancient history
Morning, PB.
And the real worry is that the new right are now beginning to normalise Nazism. Twitter is increasingly full of very large amounts of normalised, extreme antisemitism, and earlier this week the central Maga figure Tucker Carlson implied it might have been better if Hitler had occupied Europe.
I think that is wrong. Twitter is not full of anything. Your twitter feed might be full of this, that or the other, but that is on account of your browsing habits (similar to the proverbial Thai hooker story).
Each person creates their own twitter universe. Not many stories pop up on your feed, I imagine, about miniature railways. Would not be the case if you were a miniature railways fan.
That used to be the case, but is no longer. The algorithm pushes Muskoid facist views, and paid for blue tick trolls.
If you want to choose your own content then BlueSky is the place.
IIUC Bluesky is subscription driven: you subscribe to people and then get fed people who subscribed to those, and so on. Various block lists are available and can be shared. This leads to the "walled gardens" that Twitter folx criticise but is more pleasant and less insane.
Twitter is algorithm driven: you spend time looking at subject X and then get fed more about subject X and associated subjects. Blocking is more difficult. This leads to the "down the rabbit hole" that affects so many people. The effect is exacerbated by i) Elon being in charge of the algorithm and able to drive whatever nonsense pricks his fancy to millions of people in minutes, and ii) bots driving the algorithm further and faster and nastier/pornier.
It's obvious at this point that algorithm-driven social media is driving us collectively nuts, but nobody is doing anything about it, aaaargh.
"...But here’s what I think might be new, or at least under-discussed: I am seeing mounting evidence that an increasing number of people are so used to algorithmically-generated feeds that they no longer care to have a self-directed experience that they are in control of. The more time I spend interacting with folks online, the more it feels like large swaths of people have forgotten to exercise their own agency. That is what I mean by algorithmic complacency. More and more people don’t seem to know or care how to view the world without a computer algorithm guiding what they see..."
I suppose I'm like that with YouTube, but why does it matter? In the olden days we had BBC (and later ITV too) and that was it.
If I want to know about something specific I look for it, but if I just want to be entertained/randomly informed for an hour or so I look at what I'm sent.
Why does it matter? Because the BBC had lofty goals to educate and inform, as well as entertain, when they determined what to show you. They and ITV followed basic editorial standards of fact-checking etc. In comparison, social media algorithms are driven largely by what keeps you watching, even if that entails feeding you lies and propaganda.
What tips the VP to his president's insanity is the plan to annexe Canada.
Night of Camp David https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_of_Camp_David Iowa Senator Jim MacVeagh is summoned to Camp David by US President Mark Hollenbach. MacVeagh, who is expected to become Hollenbach's next Vice President, becomes concerned because Hollenbach shows signs of intense paranoia. He erratically expresses his desire to develop a closer relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union, and attempts to cut ties with US allies in Europe. Hollenbach believes the US news media are conspiring against him. MacVeagh is the only person who notices that Hollenbach's mind is crumbling, as the presidential advisors and politicians he attempts to warn ignore him. ..
Ten minutes into my tour of “old Montevideo” and the guide is reduced to demonstrating the “quality of the wood” of the doorway to the presidential palace
The sad thing is that in the news report about him on the Today programme yesterday they felt the need to explain what the Battle of Britain was.
It felt somewhat strange that the reporters/editors of Today think that people who listen to their programme need to have the BoB explained to them.
I noted that, too. The sad thing is that we're getting old. Battle of Britain is no longer the piece of universal popular culture that it was a generation back.
The Battle of Britain was 85 years ago.
That's like me learning about the Boer Wars when I was 10. OK, the BoB is much more important an event than that, but some of my contemporaries' fathers had fought in WW2 and it had finished only 30 years previously, which is like, er, 1995 is now (can't think of anything that happened then)
So while WW2 was an epoch-making event and the ever-present background to the world many of us grew up in, it is now fairly ancient history
Morning, PB.
And the real worry is that the new right are now beginning to normalise Nazism. Twitter is increasingly full of very large amounts of normalised, extreme antisemitism, and earlier this week the central Maga figure Tucker Carlson implied it might have been better if Hitler had occupied Europe.
I think that is wrong. Twitter is not full of anything. Your twitter feed might be full of this, that or the other, but that is on account of your browsing habits (similar to the proverbial Thai hooker story).
Each person creates their own twitter universe. Not many stories pop up on your feed, I imagine, about miniature railways. Would not be the case if you were a miniature railways fan.
I thought this was the case with YouTube, but after Mr Trump became President again the (political) videos that it presented to me changed completely. I was mostly getting right-wing youtubers (not far-right, just ordinary sensible conservative types) but as soon as his inauguration took place, it changed over to left-wing (again not far left, just ordinary sensible leftie types).
I didn't suddenly change my views, the choices YouTube was offering me suddenly changed. As though it was the most active youtubers coming up to the top of the algorithm, so to speak, and the most motivated group changed over. I'd be quite interested to know how some of those 'ordinary sensible conservative types' are responding to events, actually, but they don't get pushed at me any more & I've forgotten their identifiers.
Edited to change 2nd conservative to leftie.
OK, I'll bite. Care to share who the ordinary sensible conservative youtubers and/or ordinary sensible leftie youtubers are? You can PM me if you want to keep them private
J. J. McCullough is a good, Canadian, conservative (in the traditional sense: not MAGA) social commentator, doing some society stuff, some political stuff.
James Ker-Lindsay is good on international relations and state formation. He’s a Remainer, but otherwise fairly neutral on left-right stuff.
The sad thing is that in the news report about him on the Today programme yesterday they felt the need to explain what the Battle of Britain was.
It felt somewhat strange that the reporters/editors of Today think that people who listen to their programme need to have the BoB explained to them.
I noted that, too. The sad thing is that we're getting old. Battle of Britain is no longer the piece of universal popular culture that it was a generation back.
The Battle of Britain was 85 years ago.
That's like me learning about the Boer Wars when I was 10. OK, the BoB is much more important an event than that, but some of my contemporaries' fathers had fought in WW2 and it had finished only 30 years previously, which is like, er, 1995 is now (can't think of anything that happened then)
So while WW2 was an epoch-making event and the ever-present background to the world many of us grew up in, it is now fairly ancient history
Morning, PB.
And the real worry is that the new right are now beginning to normalise Nazism. Twitter is increasingly full of very large amounts of normalised, extreme antisemitism, and earlier this week the central Maga figure Tucker Carlson implied it might have been better if Hitler had occupied Europe.
I think that is wrong. Twitter is not full of anything. Your twitter feed might be full of this, that or the other, but that is on account of your browsing habits (similar to the proverbial Thai hooker story).
Each person creates their own twitter universe. Not many stories pop up on your feed, I imagine, about miniature railways. Would not be the case if you were a miniature railways fan.
That used to be the case, but is no longer. The algorithm pushes Muskoid facist views, and paid for blue tick trolls.
If you want to choose your own content then BlueSky is the place.
IIUC Bluesky is subscription driven: you subscribe to people and then get fed people who subscribed to those, and so on. Various block lists are available and can be shared. This leads to the "walled gardens" that Twitter folx criticise but is more pleasant and less insane.
Twitter is algorithm driven: you spend time looking at subject X and then get fed more about subject X and associated subjects. Blocking is more difficult. This leads to the "down the rabbit hole" that affects so many people. The effect is exacerbated by i) Elon being in charge of the algorithm and able to drive whatever nonsense pricks his fancy to millions of people in minutes, and ii) bots driving the algorithm further and faster and nastier/pornier.
It's obvious at this point that algorithm-driven social media is driving us collectively nuts, but nobody is doing anything about it, aaaargh.
It’s not true that “nobody is doing anything about social media.”
The Government is busy demolishing cycling fora which makes @kinabalu happy.
Do stop being so puerile ffs.
I tell you what, the next time a teenager commits suicide or murder because of some poisonous shit they've read online I'll pop on here and say "well at least that'll make @Malmesbury happy".
Fair enough?
The idea that the OSA is going to prevent terrible shit being available online is for the birds.
It’s the triumph of bureaucracy - the true purpose is to entrench the power of the bureaucratic state by making arbitrary enforcement powers available to an unelected body which can be used as a club against anyone that doesn’t have a political roof (as the Russians like to put it) to protect them.
The idea it's a sinister mechanism to close down speech which is 'difficult' for The Authorities is far more for the birds than the assumption that it's a good faith initiative intended (with jury out on effectiveness) to do more good than harm.
Your take (widely shared on here, I know) reminds me a little of people who were convinced government relished Lockdown and would hang on to the special powers they assumed long after the pandemic went away. That view was also widely shared on here fwiw.
The consensus is rather that it's a ham fisted measure which fails to achieve its (laudable) aims, while imposing disproportionate burdens on those who aren't big business.
Yup.
Reminds me of IR35 - when Blair was challenged on it, he acted puzzled and said the big consultancies didn’t have a problem.
Of course they didn’t. IR35 didn’t touch them - it was about one man band contractors. Who were competition to Accenture et al.
IR35 closed down a loophole that tons of well paid City workers were using to avoid tax. Including me at one point. I was earning multiples of my teacher sister and paying barely more than her to HMRC.
So if it reminds you of that, it bodes quite well.
It's lazy ... much like the Frank Gardner one we were talking about.
Their material consists of a quote from one person from a group of 4 interviewed in a local park. I think it's one of the costs of having a prominent, noisy MP. No analysis to back it up, or thinking about overall demographics, or realising that with generally lower living costs here the pressure is perhaps likely to be on expensive places.
We had it when the Graun took a picture of three shops being refurbed in the square, ignored all the others, and ran a story about delapidated town centres.
And again when Novara came and did some public interviews at the times when everybody is at work.
Very weird. Massive drop in employment rate in Ashfield since 2021- otherwise was actually doing quite well. Anyone local know why?
Picking up this "Economic Inactivity in Ashfield" = 31.3% claim by Sky we discussed yesterday.
After a bit of digging, I'm going with lazy, incompetent journalist after a story, not carrying out the basics of journalism such fact checking , and making sure that the stats quoted are up to date an din context. It's a disgrace.
The 31.3% economic inactivity number is for 2022-2023. The more recent number 2023-2024 is 22.9%. The one for the year before is also low 20s. That looks like a Covid exception, but other similar places have a 30%+ outlier in 2021/2 or 2023/4, and the others in the low 20s. There is even data published in early 2025 on the ONS site.
"Ashfield is ..." with old data, when recent date is everywhere including the canonical ONS site, is horribly amateurish.
And that puts a question over the data series, which is very lumpy (which I did not know until More or Less this morning).
A change of 10% (8000 people) in one year is absurd (Covid excepted), and in normal stats Ashfield is usually in the 20% to 70% on the scale - balanced economy and things don't change rapidly.
Checking all of that is just the most basic of journalistic skills, which I would expect from a blogger in short trousers.
I've already posted this week's More or Less, which has a segment about how unreliable the Labour Force has been for a number of years. Why does a journo not know this?
I think I would give the journalist a pass here. This is on the ONS website under the relevant section.
No.
The journalist should have checked the most recent version of the data if they are going to take 2 years old stuff and make it present tense. I would also expect them to do the easy check on the sensitivity of the data, before they hang their whole article on it.
They reported 2022-2023 data. In 2023-2024 it is back down by 10%.
My personal gripe is that 99% of the piece is just vox pops, as is pretty much all of the BBC coverage of this story. Anybody can find a case or two that steers the story one way or another. A better bit of journalism would be a deep dive into who claims what, for how long have they claimed etc.
Fraser Nelson original piece several years ago exposing the scale of the economic inactivity was pure data.
Not just the BBC, iTV and other news organs too.
Last nights ITV main broadcast even, after trigger warning, showed someone having a fit.
Of course by implication, the govt are taking money from deserving people and they are pretty much all in a similar boat.
The sad thing is that in the news report about him on the Today programme yesterday they felt the need to explain what the Battle of Britain was.
It felt somewhat strange that the reporters/editors of Today think that people who listen to their programme need to have the BoB explained to them.
I noted that, too. The sad thing is that we're getting old. Battle of Britain is no longer the piece of universal popular culture that it was a generation back.
The Battle of Britain was 85 years ago.
That's like me learning about the Boer Wars when I was 10. OK, the BoB is much more important an event than that, but some of my contemporaries' fathers had fought in WW2 and it had finished only 30 years previously, which is like, er, 1995 is now (can't think of anything that happened then)
So while WW2 was an epoch-making event and the ever-present background to the world many of us grew up in, it is now fairly ancient history
Morning, PB.
And the real worry is that the new right are now beginning to normalise Nazism. Twitter is increasingly full of very large amounts of normalised, extreme antisemitism, and earlier this week the central Maga figure Tucker Carlson implied it might have been better if Hitler had occupied Europe.
I think that is wrong. Twitter is not full of anything. Your twitter feed might be full of this, that or the other, but that is on account of your browsing habits (similar to the proverbial Thai hooker story).
Each person creates their own twitter universe. Not many stories pop up on your feed, I imagine, about miniature railways. Would not be the case if you were a miniature railways fan.
That used to be the case, but is no longer. The algorithm pushes Muskoid facist views, and paid for blue tick trolls.
If you want to choose your own content then BlueSky is the place.
IIUC Bluesky is subscription driven: you subscribe to people and then get fed people who subscribed to those, and so on. Various block lists are available and can be shared. This leads to the "walled gardens" that Twitter folx criticise but is more pleasant and less insane.
Twitter is algorithm driven: you spend time looking at subject X and then get fed more about subject X and associated subjects. Blocking is more difficult. This leads to the "down the rabbit hole" that affects so many people. The effect is exacerbated by i) Elon being in charge of the algorithm and able to drive whatever nonsense pricks his fancy to millions of people in minutes, and ii) bots driving the algorithm further and faster and nastier/pornier.
It's obvious at this point that algorithm-driven social media is driving us collectively nuts, but nobody is doing anything about it, aaaargh.
"...But here’s what I think might be new, or at least under-discussed: I am seeing mounting evidence that an increasing number of people are so used to algorithmically-generated feeds that they no longer care to have a self-directed experience that they are in control of. The more time I spend interacting with folks online, the more it feels like large swaths of people have forgotten to exercise their own agency. That is what I mean by algorithmic complacency. More and more people don’t seem to know or care how to view the world without a computer algorithm guiding what they see..."
I suppose I'm like that with YouTube, but why does it matter? In the olden days we had BBC (and later ITV too) and that was it.
If I want to know about something specific I look for it, but if I just want to be entertained/randomly informed for an hour or so I look at what I'm sent.
Yes, I'm a bit like that too. I tend to use YouTube as aural wallpaper to entertain my hindbrain while I work on the laptop, and algorithm feeds help. However I periodically delete my history and reset the algorithm by viewing certain specific videos, and then the algorithm careers off in a new direction.
The sad thing is that in the news report about him on the Today programme yesterday they felt the need to explain what the Battle of Britain was.
It felt somewhat strange that the reporters/editors of Today think that people who listen to their programme need to have the BoB explained to them.
I noted that, too. The sad thing is that we're getting old. Battle of Britain is no longer the piece of universal popular culture that it was a generation back.
The Battle of Britain was 85 years ago.
That's like me learning about the Boer Wars when I was 10. OK, the BoB is much more important an event than that, but some of my contemporaries' fathers had fought in WW2 and it had finished only 30 years previously, which is like, er, 1995 is now (can't think of anything that happened then)
So while WW2 was an epoch-making event and the ever-present background to the world many of us grew up in, it is now fairly ancient history
Morning, PB.
And the real worry is that the new right are now beginning to normalise Nazism. Twitter is increasingly full of very large amounts of normalised, extreme antisemitism, and earlier this week the central Maga figure Tucker Carlson implied it might have been better if Hitler had occupied Europe.
I think that is wrong. Twitter is not full of anything. Your twitter feed might be full of this, that or the other, but that is on account of your browsing habits (similar to the proverbial Thai hooker story).
Each person creates their own twitter universe. Not many stories pop up on your feed, I imagine, about miniature railways. Would not be the case if you were a miniature railways fan.
That used to be the case, but is no longer. The algorithm pushes Muskoid facist views, and paid for blue tick trolls.
If you want to choose your own content then BlueSky is the place.
IIUC Bluesky is subscription driven: you subscribe to people and then get fed people who subscribed to those, and so on. Various block lists are available and can be shared. This leads to the "walled gardens" that Twitter folx criticise but is more pleasant and less insane.
Twitter is algorithm driven: you spend time looking at subject X and then get fed more about subject X and associated subjects. Blocking is more difficult. This leads to the "down the rabbit hole" that affects so many people. The effect is exacerbated by i) Elon being in charge of the algorithm and able to drive whatever nonsense pricks his fancy to millions of people in minutes, and ii) bots driving the algorithm further and faster and nastier/pornier.
It's obvious at this point that algorithm-driven social media is driving us collectively nuts, but nobody is doing anything about it, aaaargh.
It’s not true that “nobody is doing anything about social media.”
The Government is busy demolishing cycling fora which makes @kinabalu happy.
Do stop being so puerile ffs.
I tell you what, the next time a teenager commits suicide or murder because of some poisonous shit they've read online I'll pop on here and say "well at least that'll make @Malmesbury happy".
Fair enough?
The idea that the OSA is going to prevent terrible shit being available online is for the birds.
It’s the triumph of bureaucracy - the true purpose is to entrench the power of the bureaucratic state by making arbitrary enforcement powers available to an unelected body which can be used as a club against anyone that doesn’t have a political roof (as the Russians like to put it) to protect them.
The idea it's a sinister mechanism to close down speech which is 'difficult' for The Authorities is far more for the birds than the assumption that it's a good faith initiative intended (with jury out on effectiveness) to do more good than harm.
Your take (widely shared on here, I know) reminds me a little of people who were convinced government relished Lockdown and would hang on to the special powers they assumed long after the pandemic went away. That view was also widely shared on here fwiw.
The consensus is rather that it's a ham fisted measure which fails to achieve its (laudable) aims, while imposing disproportionate burdens on those who aren't big business.
Yup.
Reminds me of IR35 - when Blair was challenged on it, he acted puzzled and said the big consultancies didn’t have a problem.
Of course they didn’t. IR35 didn’t touch them - it was about one man band contractors. Who were competition to Accenture et al.
IR35 closed down a loophole that tons of well paid City workers were using to avoid tax. Including me at one point. I was earning multiples of my teacher sister and paying barely more than her to HMRC.
So if it reminds you of that, it bodes quite well.
Not just city workers, automotive sector workers too. It was seen as a rite of passage to move to a ltd company contractor role to make some money, no risk.
It was also not uncommon, as it has happened at places I worked, for John smith, designer, employed full time, to leave on a Friday and John Smith Ltd, design services, charging a day rate to start on the Monday.
Ten minutes into my tour of “old Montevideo” and the guide is reduced to demonstrating the “quality of the wood” of the doorway to the presidential palace
No Graf Spee themed tours (which may involve a boat trip)? Surely one of the more interesting things to have happened in the vicinity.
The sad thing is that in the news report about him on the Today programme yesterday they felt the need to explain what the Battle of Britain was.
It felt somewhat strange that the reporters/editors of Today think that people who listen to their programme need to have the BoB explained to them.
I noted that, too. The sad thing is that we're getting old. Battle of Britain is no longer the piece of universal popular culture that it was a generation back.
The Battle of Britain was 85 years ago.
That's like me learning about the Boer Wars when I was 10. OK, the BoB is much more important an event than that, but some of my contemporaries' fathers had fought in WW2 and it had finished only 30 years previously, which is like, er, 1995 is now (can't think of anything that happened then)
So while WW2 was an epoch-making event and the ever-present background to the world many of us grew up in, it is now fairly ancient history
Morning, PB.
And the real worry is that the new right are now beginning to normalise Nazism. Twitter is increasingly full of very large amounts of normalised, extreme antisemitism, and earlier this week the central Maga figure Tucker Carlson implied it might have been better if Hitler had occupied Europe.
I think that is wrong. Twitter is not full of anything. Your twitter feed might be full of this, that or the other, but that is on account of your browsing habits (similar to the proverbial Thai hooker story).
Each person creates their own twitter universe. Not many stories pop up on your feed, I imagine, about miniature railways. Would not be the case if you were a miniature railways fan.
I thought this was the case with YouTube, but after Mr Trump became President again the (political) videos that it presented to me changed completely. I was mostly getting right-wing youtubers (not far-right, just ordinary sensible conservative types) but as soon as his inauguration took place, it changed over to left-wing (again not far left, just ordinary sensible leftie types).
I didn't suddenly change my views, the choices YouTube was offering me suddenly changed. As though it was the most active youtubers coming up to the top of the algorithm, so to speak, and the most motivated group changed over. I'd be quite interested to know how some of those 'ordinary sensible conservative types' are responding to events, actually, but they don't get pushed at me any more & I've forgotten their identifiers.
Edited to change 2nd conservative to leftie.
OK, I'll bite. Care to share who the ordinary sensible conservative youtubers and/or ordinary sensible leftie youtubers are? You can PM me if you want to keep them private
J. J. McCullough is a good, Canadian, conservative (in the traditional sense: not MAGA) social commentator, doing some society stuff, some political stuff.
James Ker-Lindsay is good on international relations and state formation. He’s a Remainer, but otherwise fairly neutral on left-right stuff.
Useful, thank you. I was already familiar with jjmc and the fact that he does do the "aboot", which I thought was a South Park myth, as nobody Canadian I know uses it. I shall have a peek at jkl
The sad thing is that in the news report about him on the Today programme yesterday they felt the need to explain what the Battle of Britain was.
It felt somewhat strange that the reporters/editors of Today think that people who listen to their programme need to have the BoB explained to them.
I noted that, too. The sad thing is that we're getting old. Battle of Britain is no longer the piece of universal popular culture that it was a generation back.
The Battle of Britain was 85 years ago.
That's like me learning about the Boer Wars when I was 10. OK, the BoB is much more important an event than that, but some of my contemporaries' fathers had fought in WW2 and it had finished only 30 years previously, which is like, er, 1995 is now (can't think of anything that happened then)
So while WW2 was an epoch-making event and the ever-present background to the world many of us grew up in, it is now fairly ancient history
Morning, PB.
And the real worry is that the new right are now beginning to normalise Nazism. Twitter is increasingly full of very large amounts of normalised, extreme antisemitism, and earlier this week the central Maga figure Tucker Carlson implied it might have been better if Hitler had occupied Europe.
I think that is wrong. Twitter is not full of anything. Your twitter feed might be full of this, that or the other, but that is on account of your browsing habits (similar to the proverbial Thai hooker story).
Each person creates their own twitter universe. Not many stories pop up on your feed, I imagine, about miniature railways. Would not be the case if you were a miniature railways fan.
That used to be the case, but is no longer. The algorithm pushes Muskoid facist views, and paid for blue tick trolls.
If you want to choose your own content then BlueSky is the place.
IIUC Bluesky is subscription driven: you subscribe to people and then get fed people who subscribed to those, and so on. Various block lists are available and can be shared. This leads to the "walled gardens" that Twitter folx criticise but is more pleasant and less insane.
Twitter is algorithm driven: you spend time looking at subject X and then get fed more about subject X and associated subjects. Blocking is more difficult. This leads to the "down the rabbit hole" that affects so many people. The effect is exacerbated by i) Elon being in charge of the algorithm and able to drive whatever nonsense pricks his fancy to millions of people in minutes, and ii) bots driving the algorithm further and faster and nastier/pornier.
It's obvious at this point that algorithm-driven social media is driving us collectively nuts, but nobody is doing anything about it, aaaargh.
"...But here’s what I think might be new, or at least under-discussed: I am seeing mounting evidence that an increasing number of people are so used to algorithmically-generated feeds that they no longer care to have a self-directed experience that they are in control of. The more time I spend interacting with folks online, the more it feels like large swaths of people have forgotten to exercise their own agency. That is what I mean by algorithmic complacency. More and more people don’t seem to know or care how to view the world without a computer algorithm guiding what they see..."
I suppose I'm like that with YouTube, but why does it matter? In the olden days we had BBC (and later ITV too) and that was it.
If I want to know about something specific I look for it, but if I just want to be entertained/randomly informed for an hour or so I look at what I'm sent.
Why does it matter? Because the BBC had lofty goals to educate and inform, as well as entertain, when they determined what to show you. They and ITV followed basic editorial standards of fact-checking etc. In comparison, social media algorithms are driven largely by what keeps you watching, even if that entails feeding you lies and propaganda.
With Youtube, we could start by getting rid of all the fake medical adverts - which are a bit of USA poison dripping in here.
Ten minutes into my tour of “old Montevideo” and the guide is reduced to demonstrating the “quality of the wood” of the doorway to the presidential palace
Ten minutes into my tour of “old Montevideo” and the guide is reduced to demonstrating the “quality of the wood” of the doorway to the presidential palace
No Graf Spee themed tours (which may involve a boat trip)? Surely one of the more interesting things to have happened in the vicinity.
Have you found the Graf Spee's eagle, which is controversial - portly, but controversial? For some that might have some Noom.
The sad thing is that in the news report about him on the Today programme yesterday they felt the need to explain what the Battle of Britain was.
It felt somewhat strange that the reporters/editors of Today think that people who listen to their programme need to have the BoB explained to them.
I noted that, too. The sad thing is that we're getting old. Battle of Britain is no longer the piece of universal popular culture that it was a generation back.
The Battle of Britain was 85 years ago.
That's like me learning about the Boer Wars when I was 10. OK, the BoB is much more important an event than that, but some of my contemporaries' fathers had fought in WW2 and it had finished only 30 years previously, which is like, er, 1995 is now (can't think of anything that happened then)
So while WW2 was an epoch-making event and the ever-present background to the world many of us grew up in, it is now fairly ancient history
Morning, PB.
And the real worry is that the new right are now beginning to normalise Nazism. Twitter is increasingly full of very large amounts of normalised, extreme antisemitism, and earlier this week the central Maga figure Tucker Carlson implied it might have been better if Hitler had occupied Europe.
I think that is wrong. Twitter is not full of anything. Your twitter feed might be full of this, that or the other, but that is on account of your browsing habits (similar to the proverbial Thai hooker story).
Each person creates their own twitter universe. Not many stories pop up on your feed, I imagine, about miniature railways. Would not be the case if you were a miniature railways fan.
That used to be the case, but is no longer. The algorithm pushes Muskoid facist views, and paid for blue tick trolls.
If you want to choose your own content then BlueSky is the place.
IIUC Bluesky is subscription driven: you subscribe to people and then get fed people who subscribed to those, and so on. Various block lists are available and can be shared. This leads to the "walled gardens" that Twitter folx criticise but is more pleasant and less insane.
Twitter is algorithm driven: you spend time looking at subject X and then get fed more about subject X and associated subjects. Blocking is more difficult. This leads to the "down the rabbit hole" that affects so many people. The effect is exacerbated by i) Elon being in charge of the algorithm and able to drive whatever nonsense pricks his fancy to millions of people in minutes, and ii) bots driving the algorithm further and faster and nastier/pornier.
It's obvious at this point that algorithm-driven social media is driving us collectively nuts, but nobody is doing anything about it, aaaargh.
It’s not true that “nobody is doing anything about social media.”
The Government is busy demolishing cycling fora which makes @kinabalu happy.
Do stop being so puerile ffs.
I tell you what, the next time a teenager commits suicide or murder because of some poisonous shit they've read online I'll pop on here and say "well at least that'll make @Malmesbury happy".
Fair enough?
The idea that the OSA is going to prevent terrible shit being available online is for the birds.
It’s the triumph of bureaucracy - the true purpose is to entrench the power of the bureaucratic state by making arbitrary enforcement powers available to an unelected body which can be used as a club against anyone that doesn’t have a political roof (as the Russians like to put it) to protect them.
The idea it's a sinister mechanism to close down speech which is 'difficult' for The Authorities is far more for the birds than the assumption that it's a good faith initiative intended (with jury out on effectiveness) to do more good than harm.
Your take (widely shared on here, I know) reminds me a little of people who were convinced government relished Lockdown and would hang on to the special powers they assumed long after the pandemic went away. That view was also widely shared on here fwiw.
The consensus is rather that it's a ham fisted measure which fails to achieve its (laudable) aims, while imposing disproportionate burdens on those who aren't big business.
Yup.
Reminds me of IR35 - when Blair was challenged on it, he acted puzzled and said the big consultancies didn’t have a problem.
Of course they didn’t. IR35 didn’t touch them - it was about one man band contractors. Who were competition to Accenture et al.
IR35 closed down a loophole that tons of well paid City workers were using to avoid tax. Including me at one point. I was earning multiples of my teacher sister and paying barely more than her to HMRC.
So if it reminds you of that, it bodes quite well.
IR35 also destroyed much of the legitimate small consultancy business.
Have worked for 9 clients in the last 18 months. All short term contracts ranging from 10 days work to 2 months. In all cases I should be outside IR35 according to HMRC.
But because they have put the responsibility for the decision with the end user companies and they are risk averse they say that everyone must be inside no matter how short the contract.
So I currently pay 51% of my day rate in tax and NI.
People like you milking the system are what screwed the legitimate consultants.
Ten minutes into my tour of “old Montevideo” and the guide is reduced to demonstrating the “quality of the wood” of the doorway to the presidential palace
The sad thing is that in the news report about him on the Today programme yesterday they felt the need to explain what the Battle of Britain was.
It felt somewhat strange that the reporters/editors of Today think that people who listen to their programme need to have the BoB explained to them.
I noted that, too. The sad thing is that we're getting old. Battle of Britain is no longer the piece of universal popular culture that it was a generation back.
The Battle of Britain was 85 years ago.
That's like me learning about the Boer Wars when I was 10. OK, the BoB is much more important an event than that, but some of my contemporaries' fathers had fought in WW2 and it had finished only 30 years previously, which is like, er, 1995 is now (can't think of anything that happened then)
So while WW2 was an epoch-making event and the ever-present background to the world many of us grew up in, it is now fairly ancient history
Morning, PB.
And the real worry is that the new right are now beginning to normalise Nazism. Twitter is increasingly full of very large amounts of normalised, extreme antisemitism, and earlier this week the central Maga figure Tucker Carlson implied it might have been better if Hitler had occupied Europe.
I think that is wrong. Twitter is not full of anything. Your twitter feed might be full of this, that or the other, but that is on account of your browsing habits (similar to the proverbial Thai hooker story).
Each person creates their own twitter universe. Not many stories pop up on your feed, I imagine, about miniature railways. Would not be the case if you were a miniature railways fan.
That used to be the case, but is no longer. The algorithm pushes Muskoid facist views, and paid for blue tick trolls.
If you want to choose your own content then BlueSky is the place.
IIUC Bluesky is subscription driven: you subscribe to people and then get fed people who subscribed to those, and so on. Various block lists are available and can be shared. This leads to the "walled gardens" that Twitter folx criticise but is more pleasant and less insane.
Twitter is algorithm driven: you spend time looking at subject X and then get fed more about subject X and associated subjects. Blocking is more difficult. This leads to the "down the rabbit hole" that affects so many people. The effect is exacerbated by i) Elon being in charge of the algorithm and able to drive whatever nonsense pricks his fancy to millions of people in minutes, and ii) bots driving the algorithm further and faster and nastier/pornier.
It's obvious at this point that algorithm-driven social media is driving us collectively nuts, but nobody is doing anything about it, aaaargh.
It’s not true that “nobody is doing anything about social media.”
The Government is busy demolishing cycling fora which makes @kinabalu happy.
Do stop being so puerile ffs.
I tell you what, the next time a teenager commits suicide or murder because of some poisonous shit they've read online I'll pop on here and say "well at least that'll make @Malmesbury happy".
Fair enough?
The idea that the OSA is going to prevent terrible shit being available online is for the birds.
It’s the triumph of bureaucracy - the true purpose is to entrench the power of the bureaucratic state by making arbitrary enforcement powers available to an unelected body which can be used as a club against anyone that doesn’t have a political roof (as the Russians like to put it) to protect them.
The idea it's a sinister mechanism to close down speech which is 'difficult' for The Authorities is far more for the birds than the assumption that it's a good faith initiative intended (with jury out on effectiveness) to do more good than harm.
Your take (widely shared on here, I know) reminds me a little of people who were convinced government relished Lockdown and would hang on to the special powers they assumed long after the pandemic went away. That view was also widely shared on here fwiw.
The consensus is rather that it's a ham fisted measure which fails to achieve its (laudable) aims, while imposing disproportionate burdens on those who aren't big business.
Yup.
Reminds me of IR35 - when Blair was challenged on it, he acted puzzled and said the big consultancies didn’t have a problem.
Of course they didn’t. IR35 didn’t touch them - it was about one man band contractors. Who were competition to Accenture et al.
IR35 closed down a loophole that tons of well paid City workers were using to avoid tax. Including me at one point. I was earning multiples of my teacher sister and paying barely more than her to HMRC.
So if it reminds you of that, it bodes quite well.
Not just city workers, automotive sector workers too. It was seen as a rite of passage to move to a ltd company contractor role to make some money, no risk.
It was also not uncommon, as it has happened at places I worked, for John smith, designer, employed full time, to leave on a Friday and John Smith Ltd, design services, charging a day rate to start on the Monday.
Clear tax dodgers.
Yes, rife in the City but not just there. Thing is, if you have multiple clients, or each assignment is short, or you're drumming up your own business, taking entrepreneurial risk, that's one thing. That's different to having a 'job'. But these folk weren't doing that. They'd be working fulltime at one place for years, indistinguishable from employees other than their admin set-up as one man limited companies. Then it's dividends instead of PAYE and it's all sorts of expenses getting written off. Upshot, an effective tax rate a fraction of what it otherwise would be. Nice work if you can get it.
Ten minutes into my tour of “old Montevideo” and the guide is reduced to demonstrating the “quality of the wood” of the doorway to the presidential palace
No Graf Spee themed tours (which may involve a boat trip)? Surely one of the more interesting things to have happened in the vicinity.
Have you found the Graf Spee's eagle, which is controversial - portly, but controversial? For some that might have some Noom.
I had a vague memory of the brouhaha.
Not sure where it is now, would look great in the boardroom of some tech bro.
The sad thing is that in the news report about him on the Today programme yesterday they felt the need to explain what the Battle of Britain was.
It felt somewhat strange that the reporters/editors of Today think that people who listen to their programme need to have the BoB explained to them.
I noted that, too. The sad thing is that we're getting old. Battle of Britain is no longer the piece of universal popular culture that it was a generation back.
The Battle of Britain was 85 years ago.
That's like me learning about the Boer Wars when I was 10. OK, the BoB is much more important an event than that, but some of my contemporaries' fathers had fought in WW2 and it had finished only 30 years previously, which is like, er, 1995 is now (can't think of anything that happened then)
So while WW2 was an epoch-making event and the ever-present background to the world many of us grew up in, it is now fairly ancient history
Morning, PB.
And the real worry is that the new right are now beginning to normalise Nazism. Twitter is increasingly full of very large amounts of normalised, extreme antisemitism, and earlier this week the central Maga figure Tucker Carlson implied it might have been better if Hitler had occupied Europe.
I think that is wrong. Twitter is not full of anything. Your twitter feed might be full of this, that or the other, but that is on account of your browsing habits (similar to the proverbial Thai hooker story).
Each person creates their own twitter universe. Not many stories pop up on your feed, I imagine, about miniature railways. Would not be the case if you were a miniature railways fan.
That used to be the case, but is no longer. The algorithm pushes Muskoid facist views, and paid for blue tick trolls.
If you want to choose your own content then BlueSky is the place.
IIUC Bluesky is subscription driven: you subscribe to people and then get fed people who subscribed to those, and so on. Various block lists are available and can be shared. This leads to the "walled gardens" that Twitter folx criticise but is more pleasant and less insane.
Twitter is algorithm driven: you spend time looking at subject X and then get fed more about subject X and associated subjects. Blocking is more difficult. This leads to the "down the rabbit hole" that affects so many people. The effect is exacerbated by i) Elon being in charge of the algorithm and able to drive whatever nonsense pricks his fancy to millions of people in minutes, and ii) bots driving the algorithm further and faster and nastier/pornier.
It's obvious at this point that algorithm-driven social media is driving us collectively nuts, but nobody is doing anything about it, aaaargh.
It’s not true that “nobody is doing anything about social media.”
The Government is busy demolishing cycling fora which makes @kinabalu happy.
Do stop being so puerile ffs.
I tell you what, the next time a teenager commits suicide or murder because of some poisonous shit they've read online I'll pop on here and say "well at least that'll make @Malmesbury happy".
Fair enough?
The idea that the OSA is going to prevent terrible shit being available online is for the birds.
It’s the triumph of bureaucracy - the true purpose is to entrench the power of the bureaucratic state by making arbitrary enforcement powers available to an unelected body which can be used as a club against anyone that doesn’t have a political roof (as the Russians like to put it) to protect them.
The idea it's a sinister mechanism to close down speech which is 'difficult' for The Authorities is far more for the birds than the assumption that it's a good faith initiative intended (with jury out on effectiveness) to do more good than harm.
Your take (widely shared on here, I know) reminds me a little of people who were convinced government relished Lockdown and would hang on to the special powers they assumed long after the pandemic went away. That view was also widely shared on here fwiw.
The consensus is rather that it's a ham fisted measure which fails to achieve its (laudable) aims, while imposing disproportionate burdens on those who aren't big business.
Yup.
Reminds me of IR35 - when Blair was challenged on it, he acted puzzled and said the big consultancies didn’t have a problem.
Of course they didn’t. IR35 didn’t touch them - it was about one man band contractors. Who were competition to Accenture et al.
IR35 closed down a loophole that tons of well paid City workers were using to avoid tax. Including me at one point. I was earning multiples of my teacher sister and paying barely more than her to HMRC.
So if it reminds you of that, it bodes quite well.
Not just city workers, automotive sector workers too. It was seen as a rite of passage to move to a ltd company contractor role to make some money, no risk.
It was also not uncommon, as it has happened at places I worked, for John smith, designer, employed full time, to leave on a Friday and John Smith Ltd, design services, charging a day rate to start on the Monday.
Clear tax dodgers.
Yes, rife in the City but not just there. Thing is, if you have multiple clients, or each assignment is short, or you're drumming up your own business, taking entrepreneurial risk, that's one thing. That's different to having a 'job'. But these folk weren't doing that. They'd be working fulltime at one place for years, indistinguishable from employees other than their admin set-up as one man limited companies. Then it's dividends instead of PAYE and it's all sorts of expenses getting written off. Upshot, an effective tax rate a fraction of what it otherwise would be. Nice work if you can get it.
It’s a trade off. They also didn’t get pensions and could be fired at the drop of a hat.
Ten minutes into my tour of “old Montevideo” and the guide is reduced to demonstrating the “quality of the wood” of the doorway to the presidential palace
No Graf Spee themed tours (which may involve a boat trip)? Surely one of the more interesting things to have happened in the vicinity.
Have you found the Graf Spee's eagle, which is controversial - portly, but controversial? For some that might have some Noom.
I had a vague memory of the brouhaha.
Not sure where it is now, would look great in the boardroom of some tech bro boardroom.
The sad thing is that in the news report about him on the Today programme yesterday they felt the need to explain what the Battle of Britain was.
It felt somewhat strange that the reporters/editors of Today think that people who listen to their programme need to have the BoB explained to them.
I noted that, too. The sad thing is that we're getting old. Battle of Britain is no longer the piece of universal popular culture that it was a generation back.
The Battle of Britain was 85 years ago.
That's like me learning about the Boer Wars when I was 10. OK, the BoB is much more important an event than that, but some of my contemporaries' fathers had fought in WW2 and it had finished only 30 years previously, which is like, er, 1995 is now (can't think of anything that happened then)
So while WW2 was an epoch-making event and the ever-present background to the world many of us grew up in, it is now fairly ancient history
Morning, PB.
And the real worry is that the new right are now beginning to normalise Nazism. Twitter is increasingly full of very large amounts of normalised, extreme antisemitism, and earlier this week the central Maga figure Tucker Carlson implied it might have been better if Hitler had occupied Europe.
I think that is wrong. Twitter is not full of anything. Your twitter feed might be full of this, that or the other, but that is on account of your browsing habits (similar to the proverbial Thai hooker story).
Each person creates their own twitter universe. Not many stories pop up on your feed, I imagine, about miniature railways. Would not be the case if you were a miniature railways fan.
That used to be the case, but is no longer. The algorithm pushes Muskoid facist views, and paid for blue tick trolls.
If you want to choose your own content then BlueSky is the place.
IIUC Bluesky is subscription driven: you subscribe to people and then get fed people who subscribed to those, and so on. Various block lists are available and can be shared. This leads to the "walled gardens" that Twitter folx criticise but is more pleasant and less insane.
Twitter is algorithm driven: you spend time looking at subject X and then get fed more about subject X and associated subjects. Blocking is more difficult. This leads to the "down the rabbit hole" that affects so many people. The effect is exacerbated by i) Elon being in charge of the algorithm and able to drive whatever nonsense pricks his fancy to millions of people in minutes, and ii) bots driving the algorithm further and faster and nastier/pornier.
It's obvious at this point that algorithm-driven social media is driving us collectively nuts, but nobody is doing anything about it, aaaargh.
It’s not true that “nobody is doing anything about social media.”
The Government is busy demolishing cycling fora which makes @kinabalu happy.
Do stop being so puerile ffs.
I tell you what, the next time a teenager commits suicide or murder because of some poisonous shit they've read online I'll pop on here and say "well at least that'll make @Malmesbury happy".
Fair enough?
The idea that the OSA is going to prevent terrible shit being available online is for the birds.
It’s the triumph of bureaucracy - the true purpose is to entrench the power of the bureaucratic state by making arbitrary enforcement powers available to an unelected body which can be used as a club against anyone that doesn’t have a political roof (as the Russians like to put it) to protect them.
The idea it's a sinister mechanism to close down speech which is 'difficult' for The Authorities is far more for the birds than the assumption that it's a good faith initiative intended (with jury out on effectiveness) to do more good than harm.
Your take (widely shared on here, I know) reminds me a little of people who were convinced government relished Lockdown and would hang on to the special powers they assumed long after the pandemic went away. That view was also widely shared on here fwiw.
The consensus is rather that it's a ham fisted measure which fails to achieve its (laudable) aims, while imposing disproportionate burdens on those who aren't big business.
Yup.
Reminds me of IR35 - when Blair was challenged on it, he acted puzzled and said the big consultancies didn’t have a problem.
Of course they didn’t. IR35 didn’t touch them - it was about one man band contractors. Who were competition to Accenture et al.
IR35 closed down a loophole that tons of well paid City workers were using to avoid tax. Including me at one point. I was earning multiples of my teacher sister and paying barely more than her to HMRC.
So if it reminds you of that, it bodes quite well.
IR35 also destroyed much of the legitimate small consultancy business.
Have worked for 9 clients in the last 18 months. All short term contracts ranging from 10 days work to 2 months. In all cases I should be outside IR35 according to HMRC.
But because they have put the responsibility for the decision with the end user companies and they are risk averse they say that everyone must be inside no matter how short the contract.
So I currently pay 51% of my day rate in tax and NI.
People like you milking the system are what screwed the legitimate consultants.
Well I only did it for a short while and there was little choice. There was a 'client' insistence on having a ltd company. Sounds like it's gone too far the other way now if your situation isn't classed as genuine self-employment.
The sad thing is that in the news report about him on the Today programme yesterday they felt the need to explain what the Battle of Britain was.
It felt somewhat strange that the reporters/editors of Today think that people who listen to their programme need to have the BoB explained to them.
I noted that, too. The sad thing is that we're getting old. Battle of Britain is no longer the piece of universal popular culture that it was a generation back.
The Battle of Britain was 85 years ago.
That's like me learning about the Boer Wars when I was 10. OK, the BoB is much more important an event than that, but some of my contemporaries' fathers had fought in WW2 and it had finished only 30 years previously, which is like, er, 1995 is now (can't think of anything that happened then)
So while WW2 was an epoch-making event and the ever-present background to the world many of us grew up in, it is now fairly ancient history
Morning, PB.
And the real worry is that the new right are now beginning to normalise Nazism. Twitter is increasingly full of very large amounts of normalised, extreme antisemitism, and earlier this week the central Maga figure Tucker Carlson implied it might have been better if Hitler had occupied Europe.
I think that is wrong. Twitter is not full of anything. Your twitter feed might be full of this, that or the other, but that is on account of your browsing habits (similar to the proverbial Thai hooker story).
Each person creates their own twitter universe. Not many stories pop up on your feed, I imagine, about miniature railways. Would not be the case if you were a miniature railways fan.
I thought this was the case with YouTube, but after Mr Trump became President again the (political) videos that it presented to me changed completely. I was mostly getting right-wing youtubers (not far-right, just ordinary sensible conservative types) but as soon as his inauguration took place, it changed over to left-wing (again not far left, just ordinary sensible leftie types).
I didn't suddenly change my views, the choices YouTube was offering me suddenly changed. As though it was the most active youtubers coming up to the top of the algorithm, so to speak, and the most motivated group changed over. I'd be quite interested to know how some of those 'ordinary sensible conservative types' are responding to events, actually, but they don't get pushed at me any more & I've forgotten their identifiers.
Edited to change 2nd conservative to leftie.
OK, I'll bite. Care to share who the ordinary sensible conservative youtubers and/or ordinary sensible leftie youtubers are? You can PM me if you want to keep them private
J. J. McCullough is a good, Canadian, conservative (in the traditional sense: not MAGA) social commentator, doing some society stuff, some political stuff.
James Ker-Lindsay is good on international relations and state formation. He’s a Remainer, but otherwise fairly neutral on left-right stuff.
Useful, thank you. I was already familiar with jjmc and the fact that he does do the "aboot", which I thought was a South Park myth, as nobody Canadian I know uses it. I shall have a peek at jkl
Ten minutes into my tour of “old Montevideo” and the guide is reduced to demonstrating the “quality of the wood” of the doorway to the presidential palace
No Graf Spee themed tours (which may involve a boat trip)? Surely one of the more interesting things to have happened in the vicinity.
Have you found the Graf Spee's eagle, which is controversial - portly, but controversial? For some that might have some Noom.
I had a vague memory of the brouhaha.
Not sure where it is now, would look great in the boardroom of some tech bro.
Figurehead for Elon's yacht?
(If he can still afford one. I see that Tesla shares are not heading for 55% down from peak - still another 40% to go.)
Ten minutes into my tour of “old Montevideo” and the guide is reduced to demonstrating the “quality of the wood” of the doorway to the presidential palace
Was his wood impressive ?
I’ve seen better
He’s trying to make up for the clear disappointment by showing me the Ashes of the Liberator of the River Plate, after that we are possibly visiting a slightly historic water cistern
Truly a city of wonders
One thing IS wondrous: the winter climate. He says they get Antarctic winds so brutal and cold - and fierce - they get a wind chill of minus 20 and the authorities have to hang ropes along the streets so people can drag themselves around without falling over
The sad thing is that in the news report about him on the Today programme yesterday they felt the need to explain what the Battle of Britain was.
It felt somewhat strange that the reporters/editors of Today think that people who listen to their programme need to have the BoB explained to them.
I noted that, too. The sad thing is that we're getting old. Battle of Britain is no longer the piece of universal popular culture that it was a generation back.
The Battle of Britain was 85 years ago.
That's like me learning about the Boer Wars when I was 10. OK, the BoB is much more important an event than that, but some of my contemporaries' fathers had fought in WW2 and it had finished only 30 years previously, which is like, er, 1995 is now (can't think of anything that happened then)
So while WW2 was an epoch-making event and the ever-present background to the world many of us grew up in, it is now fairly ancient history
Morning, PB.
And the real worry is that the new right are now beginning to normalise Nazism. Twitter is increasingly full of very large amounts of normalised, extreme antisemitism, and earlier this week the central Maga figure Tucker Carlson implied it might have been better if Hitler had occupied Europe.
I think that is wrong. Twitter is not full of anything. Your twitter feed might be full of this, that or the other, but that is on account of your browsing habits (similar to the proverbial Thai hooker story).
Each person creates their own twitter universe. Not many stories pop up on your feed, I imagine, about miniature railways. Would not be the case if you were a miniature railways fan.
That used to be the case, but is no longer. The algorithm pushes Muskoid facist views, and paid for blue tick trolls.
If you want to choose your own content then BlueSky is the place.
IIUC Bluesky is subscription driven: you subscribe to people and then get fed people who subscribed to those, and so on. Various block lists are available and can be shared. This leads to the "walled gardens" that Twitter folx criticise but is more pleasant and less insane.
Twitter is algorithm driven: you spend time looking at subject X and then get fed more about subject X and associated subjects. Blocking is more difficult. This leads to the "down the rabbit hole" that affects so many people. The effect is exacerbated by i) Elon being in charge of the algorithm and able to drive whatever nonsense pricks his fancy to millions of people in minutes, and ii) bots driving the algorithm further and faster and nastier/pornier.
It's obvious at this point that algorithm-driven social media is driving us collectively nuts, but nobody is doing anything about it, aaaargh.
It’s not true that “nobody is doing anything about social media.”
The Government is busy demolishing cycling fora which makes @kinabalu happy.
Do stop being so puerile ffs.
I tell you what, the next time a teenager commits suicide or murder because of some poisonous shit they've read online I'll pop on here and say "well at least that'll make @Malmesbury happy".
Fair enough?
The idea that the OSA is going to prevent terrible shit being available online is for the birds.
It’s the triumph of bureaucracy - the true purpose is to entrench the power of the bureaucratic state by making arbitrary enforcement powers available to an unelected body which can be used as a club against anyone that doesn’t have a political roof (as the Russians like to put it) to protect them.
The idea it's a sinister mechanism to close down speech which is 'difficult' for The Authorities is far more for the birds than the assumption that it's a good faith initiative intended (with jury out on effectiveness) to do more good than harm.
Your take (widely shared on here, I know) reminds me a little of people who were convinced government relished Lockdown and would hang on to the special powers they assumed long after the pandemic went away. That view was also widely shared on here fwiw.
The consensus is rather that it's a ham fisted measure which fails to achieve its (laudable) aims, while imposing disproportionate burdens on those who aren't big business.
Stripped of the "out to get free speech" nonsense the view becomes perfectly reasonable if not necessarily (imo) correct. As for its practical impact I think we need to assess that once it's been operational for a while. If it truly does lead to lots of small benign sites closing down with little or no noticeable benefits elsewhere then ok it's a fail.
It’s already caused a number of sites to close, following legal advice.
The sad thing is that in the news report about him on the Today programme yesterday they felt the need to explain what the Battle of Britain was.
It felt somewhat strange that the reporters/editors of Today think that people who listen to their programme need to have the BoB explained to them.
I noted that, too. The sad thing is that we're getting old. Battle of Britain is no longer the piece of universal popular culture that it was a generation back.
The Battle of Britain was 85 years ago.
That's like me learning about the Boer Wars when I was 10. OK, the BoB is much more important an event than that, but some of my contemporaries' fathers had fought in WW2 and it had finished only 30 years previously, which is like, er, 1995 is now (can't think of anything that happened then)
So while WW2 was an epoch-making event and the ever-present background to the world many of us grew up in, it is now fairly ancient history
Morning, PB.
And the real worry is that the new right are now beginning to normalise Nazism. Twitter is increasingly full of very large amounts of normalised, extreme antisemitism, and earlier this week the central Maga figure Tucker Carlson implied it might have been better if Hitler had occupied Europe.
I think that is wrong. Twitter is not full of anything. Your twitter feed might be full of this, that or the other, but that is on account of your browsing habits (similar to the proverbial Thai hooker story).
Each person creates their own twitter universe. Not many stories pop up on your feed, I imagine, about miniature railways. Would not be the case if you were a miniature railways fan.
That used to be the case, but is no longer. The algorithm pushes Muskoid facist views, and paid for blue tick trolls.
If you want to choose your own content then BlueSky is the place.
IIUC Bluesky is subscription driven: you subscribe to people and then get fed people who subscribed to those, and so on. Various block lists are available and can be shared. This leads to the "walled gardens" that Twitter folx criticise but is more pleasant and less insane.
Twitter is algorithm driven: you spend time looking at subject X and then get fed more about subject X and associated subjects. Blocking is more difficult. This leads to the "down the rabbit hole" that affects so many people. The effect is exacerbated by i) Elon being in charge of the algorithm and able to drive whatever nonsense pricks his fancy to millions of people in minutes, and ii) bots driving the algorithm further and faster and nastier/pornier.
It's obvious at this point that algorithm-driven social media is driving us collectively nuts, but nobody is doing anything about it, aaaargh.
It’s not true that “nobody is doing anything about social media.”
The Government is busy demolishing cycling fora which makes @kinabalu happy.
Do stop being so puerile ffs.
I tell you what, the next time a teenager commits suicide or murder because of some poisonous shit they've read online I'll pop on here and say "well at least that'll make @Malmesbury happy".
Fair enough?
The idea that the OSA is going to prevent terrible shit being available online is for the birds.
It’s the triumph of bureaucracy - the true purpose is to entrench the power of the bureaucratic state by making arbitrary enforcement powers available to an unelected body which can be used as a club against anyone that doesn’t have a political roof (as the Russians like to put it) to protect them.
The idea it's a sinister mechanism to close down speech which is 'difficult' for The Authorities is far more for the birds than the assumption that it's a good faith initiative intended (with jury out on effectiveness) to do more good than harm.
Your take (widely shared on here, I know) reminds me a little of people who were convinced government relished Lockdown and would hang on to the special powers they assumed long after the pandemic went away. That view was also widely shared on here fwiw.
The consensus is rather that it's a ham fisted measure which fails to achieve its (laudable) aims, while imposing disproportionate burdens on those who aren't big business.
Yup.
Reminds me of IR35 - when Blair was challenged on it, he acted puzzled and said the big consultancies didn’t have a problem.
Of course they didn’t. IR35 didn’t touch them - it was about one man band contractors. Who were competition to Accenture et al.
IR35 closed down a loophole that tons of well paid City workers were using to avoid tax. Including me at one point. I was earning multiples of my teacher sister and paying barely more than her to HMRC.
So if it reminds you of that, it bodes quite well.
Not just city workers, automotive sector workers too. It was seen as a rite of passage to move to a ltd company contractor role to make some money, no risk.
It was also not uncommon, as it has happened at places I worked, for John smith, designer, employed full time, to leave on a Friday and John Smith Ltd, design services, charging a day rate to start on the Monday.
Clear tax dodgers.
Yes, rife in the City but not just there. Thing is, if you have multiple clients, or each assignment is short, or you're drumming up your own business, taking entrepreneurial risk, that's one thing. That's different to having a 'job'. But these folk weren't doing that. They'd be working fulltime at one place for years, indistinguishable from employees other than their admin set-up as one man limited companies. Then it's dividends instead of PAYE and it's all sorts of expenses getting written off. Upshot, an effective tax rate a fraction of what it otherwise would be. Nice work if you can get it.
It’s a trade off. They also didn’t get pensions and could be fired at the drop of a hat.
Sure. And in my (City) experience skewed in favour of (bogus) self-employment.
I'm not about to defend every aspect of how IR35 was implemented and all of its consequences on each and every individual - I know my limits - but it was a real problem being addressed there and I'd say on balance and in the round a world with IR35 is better than a world without it.
In fact I was kind of on-the-fence about the Online Safety Act but now that @Malmesbury has said it's like IR35 I feel myself becoming a strong supporter of it.
The sad thing is that in the news report about him on the Today programme yesterday they felt the need to explain what the Battle of Britain was.
It felt somewhat strange that the reporters/editors of Today think that people who listen to their programme need to have the BoB explained to them.
I noted that, too. The sad thing is that we're getting old. Battle of Britain is no longer the piece of universal popular culture that it was a generation back.
The Battle of Britain was 85 years ago.
That's like me learning about the Boer Wars when I was 10. OK, the BoB is much more important an event than that, but some of my contemporaries' fathers had fought in WW2 and it had finished only 30 years previously, which is like, er, 1995 is now (can't think of anything that happened then)
So while WW2 was an epoch-making event and the ever-present background to the world many of us grew up in, it is now fairly ancient history
Morning, PB.
And the real worry is that the new right are now beginning to normalise Nazism. Twitter is increasingly full of very large amounts of normalised, extreme antisemitism, and earlier this week the central Maga figure Tucker Carlson implied it might have been better if Hitler had occupied Europe.
I think that is wrong. Twitter is not full of anything. Your twitter feed might be full of this, that or the other, but that is on account of your browsing habits (similar to the proverbial Thai hooker story).
Each person creates their own twitter universe. Not many stories pop up on your feed, I imagine, about miniature railways. Would not be the case if you were a miniature railways fan.
That used to be the case, but is no longer. The algorithm pushes Muskoid facist views, and paid for blue tick trolls.
If you want to choose your own content then BlueSky is the place.
IIUC Bluesky is subscription driven: you subscribe to people and then get fed people who subscribed to those, and so on. Various block lists are available and can be shared. This leads to the "walled gardens" that Twitter folx criticise but is more pleasant and less insane.
Twitter is algorithm driven: you spend time looking at subject X and then get fed more about subject X and associated subjects. Blocking is more difficult. This leads to the "down the rabbit hole" that affects so many people. The effect is exacerbated by i) Elon being in charge of the algorithm and able to drive whatever nonsense pricks his fancy to millions of people in minutes, and ii) bots driving the algorithm further and faster and nastier/pornier.
It's obvious at this point that algorithm-driven social media is driving us collectively nuts, but nobody is doing anything about it, aaaargh.
It’s not true that “nobody is doing anything about social media.”
The Government is busy demolishing cycling fora which makes @kinabalu happy.
Do stop being so puerile ffs.
I tell you what, the next time a teenager commits suicide or murder because of some poisonous shit they've read online I'll pop on here and say "well at least that'll make @Malmesbury happy".
Fair enough?
The idea that the OSA is going to prevent terrible shit being available online is for the birds.
It’s the triumph of bureaucracy - the true purpose is to entrench the power of the bureaucratic state by making arbitrary enforcement powers available to an unelected body which can be used as a club against anyone that doesn’t have a political roof (as the Russians like to put it) to protect them.
The idea it's a sinister mechanism to close down speech which is 'difficult' for The Authorities is far more for the birds than the assumption that it's a good faith initiative intended (with jury out on effectiveness) to do more good than harm.
Your take (widely shared on here, I know) reminds me a little of people who were convinced government relished Lockdown and would hang on to the special powers they assumed long after the pandemic went away. That view was also widely shared on here fwiw.
The consensus is rather that it's a ham fisted measure which fails to achieve its (laudable) aims, while imposing disproportionate burdens on those who aren't big business.
Yup.
Reminds me of IR35 - when Blair was challenged on it, he acted puzzled and said the big consultancies didn’t have a problem.
Of course they didn’t. IR35 didn’t touch them - it was about one man band contractors. Who were competition to Accenture et al.
IR35 closed down a loophole that tons of well paid City workers were using to avoid tax. Including me at one point. I was earning multiples of my teacher sister and paying barely more than her to HMRC.
So if it reminds you of that, it bodes quite well.
Not just city workers, automotive sector workers too. It was seen as a rite of passage to move to a ltd company contractor role to make some money, no risk.
It was also not uncommon, as it has happened at places I worked, for John smith, designer, employed full time, to leave on a Friday and John Smith Ltd, design services, charging a day rate to start on the Monday.
Clear tax dodgers.
Yes, rife in the City but not just there. Thing is, if you have multiple clients, or each assignment is short, or you're drumming up your own business, taking entrepreneurial risk, that's one thing. That's different to having a 'job'. But these folk weren't doing that. They'd be working fulltime at one place for years, indistinguishable from employees other than their admin set-up as one man limited companies. Then it's dividends instead of PAYE and it's all sorts of expenses getting written off. Upshot, an effective tax rate a fraction of what it otherwise would be. Nice work if you can get it.
It’s a trade off. They also didn’t get pensions and could be fired at the drop of a hat.
Sure. And in my (City) experience skewed in favour of (bogus) self-employment.
I'm not about to defend every aspect of how IR35 was implemented and all of its consequences on each and every individual - I know my limits - but it was a real problem being addressed there and I'd say on balance and in the round a world with IR35 is better than a world without it.
In fact I was kind of on-the-fence about the Online Safety Act but now that @Malmesbury has said it's like IR35 I feel myself becoming a strong supporter of it.
Wouldn't the equitable solution to have set yourself up as Ltd company to satisfy your client but paid yourself entirely within wages from the company to satisfy HMRC and not screw the Richard Tyndall's of this world for the future ?
The sad thing is that in the news report about him on the Today programme yesterday they felt the need to explain what the Battle of Britain was.
It felt somewhat strange that the reporters/editors of Today think that people who listen to their programme need to have the BoB explained to them.
I noted that, too. The sad thing is that we're getting old. Battle of Britain is no longer the piece of universal popular culture that it was a generation back.
The Battle of Britain was 85 years ago.
That's like me learning about the Boer Wars when I was 10. OK, the BoB is much more important an event than that, but some of my contemporaries' fathers had fought in WW2 and it had finished only 30 years previously, which is like, er, 1995 is now (can't think of anything that happened then)
So while WW2 was an epoch-making event and the ever-present background to the world many of us grew up in, it is now fairly ancient history
Morning, PB.
And the real worry is that the new right are now beginning to normalise Nazism. Twitter is increasingly full of very large amounts of normalised, extreme antisemitism, and earlier this week the central Maga figure Tucker Carlson implied it might have been better if Hitler had occupied Europe.
I think that is wrong. Twitter is not full of anything. Your twitter feed might be full of this, that or the other, but that is on account of your browsing habits (similar to the proverbial Thai hooker story).
Each person creates their own twitter universe. Not many stories pop up on your feed, I imagine, about miniature railways. Would not be the case if you were a miniature railways fan.
That used to be the case, but is no longer. The algorithm pushes Muskoid facist views, and paid for blue tick trolls.
If you want to choose your own content then BlueSky is the place.
IIUC Bluesky is subscription driven: you subscribe to people and then get fed people who subscribed to those, and so on. Various block lists are available and can be shared. This leads to the "walled gardens" that Twitter folx criticise but is more pleasant and less insane.
Twitter is algorithm driven: you spend time looking at subject X and then get fed more about subject X and associated subjects. Blocking is more difficult. This leads to the "down the rabbit hole" that affects so many people. The effect is exacerbated by i) Elon being in charge of the algorithm and able to drive whatever nonsense pricks his fancy to millions of people in minutes, and ii) bots driving the algorithm further and faster and nastier/pornier.
It's obvious at this point that algorithm-driven social media is driving us collectively nuts, but nobody is doing anything about it, aaaargh.
It’s not true that “nobody is doing anything about social media.”
The Government is busy demolishing cycling fora which makes @kinabalu happy.
Do stop being so puerile ffs.
I tell you what, the next time a teenager commits suicide or murder because of some poisonous shit they've read online I'll pop on here and say "well at least that'll make @Malmesbury happy".
Fair enough?
The idea that the OSA is going to prevent terrible shit being available online is for the birds.
It’s the triumph of bureaucracy - the true purpose is to entrench the power of the bureaucratic state by making arbitrary enforcement powers available to an unelected body which can be used as a club against anyone that doesn’t have a political roof (as the Russians like to put it) to protect them.
The idea it's a sinister mechanism to close down speech which is 'difficult' for The Authorities is far more for the birds than the assumption that it's a good faith initiative intended (with jury out on effectiveness) to do more good than harm.
Your take (widely shared on here, I know) reminds me a little of people who were convinced government relished Lockdown and would hang on to the special powers they assumed long after the pandemic went away. That view was also widely shared on here fwiw.
The consensus is rather that it's a ham fisted measure which fails to achieve its (laudable) aims, while imposing disproportionate burdens on those who aren't big business.
Stripped of the "out to get free speech" nonsense the view becomes perfectly reasonable if not necessarily (imo) correct. As for its practical impact I think we need to assess that once it's been operational for a while. If it truly does lead to lots of small benign sites closing down with little or no noticeable benefits elsewhere then ok it's a fail.
It’s already caused a number of sites to close, following legal advice.
Yes, noted. But there might be excessive caution in play with something fairly new. People (inc lawyers) can be overly risk averse in such circumstances. Let's see how it looks in a while from now. We might be pleasantly surprised.
And there's the benefit side too remember. That has to be considered.
The sad thing is that in the news report about him on the Today programme yesterday they felt the need to explain what the Battle of Britain was.
It felt somewhat strange that the reporters/editors of Today think that people who listen to their programme need to have the BoB explained to them.
I noted that, too. The sad thing is that we're getting old. Battle of Britain is no longer the piece of universal popular culture that it was a generation back.
The Battle of Britain was 85 years ago.
That's like me learning about the Boer Wars when I was 10. OK, the BoB is much more important an event than that, but some of my contemporaries' fathers had fought in WW2 and it had finished only 30 years previously, which is like, er, 1995 is now (can't think of anything that happened then)
So while WW2 was an epoch-making event and the ever-present background to the world many of us grew up in, it is now fairly ancient history
Morning, PB.
And the real worry is that the new right are now beginning to normalise Nazism. Twitter is increasingly full of very large amounts of normalised, extreme antisemitism, and earlier this week the central Maga figure Tucker Carlson implied it might have been better if Hitler had occupied Europe.
I think that is wrong. Twitter is not full of anything. Your twitter feed might be full of this, that or the other, but that is on account of your browsing habits (similar to the proverbial Thai hooker story).
Each person creates their own twitter universe. Not many stories pop up on your feed, I imagine, about miniature railways. Would not be the case if you were a miniature railways fan.
That used to be the case, but is no longer. The algorithm pushes Muskoid facist views, and paid for blue tick trolls.
If you want to choose your own content then BlueSky is the place.
IIUC Bluesky is subscription driven: you subscribe to people and then get fed people who subscribed to those, and so on. Various block lists are available and can be shared. This leads to the "walled gardens" that Twitter folx criticise but is more pleasant and less insane.
Twitter is algorithm driven: you spend time looking at subject X and then get fed more about subject X and associated subjects. Blocking is more difficult. This leads to the "down the rabbit hole" that affects so many people. The effect is exacerbated by i) Elon being in charge of the algorithm and able to drive whatever nonsense pricks his fancy to millions of people in minutes, and ii) bots driving the algorithm further and faster and nastier/pornier.
It's obvious at this point that algorithm-driven social media is driving us collectively nuts, but nobody is doing anything about it, aaaargh.
It’s not true that “nobody is doing anything about social media.”
The Government is busy demolishing cycling fora which makes @kinabalu happy.
Do stop being so puerile ffs.
I tell you what, the next time a teenager commits suicide or murder because of some poisonous shit they've read online I'll pop on here and say "well at least that'll make @Malmesbury happy".
Fair enough?
The idea that the OSA is going to prevent terrible shit being available online is for the birds.
It’s the triumph of bureaucracy - the true purpose is to entrench the power of the bureaucratic state by making arbitrary enforcement powers available to an unelected body which can be used as a club against anyone that doesn’t have a political roof (as the Russians like to put it) to protect them.
The idea it's a sinister mechanism to close down speech which is 'difficult' for The Authorities is far more for the birds than the assumption that it's a good faith initiative intended (with jury out on effectiveness) to do more good than harm.
Your take (widely shared on here, I know) reminds me a little of people who were convinced government relished Lockdown and would hang on to the special powers they assumed long after the pandemic went away. That view was also widely shared on here fwiw.
The consensus is rather that it's a ham fisted measure which fails to achieve its (laudable) aims, while imposing disproportionate burdens on those who aren't big business.
Yup.
Reminds me of IR35 - when Blair was challenged on it, he acted puzzled and said the big consultancies didn’t have a problem.
Of course they didn’t. IR35 didn’t touch them - it was about one man band contractors. Who were competition to Accenture et al.
IR35 closed down a loophole that tons of well paid City workers were using to avoid tax. Including me at one point. I was earning multiples of my teacher sister and paying barely more than her to HMRC.
So if it reminds you of that, it bodes quite well.
Not just city workers, automotive sector workers too. It was seen as a rite of passage to move to a ltd company contractor role to make some money, no risk.
It was also not uncommon, as it has happened at places I worked, for John smith, designer, employed full time, to leave on a Friday and John Smith Ltd, design services, charging a day rate to start on the Monday.
Clear tax dodgers.
Yes, rife in the City but not just there. Thing is, if you have multiple clients, or each assignment is short, or you're drumming up your own business, taking entrepreneurial risk, that's one thing. That's different to having a 'job'. But these folk weren't doing that. They'd be working fulltime at one place for years, indistinguishable from employees other than their admin set-up as one man limited companies. Then it's dividends instead of PAYE and it's all sorts of expenses getting written off. Upshot, an effective tax rate a fraction of what it otherwise would be. Nice work if you can get it.
It’s a trade off. They also didn’t get pensions and could be fired at the drop of a hat.
Sure. And in my (City) experience skewed in favour of (bogus) self-employment.
I'm not about to defend every aspect of how IR35 was implemented and all of its consequences on each and every individual - I know my limits - but it was a real problem being addressed there and I'd say on balance and in the round a world with IR35 is better than a world without it.
In fact I was kind of on-the-fence about the Online Safety Act but now that @Malmesbury has said it's like IR35 I feel myself becoming a strong supporter of it.
What I meant was that the government consulted the big firms (who wanted their small fry competition closed down) and had no interest in the side effects.
The Online Safety Act is a classic of imposing a regulatory burden but totally avoiding the real issues.
Because imposing a regulatory burden falls on the honest.
The problem sites are not cycling enthusiasts- they are either offshore (already) or the big corporates like Twatter.
Do you really think that Social Truth will comply?
The sad thing is that in the news report about him on the Today programme yesterday they felt the need to explain what the Battle of Britain was.
It felt somewhat strange that the reporters/editors of Today think that people who listen to their programme need to have the BoB explained to them.
I noted that, too. The sad thing is that we're getting old. Battle of Britain is no longer the piece of universal popular culture that it was a generation back.
The Battle of Britain was 85 years ago.
That's like me learning about the Boer Wars when I was 10. OK, the BoB is much more important an event than that, but some of my contemporaries' fathers had fought in WW2 and it had finished only 30 years previously, which is like, er, 1995 is now (can't think of anything that happened then)
So while WW2 was an epoch-making event and the ever-present background to the world many of us grew up in, it is now fairly ancient history
Morning, PB.
And the real worry is that the new right are now beginning to normalise Nazism. Twitter is increasingly full of very large amounts of normalised, extreme antisemitism, and earlier this week the central Maga figure Tucker Carlson implied it might have been better if Hitler had occupied Europe.
I think that is wrong. Twitter is not full of anything. Your twitter feed might be full of this, that or the other, but that is on account of your browsing habits (similar to the proverbial Thai hooker story).
Each person creates their own twitter universe. Not many stories pop up on your feed, I imagine, about miniature railways. Would not be the case if you were a miniature railways fan.
That used to be the case, but is no longer. The algorithm pushes Muskoid facist views, and paid for blue tick trolls.
If you want to choose your own content then BlueSky is the place.
IIUC Bluesky is subscription driven: you subscribe to people and then get fed people who subscribed to those, and so on. Various block lists are available and can be shared. This leads to the "walled gardens" that Twitter folx criticise but is more pleasant and less insane.
Twitter is algorithm driven: you spend time looking at subject X and then get fed more about subject X and associated subjects. Blocking is more difficult. This leads to the "down the rabbit hole" that affects so many people. The effect is exacerbated by i) Elon being in charge of the algorithm and able to drive whatever nonsense pricks his fancy to millions of people in minutes, and ii) bots driving the algorithm further and faster and nastier/pornier.
It's obvious at this point that algorithm-driven social media is driving us collectively nuts, but nobody is doing anything about it, aaaargh.
It’s not true that “nobody is doing anything about social media.”
The Government is busy demolishing cycling fora which makes @kinabalu happy.
Do stop being so puerile ffs.
I tell you what, the next time a teenager commits suicide or murder because of some poisonous shit they've read online I'll pop on here and say "well at least that'll make @Malmesbury happy".
Fair enough?
The idea that the OSA is going to prevent terrible shit being available online is for the birds.
It’s the triumph of bureaucracy - the true purpose is to entrench the power of the bureaucratic state by making arbitrary enforcement powers available to an unelected body which can be used as a club against anyone that doesn’t have a political roof (as the Russians like to put it) to protect them.
The idea it's a sinister mechanism to close down speech which is 'difficult' for The Authorities is far more for the birds than the assumption that it's a good faith initiative intended (with jury out on effectiveness) to do more good than harm.
Your take (widely shared on here, I know) reminds me a little of people who were convinced government relished Lockdown and would hang on to the special powers they assumed long after the pandemic went away. That view was also widely shared on here fwiw.
The consensus is rather that it's a ham fisted measure which fails to achieve its (laudable) aims, while imposing disproportionate burdens on those who aren't big business.
Yup.
Reminds me of IR35 - when Blair was challenged on it, he acted puzzled and said the big consultancies didn’t have a problem.
Of course they didn’t. IR35 didn’t touch them - it was about one man band contractors. Who were competition to Accenture et al.
IR35 closed down a loophole that tons of well paid City workers were using to avoid tax. Including me at one point. I was earning multiples of my teacher sister and paying barely more than her to HMRC.
So if it reminds you of that, it bodes quite well.
Not just city workers, automotive sector workers too. It was seen as a rite of passage to move to a ltd company contractor role to make some money, no risk.
It was also not uncommon, as it has happened at places I worked, for John smith, designer, employed full time, to leave on a Friday and John Smith Ltd, design services, charging a day rate to start on the Monday.
Clear tax dodgers.
Yes, rife in the City but not just there. Thing is, if you have multiple clients, or each assignment is short, or you're drumming up your own business, taking entrepreneurial risk, that's one thing. That's different to having a 'job'. But these folk weren't doing that. They'd be working fulltime at one place for years, indistinguishable from employees other than their admin set-up as one man limited companies. Then it's dividends instead of PAYE and it's all sorts of expenses getting written off. Upshot, an effective tax rate a fraction of what it otherwise would be. Nice work if you can get it.
It’s a trade off. They also didn’t get pensions and could be fired at the drop of a hat.
Sure. And in my (City) experience skewed in favour of (bogus) self-employment.
I'm not about to defend every aspect of how IR35 was implemented and all of its consequences on each and every individual - I know my limits - but it was a real problem being addressed there and I'd say on balance and in the round a world with IR35 is better than a world without it.
In fact I was kind of on-the-fence about the Online Safety Act but now that @Malmesbury has said it's like IR35 I feel myself becoming a strong supporter of it.
Wouldn't the equitable solution to have set yourself up as Ltd company to satisfy your client but paid yourself entirely within wages from the company to satisfy HMRC and not screw the Richard Tyndall's of this world for the future ?
My main takeaway from PB this fine Montevidean morning is that, in about 2 years, the capitalisation of “b” in “Black” will start to look really odd (“why are we doing this?”) and it will be quietly abandoned
So will the practice of removing full stops to be less triggering.
The sad thing is that in the news report about him on the Today programme yesterday they felt the need to explain what the Battle of Britain was.
It felt somewhat strange that the reporters/editors of Today think that people who listen to their programme need to have the BoB explained to them.
I noted that, too. The sad thing is that we're getting old. Battle of Britain is no longer the piece of universal popular culture that it was a generation back.
The Battle of Britain was 85 years ago.
That's like me learning about the Boer Wars when I was 10. OK, the BoB is much more important an event than that, but some of my contemporaries' fathers had fought in WW2 and it had finished only 30 years previously, which is like, er, 1995 is now (can't think of anything that happened then)
So while WW2 was an epoch-making event and the ever-present background to the world many of us grew up in, it is now fairly ancient history
Morning, PB.
And the real worry is that the new right are now beginning to normalise Nazism. Twitter is increasingly full of very large amounts of normalised, extreme antisemitism, and earlier this week the central Maga figure Tucker Carlson implied it might have been better if Hitler had occupied Europe.
I think that is wrong. Twitter is not full of anything. Your twitter feed might be full of this, that or the other, but that is on account of your browsing habits (similar to the proverbial Thai hooker story).
Each person creates their own twitter universe. Not many stories pop up on your feed, I imagine, about miniature railways. Would not be the case if you were a miniature railways fan.
That used to be the case, but is no longer. The algorithm pushes Muskoid facist views, and paid for blue tick trolls.
If you want to choose your own content then BlueSky is the place.
IIUC Bluesky is subscription driven: you subscribe to people and then get fed people who subscribed to those, and so on. Various block lists are available and can be shared. This leads to the "walled gardens" that Twitter folx criticise but is more pleasant and less insane.
Twitter is algorithm driven: you spend time looking at subject X and then get fed more about subject X and associated subjects. Blocking is more difficult. This leads to the "down the rabbit hole" that affects so many people. The effect is exacerbated by i) Elon being in charge of the algorithm and able to drive whatever nonsense pricks his fancy to millions of people in minutes, and ii) bots driving the algorithm further and faster and nastier/pornier.
It's obvious at this point that algorithm-driven social media is driving us collectively nuts, but nobody is doing anything about it, aaaargh.
It’s not true that “nobody is doing anything about social media.”
The Government is busy demolishing cycling fora which makes @kinabalu happy.
Do stop being so puerile ffs.
I tell you what, the next time a teenager commits suicide or murder because of some poisonous shit they've read online I'll pop on here and say "well at least that'll make @Malmesbury happy".
Fair enough?
The idea that the OSA is going to prevent terrible shit being available online is for the birds.
It’s the triumph of bureaucracy - the true purpose is to entrench the power of the bureaucratic state by making arbitrary enforcement powers available to an unelected body which can be used as a club against anyone that doesn’t have a political roof (as the Russians like to put it) to protect them.
The idea it's a sinister mechanism to close down speech which is 'difficult' for The Authorities is far more for the birds than the assumption that it's a good faith initiative intended (with jury out on effectiveness) to do more good than harm.
Your take (widely shared on here, I know) reminds me a little of people who were convinced government relished Lockdown and would hang on to the special powers they assumed long after the pandemic went away. That view was also widely shared on here fwiw.
The consensus is rather that it's a ham fisted measure which fails to achieve its (laudable) aims, while imposing disproportionate burdens on those who aren't big business.
Stripped of the "out to get free speech" nonsense the view becomes perfectly reasonable if not necessarily (imo) correct. As for its practical impact I think we need to assess that once it's been operational for a while. If it truly does lead to lots of small benign sites closing down with little or no noticeable benefits elsewhere then ok it's a fail.
It’s already caused a number of sites to close, following legal advice.
Yes, noted. But there might be excessive caution in play with something fairly new. People (inc lawyers) can be overly risk averse in such circumstances. Let's see how it looks in a while from now. We might be pleasantly surprised.
And there's the benefit side too remember. That has to be considered.
What benefits?
A cycling forum isn’t flooding the planet with illegal porn. Or inciting terrorism.
Ok - how about I pass a law. Says that retired accountants in Hampstead need to fill out complex forms relating to anything that falls through their letterbox every morning. If they get it wrong, unlimited fines and maybe some prison time.
All they have to do is fill out the paperwork and monitor the junk mail.
The sad thing is that in the news report about him on the Today programme yesterday they felt the need to explain what the Battle of Britain was.
It felt somewhat strange that the reporters/editors of Today think that people who listen to their programme need to have the BoB explained to them.
I noted that, too. The sad thing is that we're getting old. Battle of Britain is no longer the piece of universal popular culture that it was a generation back.
The Battle of Britain was 85 years ago.
That's like me learning about the Boer Wars when I was 10. OK, the BoB is much more important an event than that, but some of my contemporaries' fathers had fought in WW2 and it had finished only 30 years previously, which is like, er, 1995 is now (can't think of anything that happened then)
So while WW2 was an epoch-making event and the ever-present background to the world many of us grew up in, it is now fairly ancient history
Morning, PB.
And the real worry is that the new right are now beginning to normalise Nazism. Twitter is increasingly full of very large amounts of normalised, extreme antisemitism, and earlier this week the central Maga figure Tucker Carlson implied it might have been better if Hitler had occupied Europe.
I think that is wrong. Twitter is not full of anything. Your twitter feed might be full of this, that or the other, but that is on account of your browsing habits (similar to the proverbial Thai hooker story).
Each person creates their own twitter universe. Not many stories pop up on your feed, I imagine, about miniature railways. Would not be the case if you were a miniature railways fan.
That used to be the case, but is no longer. The algorithm pushes Muskoid facist views, and paid for blue tick trolls.
If you want to choose your own content then BlueSky is the place.
IIUC Bluesky is subscription driven: you subscribe to people and then get fed people who subscribed to those, and so on. Various block lists are available and can be shared. This leads to the "walled gardens" that Twitter folx criticise but is more pleasant and less insane.
Twitter is algorithm driven: you spend time looking at subject X and then get fed more about subject X and associated subjects. Blocking is more difficult. This leads to the "down the rabbit hole" that affects so many people. The effect is exacerbated by i) Elon being in charge of the algorithm and able to drive whatever nonsense pricks his fancy to millions of people in minutes, and ii) bots driving the algorithm further and faster and nastier/pornier.
It's obvious at this point that algorithm-driven social media is driving us collectively nuts, but nobody is doing anything about it, aaaargh.
It’s not true that “nobody is doing anything about social media.”
The Government is busy demolishing cycling fora which makes @kinabalu happy.
Do stop being so puerile ffs.
I tell you what, the next time a teenager commits suicide or murder because of some poisonous shit they've read online I'll pop on here and say "well at least that'll make @Malmesbury happy".
Fair enough?
The idea that the OSA is going to prevent terrible shit being available online is for the birds.
It’s the triumph of bureaucracy - the true purpose is to entrench the power of the bureaucratic state by making arbitrary enforcement powers available to an unelected body which can be used as a club against anyone that doesn’t have a political roof (as the Russians like to put it) to protect them.
The idea it's a sinister mechanism to close down speech which is 'difficult' for The Authorities is far more for the birds than the assumption that it's a good faith initiative intended (with jury out on effectiveness) to do more good than harm.
Your take (widely shared on here, I know) reminds me a little of people who were convinced government relished Lockdown and would hang on to the special powers they assumed long after the pandemic went away. That view was also widely shared on here fwiw.
The consensus is rather that it's a ham fisted measure which fails to achieve its (laudable) aims, while imposing disproportionate burdens on those who aren't big business.
Yup.
Reminds me of IR35 - when Blair was challenged on it, he acted puzzled and said the big consultancies didn’t have a problem.
Of course they didn’t. IR35 didn’t touch them - it was about one man band contractors. Who were competition to Accenture et al.
IR35 closed down a loophole that tons of well paid City workers were using to avoid tax. Including me at one point. I was earning multiples of my teacher sister and paying barely more than her to HMRC.
So if it reminds you of that, it bodes quite well.
Not just city workers, automotive sector workers too. It was seen as a rite of passage to move to a ltd company contractor role to make some money, no risk.
It was also not uncommon, as it has happened at places I worked, for John smith, designer, employed full time, to leave on a Friday and John Smith Ltd, design services, charging a day rate to start on the Monday.
Clear tax dodgers.
Yes, rife in the City but not just there. Thing is, if you have multiple clients, or each assignment is short, or you're drumming up your own business, taking entrepreneurial risk, that's one thing. That's different to having a 'job'. But these folk weren't doing that. They'd be working fulltime at one place for years, indistinguishable from employees other than their admin set-up as one man limited companies. Then it's dividends instead of PAYE and it's all sorts of expenses getting written off. Upshot, an effective tax rate a fraction of what it otherwise would be. Nice work if you can get it.
It’s a trade off. They also didn’t get pensions and could be fired at the drop of a hat.
Sure. And in my (City) experience skewed in favour of (bogus) self-employment.
I'm not about to defend every aspect of how IR35 was implemented and all of its consequences on each and every individual - I know my limits - but it was a real problem being addressed there and I'd say on balance and in the round a world with IR35 is better than a world without it.
In fact I was kind of on-the-fence about the Online Safety Act but now that @Malmesbury has said it's like IR35 I feel myself becoming a strong supporter of it.
What I meant was that the government consulted the big firms (who wanted their small fry competition closed down) and had no interest in the side effects.
The Online Safety Act is a classic of imposing a regulatory burden but totally avoiding the real issues.
Because imposing a regulatory burden falls on the honest.
The problem sites are not cycling enthusiasts- they are either offshore (already) or the big corporates like Twatter.
Do you really think that Social Truth will comply?
Yes, I knew what you meant. I was only kidding.
And I get your view loud and clear. You and I should probably drop this topic because the conversation is unbalanced. You're passionately anti and I'm just very very mildly pro (but subject to practicalities).
It's a recipe for (my) repetition and (your) frustration.
Santander shutting 95 branches, around a quarter of its U.K. network.
When they have closed all their branches - why would anyone still use them? They offer less than online challenger banks, are usually less secure, and if you can't physically use a branch there's very little point in having an account with them.
It's a sign that cash is obsolete and is now overwhelmingly only used by druggies, terrorists, criminals, and tax dodgers so closing branches makes sense.
Also Santander have been in talks with Natwest and others to dispose of their UK division as ring-fencing is stopping them from sending funds to Santander Spain.
Shutting down a quarter of their branch network improves their EBITDA and makes them look even more attractive to Natwest et al.
The sad thing is that in the news report about him on the Today programme yesterday they felt the need to explain what the Battle of Britain was.
It felt somewhat strange that the reporters/editors of Today think that people who listen to their programme need to have the BoB explained to them.
I noted that, too. The sad thing is that we're getting old. Battle of Britain is no longer the piece of universal popular culture that it was a generation back.
The Battle of Britain was 85 years ago.
That's like me learning about the Boer Wars when I was 10. OK, the BoB is much more important an event than that, but some of my contemporaries' fathers had fought in WW2 and it had finished only 30 years previously, which is like, er, 1995 is now (can't think of anything that happened then)
So while WW2 was an epoch-making event and the ever-present background to the world many of us grew up in, it is now fairly ancient history
Morning, PB.
And the real worry is that the new right are now beginning to normalise Nazism. Twitter is increasingly full of very large amounts of normalised, extreme antisemitism, and earlier this week the central Maga figure Tucker Carlson implied it might have been better if Hitler had occupied Europe.
I think that is wrong. Twitter is not full of anything. Your twitter feed might be full of this, that or the other, but that is on account of your browsing habits (similar to the proverbial Thai hooker story).
Each person creates their own twitter universe. Not many stories pop up on your feed, I imagine, about miniature railways. Would not be the case if you were a miniature railways fan.
That used to be the case, but is no longer. The algorithm pushes Muskoid facist views, and paid for blue tick trolls.
If you want to choose your own content then BlueSky is the place.
IIUC Bluesky is subscription driven: you subscribe to people and then get fed people who subscribed to those, and so on. Various block lists are available and can be shared. This leads to the "walled gardens" that Twitter folx criticise but is more pleasant and less insane.
Twitter is algorithm driven: you spend time looking at subject X and then get fed more about subject X and associated subjects. Blocking is more difficult. This leads to the "down the rabbit hole" that affects so many people. The effect is exacerbated by i) Elon being in charge of the algorithm and able to drive whatever nonsense pricks his fancy to millions of people in minutes, and ii) bots driving the algorithm further and faster and nastier/pornier.
It's obvious at this point that algorithm-driven social media is driving us collectively nuts, but nobody is doing anything about it, aaaargh.
It’s not true that “nobody is doing anything about social media.”
The Government is busy demolishing cycling fora which makes @kinabalu happy.
Do stop being so puerile ffs.
I tell you what, the next time a teenager commits suicide or murder because of some poisonous shit they've read online I'll pop on here and say "well at least that'll make @Malmesbury happy".
Fair enough?
The idea that the OSA is going to prevent terrible shit being available online is for the birds.
It’s the triumph of bureaucracy - the true purpose is to entrench the power of the bureaucratic state by making arbitrary enforcement powers available to an unelected body which can be used as a club against anyone that doesn’t have a political roof (as the Russians like to put it) to protect them.
The idea it's a sinister mechanism to close down speech which is 'difficult' for The Authorities is far more for the birds than the assumption that it's a good faith initiative intended (with jury out on effectiveness) to do more good than harm.
Your take (widely shared on here, I know) reminds me a little of people who were convinced government relished Lockdown and would hang on to the special powers they assumed long after the pandemic went away. That view was also widely shared on here fwiw.
The consensus is rather that it's a ham fisted measure which fails to achieve its (laudable) aims, while imposing disproportionate burdens on those who aren't big business.
Yup.
Reminds me of IR35 - when Blair was challenged on it, he acted puzzled and said the big consultancies didn’t have a problem.
Of course they didn’t. IR35 didn’t touch them - it was about one man band contractors. Who were competition to Accenture et al.
IR35 closed down a loophole that tons of well paid City workers were using to avoid tax. Including me at one point. I was earning multiples of my teacher sister and paying barely more than her to HMRC.
So if it reminds you of that, it bodes quite well.
Not just city workers, automotive sector workers too. It was seen as a rite of passage to move to a ltd company contractor role to make some money, no risk.
It was also not uncommon, as it has happened at places I worked, for John smith, designer, employed full time, to leave on a Friday and John Smith Ltd, design services, charging a day rate to start on the Monday.
Clear tax dodgers.
Yes, rife in the City but not just there. Thing is, if you have multiple clients, or each assignment is short, or you're drumming up your own business, taking entrepreneurial risk, that's one thing. That's different to having a 'job'. But these folk weren't doing that. They'd be working fulltime at one place for years, indistinguishable from employees other than their admin set-up as one man limited companies. Then it's dividends instead of PAYE and it's all sorts of expenses getting written off. Upshot, an effective tax rate a fraction of what it otherwise would be. Nice work if you can get it.
It’s a trade off. They also didn’t get pensions and could be fired at the drop of a hat.
Sure. And in my (City) experience skewed in favour of (bogus) self-employment.
I'm not about to defend every aspect of how IR35 was implemented and all of its consequences on each and every individual - I know my limits - but it was a real problem being addressed there and I'd say on balance and in the round a world with IR35 is better than a world without it.
In fact I was kind of on-the-fence about the Online Safety Act but now that @Malmesbury has said it's like IR35 I feel myself becoming a strong supporter of it.
Wouldn't the equitable solution to have set yourself up as Ltd company to satisfy your client but paid yourself entirely within wages from the company to satisfy HMRC and not screw the Richard Tyndall's of this world for the future ?
Have you considered stand-up?
It's a good point though. If you wanted to pay tax through PAYE you could have done.
The sad thing is that in the news report about him on the Today programme yesterday they felt the need to explain what the Battle of Britain was.
It felt somewhat strange that the reporters/editors of Today think that people who listen to their programme need to have the BoB explained to them.
I noted that, too. The sad thing is that we're getting old. Battle of Britain is no longer the piece of universal popular culture that it was a generation back.
The Battle of Britain was 85 years ago.
That's like me learning about the Boer Wars when I was 10. OK, the BoB is much more important an event than that, but some of my contemporaries' fathers had fought in WW2 and it had finished only 30 years previously, which is like, er, 1995 is now (can't think of anything that happened then)
So while WW2 was an epoch-making event and the ever-present background to the world many of us grew up in, it is now fairly ancient history
Morning, PB.
And the real worry is that the new right are now beginning to normalise Nazism. Twitter is increasingly full of very large amounts of normalised, extreme antisemitism, and earlier this week the central Maga figure Tucker Carlson implied it might have been better if Hitler had occupied Europe.
I think that is wrong. Twitter is not full of anything. Your twitter feed might be full of this, that or the other, but that is on account of your browsing habits (similar to the proverbial Thai hooker story).
Each person creates their own twitter universe. Not many stories pop up on your feed, I imagine, about miniature railways. Would not be the case if you were a miniature railways fan.
That used to be the case, but is no longer. The algorithm pushes Muskoid facist views, and paid for blue tick trolls.
If you want to choose your own content then BlueSky is the place.
IIUC Bluesky is subscription driven: you subscribe to people and then get fed people who subscribed to those, and so on. Various block lists are available and can be shared. This leads to the "walled gardens" that Twitter folx criticise but is more pleasant and less insane.
Twitter is algorithm driven: you spend time looking at subject X and then get fed more about subject X and associated subjects. Blocking is more difficult. This leads to the "down the rabbit hole" that affects so many people. The effect is exacerbated by i) Elon being in charge of the algorithm and able to drive whatever nonsense pricks his fancy to millions of people in minutes, and ii) bots driving the algorithm further and faster and nastier/pornier.
It's obvious at this point that algorithm-driven social media is driving us collectively nuts, but nobody is doing anything about it, aaaargh.
It’s not true that “nobody is doing anything about social media.”
The Government is busy demolishing cycling fora which makes @kinabalu happy.
Do stop being so puerile ffs.
I tell you what, the next time a teenager commits suicide or murder because of some poisonous shit they've read online I'll pop on here and say "well at least that'll make @Malmesbury happy".
Fair enough?
The idea that the OSA is going to prevent terrible shit being available online is for the birds.
It’s the triumph of bureaucracy - the true purpose is to entrench the power of the bureaucratic state by making arbitrary enforcement powers available to an unelected body which can be used as a club against anyone that doesn’t have a political roof (as the Russians like to put it) to protect them.
The idea it's a sinister mechanism to close down speech which is 'difficult' for The Authorities is far more for the birds than the assumption that it's a good faith initiative intended (with jury out on effectiveness) to do more good than harm.
Your take (widely shared on here, I know) reminds me a little of people who were convinced government relished Lockdown and would hang on to the special powers they assumed long after the pandemic went away. That view was also widely shared on here fwiw.
The consensus is rather that it's a ham fisted measure which fails to achieve its (laudable) aims, while imposing disproportionate burdens on those who aren't big business.
Yup.
Reminds me of IR35 - when Blair was challenged on it, he acted puzzled and said the big consultancies didn’t have a problem.
Of course they didn’t. IR35 didn’t touch them - it was about one man band contractors. Who were competition to Accenture et al.
IR35 closed down a loophole that tons of well paid City workers were using to avoid tax. Including me at one point. I was earning multiples of my teacher sister and paying barely more than her to HMRC.
So if it reminds you of that, it bodes quite well.
Not just city workers, automotive sector workers too. It was seen as a rite of passage to move to a ltd company contractor role to make some money, no risk.
It was also not uncommon, as it has happened at places I worked, for John smith, designer, employed full time, to leave on a Friday and John Smith Ltd, design services, charging a day rate to start on the Monday.
Clear tax dodgers.
Yes, rife in the City but not just there. Thing is, if you have multiple clients, or each assignment is short, or you're drumming up your own business, taking entrepreneurial risk, that's one thing. That's different to having a 'job'. But these folk weren't doing that. They'd be working fulltime at one place for years, indistinguishable from employees other than their admin set-up as one man limited companies. Then it's dividends instead of PAYE and it's all sorts of expenses getting written off. Upshot, an effective tax rate a fraction of what it otherwise would be. Nice work if you can get it.
It’s a trade off. They also didn’t get pensions and could be fired at the drop of a hat.
Sure. And in my (City) experience skewed in favour of (bogus) self-employment.
I'm not about to defend every aspect of how IR35 was implemented and all of its consequences on each and every individual - I know my limits - but it was a real problem being addressed there and I'd say on balance and in the round a world with IR35 is better than a world without it.
In fact I was kind of on-the-fence about the Online Safety Act but now that @Malmesbury has said it's like IR35 I feel myself becoming a strong supporter of it.
What I meant was that the government consulted the big firms (who wanted their small fry competition closed down) and had no interest in the side effects.
The Online Safety Act is a classic of imposing a regulatory burden but totally avoiding the real issues.
Because imposing a regulatory burden falls on the honest.
The problem sites are not cycling enthusiasts- they are either offshore (already) or the big corporates like Twatter.
Do you really think that Social Truth will comply?
Yes, I knew what you meant. I was only kidding.
And I get your view loud and clear. You and I should probably drop this topic because the conversation is unbalanced. You're passionately anti and I'm just very very mildly pro (but subject to practicalities).
It's a recipe for (my) repetition and (your) frustration.
A big problem for this country is the belief that a regulation always makes things better.
Regulation can kill. Regulations can destroy.
At Grenfell, every question about safety, before the fire was answered by reference to literal tons of documents. Because the regulations were performative bullshit. And there was no enforcement.
If a regulation actually achieves something noticeable (less poor people burnt to death is a noticeable metric) then it has use.
The sad thing is that in the news report about him on the Today programme yesterday they felt the need to explain what the Battle of Britain was.
It felt somewhat strange that the reporters/editors of Today think that people who listen to their programme need to have the BoB explained to them.
I noted that, too. The sad thing is that we're getting old. Battle of Britain is no longer the piece of universal popular culture that it was a generation back.
The Battle of Britain was 85 years ago.
That's like me learning about the Boer Wars when I was 10. OK, the BoB is much more important an event than that, but some of my contemporaries' fathers had fought in WW2 and it had finished only 30 years previously, which is like, er, 1995 is now (can't think of anything that happened then)
So while WW2 was an epoch-making event and the ever-present background to the world many of us grew up in, it is now fairly ancient history
Morning, PB.
And the real worry is that the new right are now beginning to normalise Nazism. Twitter is increasingly full of very large amounts of normalised, extreme antisemitism, and earlier this week the central Maga figure Tucker Carlson implied it might have been better if Hitler had occupied Europe.
I think that is wrong. Twitter is not full of anything. Your twitter feed might be full of this, that or the other, but that is on account of your browsing habits (similar to the proverbial Thai hooker story).
Each person creates their own twitter universe. Not many stories pop up on your feed, I imagine, about miniature railways. Would not be the case if you were a miniature railways fan.
That used to be the case, but is no longer. The algorithm pushes Muskoid facist views, and paid for blue tick trolls.
If you want to choose your own content then BlueSky is the place.
IIUC Bluesky is subscription driven: you subscribe to people and then get fed people who subscribed to those, and so on. Various block lists are available and can be shared. This leads to the "walled gardens" that Twitter folx criticise but is more pleasant and less insane.
Twitter is algorithm driven: you spend time looking at subject X and then get fed more about subject X and associated subjects. Blocking is more difficult. This leads to the "down the rabbit hole" that affects so many people. The effect is exacerbated by i) Elon being in charge of the algorithm and able to drive whatever nonsense pricks his fancy to millions of people in minutes, and ii) bots driving the algorithm further and faster and nastier/pornier.
It's obvious at this point that algorithm-driven social media is driving us collectively nuts, but nobody is doing anything about it, aaaargh.
It’s not true that “nobody is doing anything about social media.”
The Government is busy demolishing cycling fora which makes @kinabalu happy.
Do stop being so puerile ffs.
I tell you what, the next time a teenager commits suicide or murder because of some poisonous shit they've read online I'll pop on here and say "well at least that'll make @Malmesbury happy".
Fair enough?
The idea that the OSA is going to prevent terrible shit being available online is for the birds.
It’s the triumph of bureaucracy - the true purpose is to entrench the power of the bureaucratic state by making arbitrary enforcement powers available to an unelected body which can be used as a club against anyone that doesn’t have a political roof (as the Russians like to put it) to protect them.
The idea it's a sinister mechanism to close down speech which is 'difficult' for The Authorities is far more for the birds than the assumption that it's a good faith initiative intended (with jury out on effectiveness) to do more good than harm.
Your take (widely shared on here, I know) reminds me a little of people who were convinced government relished Lockdown and would hang on to the special powers they assumed long after the pandemic went away. That view was also widely shared on here fwiw.
The consensus is rather that it's a ham fisted measure which fails to achieve its (laudable) aims, while imposing disproportionate burdens on those who aren't big business.
Stripped of the "out to get free speech" nonsense the view becomes perfectly reasonable if not necessarily (imo) correct. As for its practical impact I think we need to assess that once it's been operational for a while. If it truly does lead to lots of small benign sites closing down with little or no noticeable benefits elsewhere then ok it's a fail.
It’s already caused a number of sites to close, following legal advice.
Yes, noted. But there might be excessive caution in play with something fairly new. People (inc lawyers) can be overly risk averse in such circumstances. Let's see how it looks in a while from now. We might be pleasantly surprised.
And there's the benefit side too remember. That has to be considered.
What benefits?
A cycling forum isn’t flooding the planet with illegal porn. Or inciting terrorism.
Ok - how about I pass a law. Says that retired accountants in Hampstead need to fill out complex forms relating to anything that falls through their letterbox every morning. If they get it wrong, unlimited fines and maybe some prison time.
All they have to do is fill out the paperwork and monitor the junk mail.
We've already done this. Your view is that despite the best efforts of everyone involved in this initiative there are precisely zero benefits. That obviously makes it a no-brainer for you to oppose (even if it were cost free). Me, I'm mildly in favour (but subject to the practical impact once it's bedded down).
The sad thing is that in the news report about him on the Today programme yesterday they felt the need to explain what the Battle of Britain was.
It felt somewhat strange that the reporters/editors of Today think that people who listen to their programme need to have the BoB explained to them.
I noted that, too. The sad thing is that we're getting old. Battle of Britain is no longer the piece of universal popular culture that it was a generation back.
The Battle of Britain was 85 years ago.
That's like me learning about the Boer Wars when I was 10. OK, the BoB is much more important an event than that, but some of my contemporaries' fathers had fought in WW2 and it had finished only 30 years previously, which is like, er, 1995 is now (can't think of anything that happened then)
So while WW2 was an epoch-making event and the ever-present background to the world many of us grew up in, it is now fairly ancient history
Morning, PB.
And the real worry is that the new right are now beginning to normalise Nazism. Twitter is increasingly full of very large amounts of normalised, extreme antisemitism, and earlier this week the central Maga figure Tucker Carlson implied it might have been better if Hitler had occupied Europe.
I think that is wrong. Twitter is not full of anything. Your twitter feed might be full of this, that or the other, but that is on account of your browsing habits (similar to the proverbial Thai hooker story).
Each person creates their own twitter universe. Not many stories pop up on your feed, I imagine, about miniature railways. Would not be the case if you were a miniature railways fan.
That used to be the case, but is no longer. The algorithm pushes Muskoid facist views, and paid for blue tick trolls.
If you want to choose your own content then BlueSky is the place.
IIUC Bluesky is subscription driven: you subscribe to people and then get fed people who subscribed to those, and so on. Various block lists are available and can be shared. This leads to the "walled gardens" that Twitter folx criticise but is more pleasant and less insane.
Twitter is algorithm driven: you spend time looking at subject X and then get fed more about subject X and associated subjects. Blocking is more difficult. This leads to the "down the rabbit hole" that affects so many people. The effect is exacerbated by i) Elon being in charge of the algorithm and able to drive whatever nonsense pricks his fancy to millions of people in minutes, and ii) bots driving the algorithm further and faster and nastier/pornier.
It's obvious at this point that algorithm-driven social media is driving us collectively nuts, but nobody is doing anything about it, aaaargh.
It’s not true that “nobody is doing anything about social media.”
The Government is busy demolishing cycling fora which makes @kinabalu happy.
Do stop being so puerile ffs.
I tell you what, the next time a teenager commits suicide or murder because of some poisonous shit they've read online I'll pop on here and say "well at least that'll make @Malmesbury happy".
Fair enough?
The idea that the OSA is going to prevent terrible shit being available online is for the birds.
It’s the triumph of bureaucracy - the true purpose is to entrench the power of the bureaucratic state by making arbitrary enforcement powers available to an unelected body which can be used as a club against anyone that doesn’t have a political roof (as the Russians like to put it) to protect them.
The idea it's a sinister mechanism to close down speech which is 'difficult' for The Authorities is far more for the birds than the assumption that it's a good faith initiative intended (with jury out on effectiveness) to do more good than harm.
Your take (widely shared on here, I know) reminds me a little of people who were convinced government relished Lockdown and would hang on to the special powers they assumed long after the pandemic went away. That view was also widely shared on here fwiw.
The consensus is rather that it's a ham fisted measure which fails to achieve its (laudable) aims, while imposing disproportionate burdens on those who aren't big business.
Yup.
Reminds me of IR35 - when Blair was challenged on it, he acted puzzled and said the big consultancies didn’t have a problem.
Of course they didn’t. IR35 didn’t touch them - it was about one man band contractors. Who were competition to Accenture et al.
IR35 closed down a loophole that tons of well paid City workers were using to avoid tax. Including me at one point. I was earning multiples of my teacher sister and paying barely more than her to HMRC.
So if it reminds you of that, it bodes quite well.
Not just city workers, automotive sector workers too. It was seen as a rite of passage to move to a ltd company contractor role to make some money, no risk.
It was also not uncommon, as it has happened at places I worked, for John smith, designer, employed full time, to leave on a Friday and John Smith Ltd, design services, charging a day rate to start on the Monday.
Clear tax dodgers.
Yes, rife in the City but not just there. Thing is, if you have multiple clients, or each assignment is short, or you're drumming up your own business, taking entrepreneurial risk, that's one thing. That's different to having a 'job'. But these folk weren't doing that. They'd be working fulltime at one place for years, indistinguishable from employees other than their admin set-up as one man limited companies. Then it's dividends instead of PAYE and it's all sorts of expenses getting written off. Upshot, an effective tax rate a fraction of what it otherwise would be. Nice work if you can get it.
It’s a trade off. They also didn’t get pensions and could be fired at the drop of a hat.
Sure. And in my (City) experience skewed in favour of (bogus) self-employment.
I'm not about to defend every aspect of how IR35 was implemented and all of its consequences on each and every individual - I know my limits - but it was a real problem being addressed there and I'd say on balance and in the round a world with IR35 is better than a world without it.
In fact I was kind of on-the-fence about the Online Safety Act but now that @Malmesbury has said it's like IR35 I feel myself becoming a strong supporter of it.
What I meant was that the government consulted the big firms (who wanted their small fry competition closed down) and had no interest in the side effects.
The Online Safety Act is a classic of imposing a regulatory burden but totally avoiding the real issues.
Because imposing a regulatory burden falls on the honest.
The problem sites are not cycling enthusiasts- they are either offshore (already) or the big corporates like Twatter.
Do you really think that Social Truth will comply?
Yes, I knew what you meant. I was only kidding.
And I get your view loud and clear. You and I should probably drop this topic because the conversation is unbalanced. You're passionately anti and I'm just very very mildly pro (but subject to practicalities).
It's a recipe for (my) repetition and (your) frustration.
A big problem for this country is the belief that a regulation always makes things better.
Regulation can kill. Regulations can destroy.
At Grenfell, every question about safety, before the fire was answered by reference to literal tons of documents. Because the regulations were performative bullshit. And there was no enforcement.
If a regulation actually achieves something noticeable (less poor people burnt to death is a noticeable metric) then it has use.
One of the major reasons put forward by those responsible for checking / refurbishing all the building with cladding is that new regulation has again been poorly thought out, so it is radically slowing down the rate at which this issue can be resolved.
The sad thing is that in the news report about him on the Today programme yesterday they felt the need to explain what the Battle of Britain was.
It felt somewhat strange that the reporters/editors of Today think that people who listen to their programme need to have the BoB explained to them.
I noted that, too. The sad thing is that we're getting old. Battle of Britain is no longer the piece of universal popular culture that it was a generation back.
The Battle of Britain was 85 years ago.
That's like me learning about the Boer Wars when I was 10. OK, the BoB is much more important an event than that, but some of my contemporaries' fathers had fought in WW2 and it had finished only 30 years previously, which is like, er, 1995 is now (can't think of anything that happened then)
So while WW2 was an epoch-making event and the ever-present background to the world many of us grew up in, it is now fairly ancient history
Morning, PB.
And the real worry is that the new right are now beginning to normalise Nazism. Twitter is increasingly full of very large amounts of normalised, extreme antisemitism, and earlier this week the central Maga figure Tucker Carlson implied it might have been better if Hitler had occupied Europe.
I think that is wrong. Twitter is not full of anything. Your twitter feed might be full of this, that or the other, but that is on account of your browsing habits (similar to the proverbial Thai hooker story).
Each person creates their own twitter universe. Not many stories pop up on your feed, I imagine, about miniature railways. Would not be the case if you were a miniature railways fan.
That used to be the case, but is no longer. The algorithm pushes Muskoid facist views, and paid for blue tick trolls.
If you want to choose your own content then BlueSky is the place.
IIUC Bluesky is subscription driven: you subscribe to people and then get fed people who subscribed to those, and so on. Various block lists are available and can be shared. This leads to the "walled gardens" that Twitter folx criticise but is more pleasant and less insane.
Twitter is algorithm driven: you spend time looking at subject X and then get fed more about subject X and associated subjects. Blocking is more difficult. This leads to the "down the rabbit hole" that affects so many people. The effect is exacerbated by i) Elon being in charge of the algorithm and able to drive whatever nonsense pricks his fancy to millions of people in minutes, and ii) bots driving the algorithm further and faster and nastier/pornier.
It's obvious at this point that algorithm-driven social media is driving us collectively nuts, but nobody is doing anything about it, aaaargh.
It’s not true that “nobody is doing anything about social media.”
The Government is busy demolishing cycling fora which makes @kinabalu happy.
Do stop being so puerile ffs.
I tell you what, the next time a teenager commits suicide or murder because of some poisonous shit they've read online I'll pop on here and say "well at least that'll make @Malmesbury happy".
Fair enough?
The idea that the OSA is going to prevent terrible shit being available online is for the birds.
It’s the triumph of bureaucracy - the true purpose is to entrench the power of the bureaucratic state by making arbitrary enforcement powers available to an unelected body which can be used as a club against anyone that doesn’t have a political roof (as the Russians like to put it) to protect them.
The idea it's a sinister mechanism to close down speech which is 'difficult' for The Authorities is far more for the birds than the assumption that it's a good faith initiative intended (with jury out on effectiveness) to do more good than harm.
Your take (widely shared on here, I know) reminds me a little of people who were convinced government relished Lockdown and would hang on to the special powers they assumed long after the pandemic went away. That view was also widely shared on here fwiw.
The consensus is rather that it's a ham fisted measure which fails to achieve its (laudable) aims, while imposing disproportionate burdens on those who aren't big business.
Yup.
Reminds me of IR35 - when Blair was challenged on it, he acted puzzled and said the big consultancies didn’t have a problem.
Of course they didn’t. IR35 didn’t touch them - it was about one man band contractors. Who were competition to Accenture et al.
IR35 closed down a loophole that tons of well paid City workers were using to avoid tax. Including me at one point. I was earning multiples of my teacher sister and paying barely more than her to HMRC.
So if it reminds you of that, it bodes quite well.
Not just city workers, automotive sector workers too. It was seen as a rite of passage to move to a ltd company contractor role to make some money, no risk.
It was also not uncommon, as it has happened at places I worked, for John smith, designer, employed full time, to leave on a Friday and John Smith Ltd, design services, charging a day rate to start on the Monday.
Clear tax dodgers.
Yes, rife in the City but not just there. Thing is, if you have multiple clients, or each assignment is short, or you're drumming up your own business, taking entrepreneurial risk, that's one thing. That's different to having a 'job'. But these folk weren't doing that. They'd be working fulltime at one place for years, indistinguishable from employees other than their admin set-up as one man limited companies. Then it's dividends instead of PAYE and it's all sorts of expenses getting written off. Upshot, an effective tax rate a fraction of what it otherwise would be. Nice work if you can get it.
It’s a trade off. They also didn’t get pensions and could be fired at the drop of a hat.
Sure. And in my (City) experience skewed in favour of (bogus) self-employment.
I'm not about to defend every aspect of how IR35 was implemented and all of its consequences on each and every individual - I know my limits - but it was a real problem being addressed there and I'd say on balance and in the round a world with IR35 is better than a world without it.
In fact I was kind of on-the-fence about the Online Safety Act but now that @Malmesbury has said it's like IR35 I feel myself becoming a strong supporter of it.
What I meant was that the government consulted the big firms (who wanted their small fry competition closed down) and had no interest in the side effects.
The Online Safety Act is a classic of imposing a regulatory burden but totally avoiding the real issues.
Because imposing a regulatory burden falls on the honest.
The problem sites are not cycling enthusiasts- they are either offshore (already) or the big corporates like Twatter.
Do you really think that Social Truth will comply?
Yes, I knew what you meant. I was only kidding.
And I get your view loud and clear. You and I should probably drop this topic because the conversation is unbalanced. You're passionately anti and I'm just very very mildly pro (but subject to practicalities).
It's a recipe for (my) repetition and (your) frustration.
A big problem for this country is the belief that a regulation always makes things better.
Regulation can kill. Regulations can destroy.
At Grenfell, every question about safety, before the fire was answered by reference to literal tons of documents. Because the regulations were performative bullshit. And there was no enforcement.
If a regulation actually achieves something noticeable (less poor people burnt to death is a noticeable metric) then it has use.
I suggest you find someone who does believe that more Regulation and reams of paperwork and checklists always makes things better and chunter these nuggets of wisdom at them. Do we have a deal?
The sad thing is that in the news report about him on the Today programme yesterday they felt the need to explain what the Battle of Britain was.
It felt somewhat strange that the reporters/editors of Today think that people who listen to their programme need to have the BoB explained to them.
I noted that, too. The sad thing is that we're getting old. Battle of Britain is no longer the piece of universal popular culture that it was a generation back.
The Battle of Britain was 85 years ago.
That's like me learning about the Boer Wars when I was 10. OK, the BoB is much more important an event than that, but some of my contemporaries' fathers had fought in WW2 and it had finished only 30 years previously, which is like, er, 1995 is now (can't think of anything that happened then)
So while WW2 was an epoch-making event and the ever-present background to the world many of us grew up in, it is now fairly ancient history
Morning, PB.
And the real worry is that the new right are now beginning to normalise Nazism. Twitter is increasingly full of very large amounts of normalised, extreme antisemitism, and earlier this week the central Maga figure Tucker Carlson implied it might have been better if Hitler had occupied Europe.
I think that is wrong. Twitter is not full of anything. Your twitter feed might be full of this, that or the other, but that is on account of your browsing habits (similar to the proverbial Thai hooker story).
Each person creates their own twitter universe. Not many stories pop up on your feed, I imagine, about miniature railways. Would not be the case if you were a miniature railways fan.
That used to be the case, but is no longer. The algorithm pushes Muskoid facist views, and paid for blue tick trolls.
If you want to choose your own content then BlueSky is the place.
IIUC Bluesky is subscription driven: you subscribe to people and then get fed people who subscribed to those, and so on. Various block lists are available and can be shared. This leads to the "walled gardens" that Twitter folx criticise but is more pleasant and less insane.
Twitter is algorithm driven: you spend time looking at subject X and then get fed more about subject X and associated subjects. Blocking is more difficult. This leads to the "down the rabbit hole" that affects so many people. The effect is exacerbated by i) Elon being in charge of the algorithm and able to drive whatever nonsense pricks his fancy to millions of people in minutes, and ii) bots driving the algorithm further and faster and nastier/pornier.
It's obvious at this point that algorithm-driven social media is driving us collectively nuts, but nobody is doing anything about it, aaaargh.
It’s not true that “nobody is doing anything about social media.”
The Government is busy demolishing cycling fora which makes @kinabalu happy.
Do stop being so puerile ffs.
I tell you what, the next time a teenager commits suicide or murder because of some poisonous shit they've read online I'll pop on here and say "well at least that'll make @Malmesbury happy".
Fair enough?
The idea that the OSA is going to prevent terrible shit being available online is for the birds.
It’s the triumph of bureaucracy - the true purpose is to entrench the power of the bureaucratic state by making arbitrary enforcement powers available to an unelected body which can be used as a club against anyone that doesn’t have a political roof (as the Russians like to put it) to protect them.
The idea it's a sinister mechanism to close down speech which is 'difficult' for The Authorities is far more for the birds than the assumption that it's a good faith initiative intended (with jury out on effectiveness) to do more good than harm.
Your take (widely shared on here, I know) reminds me a little of people who were convinced government relished Lockdown and would hang on to the special powers they assumed long after the pandemic went away. That view was also widely shared on here fwiw.
The consensus is rather that it's a ham fisted measure which fails to achieve its (laudable) aims, while imposing disproportionate burdens on those who aren't big business.
Yup.
Reminds me of IR35 - when Blair was challenged on it, he acted puzzled and said the big consultancies didn’t have a problem.
Of course they didn’t. IR35 didn’t touch them - it was about one man band contractors. Who were competition to Accenture et al.
IR35 closed down a loophole that tons of well paid City workers were using to avoid tax. Including me at one point. I was earning multiples of my teacher sister and paying barely more than her to HMRC.
So if it reminds you of that, it bodes quite well.
Not just city workers, automotive sector workers too. It was seen as a rite of passage to move to a ltd company contractor role to make some money, no risk.
It was also not uncommon, as it has happened at places I worked, for John smith, designer, employed full time, to leave on a Friday and John Smith Ltd, design services, charging a day rate to start on the Monday.
Clear tax dodgers.
Yes, rife in the City but not just there. Thing is, if you have multiple clients, or each assignment is short, or you're drumming up your own business, taking entrepreneurial risk, that's one thing. That's different to having a 'job'. But these folk weren't doing that. They'd be working fulltime at one place for years, indistinguishable from employees other than their admin set-up as one man limited companies. Then it's dividends instead of PAYE and it's all sorts of expenses getting written off. Upshot, an effective tax rate a fraction of what it otherwise would be. Nice work if you can get it.
It’s a trade off. They also didn’t get pensions and could be fired at the drop of a hat.
Sure. And in my (City) experience skewed in favour of (bogus) self-employment.
I'm not about to defend every aspect of how IR35 was implemented and all of its consequences on each and every individual - I know my limits - but it was a real problem being addressed there and I'd say on balance and in the round a world with IR35 is better than a world without it.
In fact I was kind of on-the-fence about the Online Safety Act but now that @Malmesbury has said it's like IR35 I feel myself becoming a strong supporter of it.
What I meant was that the government consulted the big firms (who wanted their small fry competition closed down) and had no interest in the side effects.
The Online Safety Act is a classic of imposing a regulatory burden but totally avoiding the real issues.
Because imposing a regulatory burden falls on the honest.
The problem sites are not cycling enthusiasts- they are either offshore (already) or the big corporates like Twatter.
Do you really think that Social Truth will comply?
Yes, I knew what you meant. I was only kidding.
And I get your view loud and clear. You and I should probably drop this topic because the conversation is unbalanced. You're passionately anti and I'm just very very mildly pro (but subject to practicalities).
It's a recipe for (my) repetition and (your) frustration.
A big problem for this country is the belief that a regulation always makes things better.
Regulation can kill. Regulations can destroy.
At Grenfell, every question about safety, before the fire was answered by reference to literal tons of documents. Because the regulations were performative bullshit. And there was no enforcement.
If a regulation actually achieves something noticeable (less poor people burnt to death is a noticeable metric) then it has use.
There is also a tendency to not notice when regulation is working, precisely because nothing noticeable happens. Someone doesn't die, something doesn't collapse, etc. There is a huge amount of regulation that is very successful.
The sad thing is that in the news report about him on the Today programme yesterday they felt the need to explain what the Battle of Britain was.
It felt somewhat strange that the reporters/editors of Today think that people who listen to their programme need to have the BoB explained to them.
I noted that, too. The sad thing is that we're getting old. Battle of Britain is no longer the piece of universal popular culture that it was a generation back.
The Battle of Britain was 85 years ago.
That's like me learning about the Boer Wars when I was 10. OK, the BoB is much more important an event than that, but some of my contemporaries' fathers had fought in WW2 and it had finished only 30 years previously, which is like, er, 1995 is now (can't think of anything that happened then)
So while WW2 was an epoch-making event and the ever-present background to the world many of us grew up in, it is now fairly ancient history
Morning, PB.
And the real worry is that the new right are now beginning to normalise Nazism. Twitter is increasingly full of very large amounts of normalised, extreme antisemitism, and earlier this week the central Maga figure Tucker Carlson implied it might have been better if Hitler had occupied Europe.
I think that is wrong. Twitter is not full of anything. Your twitter feed might be full of this, that or the other, but that is on account of your browsing habits (similar to the proverbial Thai hooker story).
Each person creates their own twitter universe. Not many stories pop up on your feed, I imagine, about miniature railways. Would not be the case if you were a miniature railways fan.
That used to be the case, but is no longer. The algorithm pushes Muskoid facist views, and paid for blue tick trolls.
If you want to choose your own content then BlueSky is the place.
IIUC Bluesky is subscription driven: you subscribe to people and then get fed people who subscribed to those, and so on. Various block lists are available and can be shared. This leads to the "walled gardens" that Twitter folx criticise but is more pleasant and less insane.
Twitter is algorithm driven: you spend time looking at subject X and then get fed more about subject X and associated subjects. Blocking is more difficult. This leads to the "down the rabbit hole" that affects so many people. The effect is exacerbated by i) Elon being in charge of the algorithm and able to drive whatever nonsense pricks his fancy to millions of people in minutes, and ii) bots driving the algorithm further and faster and nastier/pornier.
It's obvious at this point that algorithm-driven social media is driving us collectively nuts, but nobody is doing anything about it, aaaargh.
It’s not true that “nobody is doing anything about social media.”
The Government is busy demolishing cycling fora which makes @kinabalu happy.
Do stop being so puerile ffs.
I tell you what, the next time a teenager commits suicide or murder because of some poisonous shit they've read online I'll pop on here and say "well at least that'll make @Malmesbury happy".
Fair enough?
The idea that the OSA is going to prevent terrible shit being available online is for the birds.
It’s the triumph of bureaucracy - the true purpose is to entrench the power of the bureaucratic state by making arbitrary enforcement powers available to an unelected body which can be used as a club against anyone that doesn’t have a political roof (as the Russians like to put it) to protect them.
The idea it's a sinister mechanism to close down speech which is 'difficult' for The Authorities is far more for the birds than the assumption that it's a good faith initiative intended (with jury out on effectiveness) to do more good than harm.
Your take (widely shared on here, I know) reminds me a little of people who were convinced government relished Lockdown and would hang on to the special powers they assumed long after the pandemic went away. That view was also widely shared on here fwiw.
The consensus is rather that it's a ham fisted measure which fails to achieve its (laudable) aims, while imposing disproportionate burdens on those who aren't big business.
Yup.
Reminds me of IR35 - when Blair was challenged on it, he acted puzzled and said the big consultancies didn’t have a problem.
Of course they didn’t. IR35 didn’t touch them - it was about one man band contractors. Who were competition to Accenture et al.
IR35 closed down a loophole that tons of well paid City workers were using to avoid tax. Including me at one point. I was earning multiples of my teacher sister and paying barely more than her to HMRC.
So if it reminds you of that, it bodes quite well.
Not just city workers, automotive sector workers too. It was seen as a rite of passage to move to a ltd company contractor role to make some money, no risk.
It was also not uncommon, as it has happened at places I worked, for John smith, designer, employed full time, to leave on a Friday and John Smith Ltd, design services, charging a day rate to start on the Monday.
Clear tax dodgers.
Yes, rife in the City but not just there. Thing is, if you have multiple clients, or each assignment is short, or you're drumming up your own business, taking entrepreneurial risk, that's one thing. That's different to having a 'job'. But these folk weren't doing that. They'd be working fulltime at one place for years, indistinguishable from employees other than their admin set-up as one man limited companies. Then it's dividends instead of PAYE and it's all sorts of expenses getting written off. Upshot, an effective tax rate a fraction of what it otherwise would be. Nice work if you can get it.
It’s a trade off. They also didn’t get pensions and could be fired at the drop of a hat.
Sure. And in my (City) experience skewed in favour of (bogus) self-employment.
I'm not about to defend every aspect of how IR35 was implemented and all of its consequences on each and every individual - I know my limits - but it was a real problem being addressed there and I'd say on balance and in the round a world with IR35 is better than a world without it.
In fact I was kind of on-the-fence about the Online Safety Act but now that @Malmesbury has said it's like IR35 I feel myself becoming a strong supporter of it.
What I meant was that the government consulted the big firms (who wanted their small fry competition closed down) and had no interest in the side effects.
The Online Safety Act is a classic of imposing a regulatory burden but totally avoiding the real issues.
Because imposing a regulatory burden falls on the honest.
The problem sites are not cycling enthusiasts- they are either offshore (already) or the big corporates like Twatter.
Do you really think that Social Truth will comply?
Yes, I knew what you meant. I was only kidding.
And I get your view loud and clear. You and I should probably drop this topic because the conversation is unbalanced. You're passionately anti and I'm just very very mildly pro (but subject to practicalities).
It's a recipe for (my) repetition and (your) frustration.
A big problem for this country is the belief that a regulation always makes things better.
Regulation can kill. Regulations can destroy.
At Grenfell, every question about safety, before the fire was answered by reference to literal tons of documents. Because the regulations were performative bullshit. And there was no enforcement.
If a regulation actually achieves something noticeable (less poor people burnt to death is a noticeable metric) then it has use.
One of the major reasons put forward by those responsible for checking / refurbishing all the building with cladding is that new regulation has again been poorly thought out, so it is radically slowing down the rate at which this issue can be resolved.
Indeed. When the new regulations for cladding were first written down, they barely covered a page.
Then they were professionalised into a doorstep.
But that isn’t the funny bit. Under the complicated new regulations, the definition of inflammable insulation is not very well defined.
The sad thing is that in the news report about him on the Today programme yesterday they felt the need to explain what the Battle of Britain was.
It felt somewhat strange that the reporters/editors of Today think that people who listen to their programme need to have the BoB explained to them.
I noted that, too. The sad thing is that we're getting old. Battle of Britain is no longer the piece of universal popular culture that it was a generation back.
The Battle of Britain was 85 years ago.
That's like me learning about the Boer Wars when I was 10. OK, the BoB is much more important an event than that, but some of my contemporaries' fathers had fought in WW2 and it had finished only 30 years previously, which is like, er, 1995 is now (can't think of anything that happened then)
So while WW2 was an epoch-making event and the ever-present background to the world many of us grew up in, it is now fairly ancient history
Morning, PB.
And the real worry is that the new right are now beginning to normalise Nazism. Twitter is increasingly full of very large amounts of normalised, extreme antisemitism, and earlier this week the central Maga figure Tucker Carlson implied it might have been better if Hitler had occupied Europe.
I think that is wrong. Twitter is not full of anything. Your twitter feed might be full of this, that or the other, but that is on account of your browsing habits (similar to the proverbial Thai hooker story).
Each person creates their own twitter universe. Not many stories pop up on your feed, I imagine, about miniature railways. Would not be the case if you were a miniature railways fan.
That used to be the case, but is no longer. The algorithm pushes Muskoid facist views, and paid for blue tick trolls.
If you want to choose your own content then BlueSky is the place.
IIUC Bluesky is subscription driven: you subscribe to people and then get fed people who subscribed to those, and so on. Various block lists are available and can be shared. This leads to the "walled gardens" that Twitter folx criticise but is more pleasant and less insane.
Twitter is algorithm driven: you spend time looking at subject X and then get fed more about subject X and associated subjects. Blocking is more difficult. This leads to the "down the rabbit hole" that affects so many people. The effect is exacerbated by i) Elon being in charge of the algorithm and able to drive whatever nonsense pricks his fancy to millions of people in minutes, and ii) bots driving the algorithm further and faster and nastier/pornier.
It's obvious at this point that algorithm-driven social media is driving us collectively nuts, but nobody is doing anything about it, aaaargh.
It’s not true that “nobody is doing anything about social media.”
The Government is busy demolishing cycling fora which makes @kinabalu happy.
Do stop being so puerile ffs.
I tell you what, the next time a teenager commits suicide or murder because of some poisonous shit they've read online I'll pop on here and say "well at least that'll make @Malmesbury happy".
Fair enough?
The idea that the OSA is going to prevent terrible shit being available online is for the birds.
It’s the triumph of bureaucracy - the true purpose is to entrench the power of the bureaucratic state by making arbitrary enforcement powers available to an unelected body which can be used as a club against anyone that doesn’t have a political roof (as the Russians like to put it) to protect them.
The idea it's a sinister mechanism to close down speech which is 'difficult' for The Authorities is far more for the birds than the assumption that it's a good faith initiative intended (with jury out on effectiveness) to do more good than harm.
Your take (widely shared on here, I know) reminds me a little of people who were convinced government relished Lockdown and would hang on to the special powers they assumed long after the pandemic went away. That view was also widely shared on here fwiw.
The consensus is rather that it's a ham fisted measure which fails to achieve its (laudable) aims, while imposing disproportionate burdens on those who aren't big business.
Yup.
Reminds me of IR35 - when Blair was challenged on it, he acted puzzled and said the big consultancies didn’t have a problem.
Of course they didn’t. IR35 didn’t touch them - it was about one man band contractors. Who were competition to Accenture et al.
IR35 closed down a loophole that tons of well paid City workers were using to avoid tax. Including me at one point. I was earning multiples of my teacher sister and paying barely more than her to HMRC.
So if it reminds you of that, it bodes quite well.
Not just city workers, automotive sector workers too. It was seen as a rite of passage to move to a ltd company contractor role to make some money, no risk.
It was also not uncommon, as it has happened at places I worked, for John smith, designer, employed full time, to leave on a Friday and John Smith Ltd, design services, charging a day rate to start on the Monday.
Clear tax dodgers.
Yes, rife in the City but not just there. Thing is, if you have multiple clients, or each assignment is short, or you're drumming up your own business, taking entrepreneurial risk, that's one thing. That's different to having a 'job'. But these folk weren't doing that. They'd be working fulltime at one place for years, indistinguishable from employees other than their admin set-up as one man limited companies. Then it's dividends instead of PAYE and it's all sorts of expenses getting written off. Upshot, an effective tax rate a fraction of what it otherwise would be. Nice work if you can get it.
It’s a trade off. They also didn’t get pensions and could be fired at the drop of a hat.
Sure. And in my (City) experience skewed in favour of (bogus) self-employment.
I'm not about to defend every aspect of how IR35 was implemented and all of its consequences on each and every individual - I know my limits - but it was a real problem being addressed there and I'd say on balance and in the round a world with IR35 is better than a world without it.
In fact I was kind of on-the-fence about the Online Safety Act but now that @Malmesbury has said it's like IR35 I feel myself becoming a strong supporter of it.
Wouldn't the equitable solution to have set yourself up as Ltd company to satisfy your client but paid yourself entirely within wages from the company to satisfy HMRC and not screw the Richard Tyndall's of this world for the future ?
Have you considered stand-up?
It's a good point though. If you wanted to pay tax through PAYE you could have done.
Lol, c'mon. It's a close cousin of "If you're so in favour of higher taxes why not send a voluntary cheque to HMRC".
The sad thing is that in the news report about him on the Today programme yesterday they felt the need to explain what the Battle of Britain was.
It felt somewhat strange that the reporters/editors of Today think that people who listen to their programme need to have the BoB explained to them.
I noted that, too. The sad thing is that we're getting old. Battle of Britain is no longer the piece of universal popular culture that it was a generation back.
The Battle of Britain was 85 years ago.
That's like me learning about the Boer Wars when I was 10. OK, the BoB is much more important an event than that, but some of my contemporaries' fathers had fought in WW2 and it had finished only 30 years previously, which is like, er, 1995 is now (can't think of anything that happened then)
So while WW2 was an epoch-making event and the ever-present background to the world many of us grew up in, it is now fairly ancient history
Morning, PB.
And the real worry is that the new right are now beginning to normalise Nazism. Twitter is increasingly full of very large amounts of normalised, extreme antisemitism, and earlier this week the central Maga figure Tucker Carlson implied it might have been better if Hitler had occupied Europe.
I think that is wrong. Twitter is not full of anything. Your twitter feed might be full of this, that or the other, but that is on account of your browsing habits (similar to the proverbial Thai hooker story).
Each person creates their own twitter universe. Not many stories pop up on your feed, I imagine, about miniature railways. Would not be the case if you were a miniature railways fan.
That used to be the case, but is no longer. The algorithm pushes Muskoid facist views, and paid for blue tick trolls.
If you want to choose your own content then BlueSky is the place.
IIUC Bluesky is subscription driven: you subscribe to people and then get fed people who subscribed to those, and so on. Various block lists are available and can be shared. This leads to the "walled gardens" that Twitter folx criticise but is more pleasant and less insane.
Twitter is algorithm driven: you spend time looking at subject X and then get fed more about subject X and associated subjects. Blocking is more difficult. This leads to the "down the rabbit hole" that affects so many people. The effect is exacerbated by i) Elon being in charge of the algorithm and able to drive whatever nonsense pricks his fancy to millions of people in minutes, and ii) bots driving the algorithm further and faster and nastier/pornier.
It's obvious at this point that algorithm-driven social media is driving us collectively nuts, but nobody is doing anything about it, aaaargh.
It’s not true that “nobody is doing anything about social media.”
The Government is busy demolishing cycling fora which makes @kinabalu happy.
Do stop being so puerile ffs.
I tell you what, the next time a teenager commits suicide or murder because of some poisonous shit they've read online I'll pop on here and say "well at least that'll make @Malmesbury happy".
Fair enough?
The idea that the OSA is going to prevent terrible shit being available online is for the birds.
It’s the triumph of bureaucracy - the true purpose is to entrench the power of the bureaucratic state by making arbitrary enforcement powers available to an unelected body which can be used as a club against anyone that doesn’t have a political roof (as the Russians like to put it) to protect them.
The idea it's a sinister mechanism to close down speech which is 'difficult' for The Authorities is far more for the birds than the assumption that it's a good faith initiative intended (with jury out on effectiveness) to do more good than harm.
Your take (widely shared on here, I know) reminds me a little of people who were convinced government relished Lockdown and would hang on to the special powers they assumed long after the pandemic went away. That view was also widely shared on here fwiw.
The consensus is rather that it's a ham fisted measure which fails to achieve its (laudable) aims, while imposing disproportionate burdens on those who aren't big business.
Yup.
Reminds me of IR35 - when Blair was challenged on it, he acted puzzled and said the big consultancies didn’t have a problem.
Of course they didn’t. IR35 didn’t touch them - it was about one man band contractors. Who were competition to Accenture et al.
IR35 closed down a loophole that tons of well paid City workers were using to avoid tax. Including me at one point. I was earning multiples of my teacher sister and paying barely more than her to HMRC.
So if it reminds you of that, it bodes quite well.
Not just city workers, automotive sector workers too. It was seen as a rite of passage to move to a ltd company contractor role to make some money, no risk.
It was also not uncommon, as it has happened at places I worked, for John smith, designer, employed full time, to leave on a Friday and John Smith Ltd, design services, charging a day rate to start on the Monday.
Clear tax dodgers.
Yes, rife in the City but not just there. Thing is, if you have multiple clients, or each assignment is short, or you're drumming up your own business, taking entrepreneurial risk, that's one thing. That's different to having a 'job'. But these folk weren't doing that. They'd be working fulltime at one place for years, indistinguishable from employees other than their admin set-up as one man limited companies. Then it's dividends instead of PAYE and it's all sorts of expenses getting written off. Upshot, an effective tax rate a fraction of what it otherwise would be. Nice work if you can get it.
It’s a trade off. They also didn’t get pensions and could be fired at the drop of a hat.
Sure. And in my (City) experience skewed in favour of (bogus) self-employment.
I'm not about to defend every aspect of how IR35 was implemented and all of its consequences on each and every individual - I know my limits - but it was a real problem being addressed there and I'd say on balance and in the round a world with IR35 is better than a world without it.
In fact I was kind of on-the-fence about the Online Safety Act but now that @Malmesbury has said it's like IR35 I feel myself becoming a strong supporter of it.
Wouldn't the equitable solution to have set yourself up as Ltd company to satisfy your client but paid yourself entirely within wages from the company to satisfy HMRC and not screw the Richard Tyndall's of this world for the future ?
Have you considered stand-up?
It's a good point though. If you wanted to pay tax through PAYE you could have done.
Lol, c'mon. It's a close cousin of "If you're so in favour of higher taxes why not send a voluntary cheque to HMRC".
So you are a self-confessed tax-avoider for all your left-of-centre champagne socialism. Such hypocrisy that is so typical of Labour supporters, particularly personified by Rayner and her two council house sales, Starmer and his tax-free benefit in kind clothing and Reeves with her lies on her CV and dodgy attitude to expenses.
You believe that you are some sort of special case, and your virtue is unsullied because you vote for the Labour Party
‘It’s a Heist’: Real Federal Auditors Are Horrified by DOGE WIRED talked to actual federal auditors about how government auditing works—and how DOGE is doing the opposite.
The sad thing is that in the news report about him on the Today programme yesterday they felt the need to explain what the Battle of Britain was.
It felt somewhat strange that the reporters/editors of Today think that people who listen to their programme need to have the BoB explained to them.
I noted that, too. The sad thing is that we're getting old. Battle of Britain is no longer the piece of universal popular culture that it was a generation back.
The Battle of Britain was 85 years ago.
That's like me learning about the Boer Wars when I was 10. OK, the BoB is much more important an event than that, but some of my contemporaries' fathers had fought in WW2 and it had finished only 30 years previously, which is like, er, 1995 is now (can't think of anything that happened then)
So while WW2 was an epoch-making event and the ever-present background to the world many of us grew up in, it is now fairly ancient history
Morning, PB.
And the real worry is that the new right are now beginning to normalise Nazism. Twitter is increasingly full of very large amounts of normalised, extreme antisemitism, and earlier this week the central Maga figure Tucker Carlson implied it might have been better if Hitler had occupied Europe.
I think that is wrong. Twitter is not full of anything. Your twitter feed might be full of this, that or the other, but that is on account of your browsing habits (similar to the proverbial Thai hooker story).
Each person creates their own twitter universe. Not many stories pop up on your feed, I imagine, about miniature railways. Would not be the case if you were a miniature railways fan.
That used to be the case, but is no longer. The algorithm pushes Muskoid facist views, and paid for blue tick trolls.
If you want to choose your own content then BlueSky is the place.
IIUC Bluesky is subscription driven: you subscribe to people and then get fed people who subscribed to those, and so on. Various block lists are available and can be shared. This leads to the "walled gardens" that Twitter folx criticise but is more pleasant and less insane.
Twitter is algorithm driven: you spend time looking at subject X and then get fed more about subject X and associated subjects. Blocking is more difficult. This leads to the "down the rabbit hole" that affects so many people. The effect is exacerbated by i) Elon being in charge of the algorithm and able to drive whatever nonsense pricks his fancy to millions of people in minutes, and ii) bots driving the algorithm further and faster and nastier/pornier.
It's obvious at this point that algorithm-driven social media is driving us collectively nuts, but nobody is doing anything about it, aaaargh.
It’s not true that “nobody is doing anything about social media.”
The Government is busy demolishing cycling fora which makes @kinabalu happy.
Do stop being so puerile ffs.
I tell you what, the next time a teenager commits suicide or murder because of some poisonous shit they've read online I'll pop on here and say "well at least that'll make @Malmesbury happy".
Fair enough?
The idea that the OSA is going to prevent terrible shit being available online is for the birds.
It’s the triumph of bureaucracy - the true purpose is to entrench the power of the bureaucratic state by making arbitrary enforcement powers available to an unelected body which can be used as a club against anyone that doesn’t have a political roof (as the Russians like to put it) to protect them.
The idea it's a sinister mechanism to close down speech which is 'difficult' for The Authorities is far more for the birds than the assumption that it's a good faith initiative intended (with jury out on effectiveness) to do more good than harm.
Your take (widely shared on here, I know) reminds me a little of people who were convinced government relished Lockdown and would hang on to the special powers they assumed long after the pandemic went away. That view was also widely shared on here fwiw.
The consensus is rather that it's a ham fisted measure which fails to achieve its (laudable) aims, while imposing disproportionate burdens on those who aren't big business.
Yup.
Reminds me of IR35 - when Blair was challenged on it, he acted puzzled and said the big consultancies didn’t have a problem.
Of course they didn’t. IR35 didn’t touch them - it was about one man band contractors. Who were competition to Accenture et al.
IR35 closed down a loophole that tons of well paid City workers were using to avoid tax. Including me at one point. I was earning multiples of my teacher sister and paying barely more than her to HMRC.
So if it reminds you of that, it bodes quite well.
Not just city workers, automotive sector workers too. It was seen as a rite of passage to move to a ltd company contractor role to make some money, no risk.
It was also not uncommon, as it has happened at places I worked, for John smith, designer, employed full time, to leave on a Friday and John Smith Ltd, design services, charging a day rate to start on the Monday.
Clear tax dodgers.
Yes, rife in the City but not just there. Thing is, if you have multiple clients, or each assignment is short, or you're drumming up your own business, taking entrepreneurial risk, that's one thing. That's different to having a 'job'. But these folk weren't doing that. They'd be working fulltime at one place for years, indistinguishable from employees other than their admin set-up as one man limited companies. Then it's dividends instead of PAYE and it's all sorts of expenses getting written off. Upshot, an effective tax rate a fraction of what it otherwise would be. Nice work if you can get it.
It’s a trade off. They also didn’t get pensions and could be fired at the drop of a hat.
Sure. And in my (City) experience skewed in favour of (bogus) self-employment.
I'm not about to defend every aspect of how IR35 was implemented and all of its consequences on each and every individual - I know my limits - but it was a real problem being addressed there and I'd say on balance and in the round a world with IR35 is better than a world without it.
In fact I was kind of on-the-fence about the Online Safety Act but now that @Malmesbury has said it's like IR35 I feel myself becoming a strong supporter of it.
Wouldn't the equitable solution to have set yourself up as Ltd company to satisfy your client but paid yourself entirely within wages from the company to satisfy HMRC and not screw the Richard Tyndall's of this world for the future ?
Have you considered stand-up?
It's a good point though. If you wanted to pay tax through PAYE you could have done.
Lol, c'mon. It's a close cousin of "If you're so in favour of higher taxes why not send a voluntary cheque to HMRC".
So you are a self-confessed tax-avoider for all your left-of-centre champagne socialism. Such hypocrisy that is so typical of Labour supporters, particularly personified by Rayner and her two council house sales, Starmer and his tax-free benefit in kind clothing and Reeves with her lies on her CV and dodgy attitude to expenses.
You believe that you are some sort of special case, and your virtue is unsullied because you vote for the Labour Party
Well not really, Nigel. I merely failed to be the one and only person in the pre IR35 City with a limited company to put themselves voluntarily on PAYE instead of dividends. I don't think supporting Labour requires that sort of sainthood. It would have cost me a shedload and for what? To avoid a bum rap of "hypocrisy" in online debate with Tories? No thank you.
Comments
Fraser Nelson original piece several years ago exposing the scale of the economic inactivity was pure data.
Reminds me of IR35 - when Blair was challenged on it, he acted puzzled and said the big consultancies didn’t have a problem.
Of course they didn’t. IR35 didn’t touch them - it was about one man band contractors. Who were competition to Accenture et al.
Having had a look at this, I may push it to More or Less.
https://x.com/steve_vladeck/status/1902330130883658155
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/donald-trump-hannibal-lecter-timeline-1235070008/
This is why like so many I have for many elections past voted tactically, and will continue to do so until the electoral system changes. That will probably not be in my lifetime.
Night of Camp David
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_of_Camp_David
Iowa Senator Jim MacVeagh is summoned to Camp David by US President Mark Hollenbach. MacVeagh, who is expected to become Hollenbach's next Vice President, becomes concerned because Hollenbach shows signs of intense paranoia. He erratically expresses his desire to develop a closer relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union, and attempts to cut ties with US allies in Europe. Hollenbach believes the US news media are conspiring against him. MacVeagh is the only person who notices that Hollenbach's mind is crumbling, as the presidential advisors and politicians he attempts to warn ignore him. ..
"NEW: Reform Records Highest Support Ever in a Scottish Poll
Constituency vote share:
SNP: 34% (-1)
Labour: 23% (+1)
Reform UK: 17% (+4)
Conservatives: 12% (-2)
Liberal Democrats: 8% (n/c)
Green: 4% (-2)
Alba: 1% (n/c)
Fwk: 6-13 March 2025
(Changes vs January 2025)"
https://x.com/Survation/status/1902310109876805911?s=19
James Ker-Lindsay is good on international relations and state formation. He’s a Remainer, but otherwise fairly neutral on left-right stuff.
So if it reminds you of that, it bodes quite well.
Last nights ITV main broadcast even, after trigger warning, showed someone having a fit.
Of course by implication, the govt are taking money from deserving people and they are pretty much all in a similar boat.
https://x.com/realpublicius/status/1902100481331359904?s=61&t=LYVEHh2mqFy1oUJAdCfe-Q
Reports that the White House have lobbied the IOC to have Jesse Owen’s’ gold medals revoked are yet tbc.
It was also not uncommon, as it has happened at places I worked, for John smith, designer, employed full time, to leave on a Friday and John Smith Ltd, design services, charging a day rate to start on the Monday.
Clear tax dodgers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1930_FIFA_World_Cup
Have worked for 9 clients in the last 18 months. All short term contracts ranging from 10 days work to 2 months. In all cases I should be outside IR35 according to HMRC.
But because they have put the responsibility for the decision with the end user companies and they are risk averse they say that everyone must be inside no matter how short the contract.
So I currently pay 51% of my day rate in tax and NI.
People like you milking the system are what screwed the legitimate consultants.
I had no idea we’d been anywhere near Uruguay
*proud*
Not sure where it is now, would look great in the boardroom of some tech bro.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ercig3Oe8pE is a nice, recent example of his work.
(If he can still afford one. I see that Tesla shares are not heading for 55% down from peak - still another 40% to go.)
He’s trying to make up for the clear disappointment by showing me the Ashes of the Liberator of the River Plate, after that we are possibly visiting a slightly historic water cistern
Truly a city of wonders
One thing IS wondrous: the winter climate. He says they get Antarctic winds so brutal and cold - and fierce - they get a wind chill of minus 20 and the authorities have to hang ropes along the streets so people can drag themselves around without falling over
I'm not about to defend every aspect of how IR35 was implemented and all of its consequences on each and every individual - I know my limits - but it was a real problem being addressed there and I'd say on balance and in the round a world with IR35 is better than a world without it.
In fact I was kind of on-the-fence about the Online Safety Act but now that @Malmesbury has said it's like IR35 I feel myself becoming a strong supporter of it.
And there's the benefit side too remember. That has to be considered.
The Online Safety Act is a classic of imposing a regulatory burden but totally avoiding the real issues.
Because imposing a regulatory burden falls on the honest.
The problem sites are not cycling enthusiasts- they are either offshore (already) or the big corporates like Twatter.
Do you really think that Social Truth will comply?
A cycling forum isn’t flooding the planet with illegal porn. Or inciting terrorism.
Ok - how about I pass a law. Says that retired accountants in Hampstead need to fill out complex forms relating to anything that falls through their letterbox every morning. If they get it wrong, unlimited fines and maybe some prison time.
All they have to do is fill out the paperwork and monitor the junk mail.
The casualties were quite low, and the result was a Spanish victory.
“Destroying everything” is an exaggeration.
And I get your view loud and clear. You and I should probably drop this topic because the conversation is unbalanced. You're passionately anti and I'm just very very mildly pro (but subject to practicalities).
It's a recipe for (my) repetition and (your) frustration.
Also Santander have been in talks with Natwest and others to dispose of their UK division as ring-fencing is stopping them from sending funds to Santander Spain.
Shutting down a quarter of their branch network improves their EBITDA and makes them look even more attractive to Natwest et al.
Regulation can kill. Regulations can destroy.
At Grenfell, every question about safety, before the fire was answered by reference to literal tons of documents. Because the regulations were performative bullshit. And there was no enforcement.
If a regulation actually achieves something noticeable (less poor people burnt to death is a noticeable metric) then it has use.
NEW THREAD
Then they were professionalised into a doorstep.
But that isn’t the funny bit. Under the complicated new regulations, the definition of inflammable insulation is not very well defined.
Come on baby, light my fire….
You believe that you are some sort of special case, and your virtue is unsullied because you vote for the Labour Party
‘It’s a Heist’: Real Federal Auditors Are Horrified by DOGE
WIRED talked to actual federal auditors about how government auditing works—and how DOGE is doing the opposite.