I expect the two child benefit cap will go in November mostly funded by an increase in gambling taxes . This no 10 will hope will reduce the appeal of Your party .
An increase in gambling taxes is low hanging fruit and won’t be controversial for the vast majority of the public .
Good morning
Another unpopular measure according to the polls, and does nothing to address Reeves 'all my very own deep hole' in the public finances
Why doesn't she focus on all the popular ways to increase taxes and cut spending? It's exasperating.
Truth is that income tax has to rise, but she cannot do that because of her idiotic pre election promises
Also you do not raise taxes to address a huge hole in the public finances and use some of that tax raising to create another spending commitment
Do you think whoever is leading the tory party at the next GE will do into it promising to raise income tax because I don't.
Labour are a high tax high spend government and it is not in their DNA to cut spending
Conservatives are low tax low spending and I would expect a conservative government to reduce corporation tax, encourage wealth creation and abolish IHT on farmers. I would also expect a review of all net zero subsidies
Why on earth would you expect them to do that? Most of that is at odds with their time in office - particularly on renewables and farmers.
Any party that is focussed on a pensioner voting cohort like the Conservatives is going to high tax, high spend.
Cameron and Osborne certainly cut spending as a percentage of gdp and cut tax at all income levels, including a big inheritance tax cut.
Kemi has said she will take an axe to spending, especially welfare spending and net zero spending etc and at one stage even proposed means testing the triple lock
How much did the national debt increase during the last Conservative government?
Because of lockdown, Cameron and Osborne certainly cut it compared to what Brown left
You’d think someone interested in politics would understand the difference between the deficit and the debt but you’ve never been good with numbers.
You did not just say national debt, you said national debt increase, the national debt increase was lower under Cameron and Clegg and Osborne than Brown and Darling
Are you trying to argue that the national debt didn’t increase between 2010 and 2024? Because it did. Massively.
It increased at a lower rate than under Brown and Darling, certainly pre lockdown
And yet the national debt increased. Massively. Strong financial management by the Tories. Bravo.
Spending as a percentage of gdp was 47% when Brown left office in 2010, falling to 41% when Cameron left office in 2016
Maybe, but that isn’t the national debt. That’s a different statistic entirely.
It led to the decline in increase in the national debt
Maybe. But yet the national debt still increased over the 14 years you were in power. Massively.
What additional cuts would you have made to balance the budget and run a surplus?
I'd double council tax. That's the current deficit wiped out (nearly) in one go.
A freeze on hospital spending, abolish stamp duty, NICs/IT merger. Borrow as much for capital investment as the markets allow.
I honestly don't see the point in borrowing for capital investment when the cost of infrastructure is so high. We need to actually work to remove all of those barriers before we even think about that. Again, it just seems absolutely criminal to me that building a third runway at Heathrow will cost £49bn, even the short runway will come in at £21bn. This is just one example, there's suggestions that the next nuclear plant will be £70bn while Korea builds all of this similar infrastructure at a tenth of the cost. It's not as though their living standards are substantially different to ours.
It's not universally bad. We've had some good projects in Scotland. Queensferry Crossing came in under budget and on time. Small stuff, incremental stuff, tends to go ok.
I think you've fallen for the trap of thinking in terms of billions, not millions. The odd town bypass, new tram routes, a few million on cycle lanes, rail electrification, phone masts, a public health investment. That can add up to billions, but you've diversified across projects so that one disaster doesn't cause the whole investment to collapse.
Even with small projects, the process state still rears it’s ugly head.
Not very far from where I live the council decided to use some government money to build a cycle/pedestrian bridge over the river between two sites that are due for extensive redevelopment in the future. Cue outrage from local nimbies over the trauma caused by the need to cut down twelve trees. Twelve self-seeded trees that would grow back afterwards. So far we’ve had one judicial review, another in the works & the entire project has roughly doubled in cost due to all the delays.
The Aarhus Convention is a plague upon the nation.
Where I live, the council planted some fast growing trees. About 15 years back.
These tore up the pavement, when they got big. Because the pavements are narrow, in places, this makes it impossible to use prams, wheelchairs or walking frames. Literally you can’t get through the gap between the tree and people’s garden walls, except by scrambling over tree roots erupting from the pavement.
The sane thing to do is chop the trees down and replace. They have all the cultural value of a pine tree in one of those Swedish forest grown for wood pulp.
But no.
So the old people and mothers walk in the actual road, with the cars.
Marc Andreessen complains to Downing Street about Online Safety Act and UK tech minister
In a sign that the government was caught off guard by the extent to which these tools would be used, ministers last week requested data from the internet regulator Ofcom about how and when VPNs were being downloaded, according to two people briefed on the move.
Kyle has said publicly that he is not considering any ban on VPNs, but officials say ministers are keen to understand how the tools are being used, particularly by children.
It's not hard to see where this is going. What happens when Ofcom come back and say, yes, VPNs are being extensively used by under-18s and the OSA is being bypassed to the extent it's a giant waste of time?
I don't believe Kyle's statements about VPNs. He's one of those morons who believe any problem can be fixed by making a new law. So the government will ban VPNs without a licence.
When people say this stuff about what's going to happen and it doesn't (eg the government were going to keep the lockdown beyond the pandemic because they were luvin it) I'd like to see some accountability. Some fessing up that "I was wrong and will learn from it "
Like I always do on the odd occasion I get things wrong.
If the government doesn't implement some kind of restriction on VPNs before they get kicked out I will happily and publicly acknowledge I was wrong. But the alternative scenario is to admit the OSA is a failure, repeal it and look like a bunch of ridiculous fools. Can't see this government being in any way willing to do that.
The only way I see a VPN ban not happening is if some organisation - Wikipedia possibly - refuses to comply with the OSA and then takes uk.gov to the ECHR and wins. But that will take more years than this administration has left.
I'm no tech expert but I'd have thought there are possibilities between do nothing (about VPNs accessing 'nasty' sites) and a ban (the chance of which imo is close to zero).
If you want to secure access to certain sites for people below the age of x, you need to have a way of proving you are over x.
1) you use official identification documents to prove this. Online banks do this. No one, will upload their passport details to a porn site, though.
2) A trusted third party could run a site that, having proved you are over x, issues one use codes (tokens) that confirm to the over x sites that you are over x, without disclosing your actual personal identity.
Either will not prevent strawman sales, logins etc.
The second option is the most practical. It could be used for a wide range of things - buying alcohol online, gambling access etc. So using it would not be immediately disreputable. You could easily imagine that Amazon could offer issuing such tokens.
Yes. Amazon and Apple are the obvious two trusted partners for such a scheme, companies who deal in payments.
I expect the two child benefit cap will go in November mostly funded by an increase in gambling taxes . This no 10 will hope will reduce the appeal of Your party .
An increase in gambling taxes is low hanging fruit and won’t be controversial for the vast majority of the public .
Good morning
Another unpopular measure according to the polls, and does nothing to address Reeves 'all my very own deep hole' in the public finances
Why doesn't she focus on all the popular ways to increase taxes and cut spending? It's exasperating.
Truth is that income tax has to rise, but she cannot do that because of her idiotic pre election promises
Also you do not raise taxes to address a huge hole in the public finances and use some of that tax raising to create another spending commitment
Do you think whoever is leading the tory party at the next GE will do into it promising to raise income tax because I don't.
Labour are a high tax high spend government and it is not in their DNA to cut spending
Conservatives are low tax low spending and I would expect a conservative government to reduce corporation tax, encourage wealth creation and abolish IHT on farmers. I would also expect a review of all net zero subsidies
Why on earth would you expect them to do that? Most of that is at odds with their time in office - particularly on renewables and farmers.
Any party that is focussed on a pensioner voting cohort like the Conservatives is going to high tax, high spend.
Cameron and Osborne certainly cut spending as a percentage of gdp and cut tax at all income levels, including a big inheritance tax cut.
Kemi has said she will take an axe to spending, especially welfare spending and net zero spending etc and at one stage even proposed means testing the triple lock
How much did the national debt increase during the last Conservative government?
Because of lockdown, Cameron and Osborne certainly cut it compared to what Brown left
You’d think someone interested in politics would understand the difference between the deficit and the debt but you’ve never been good with numbers.
You did not just say national debt, you said national debt increase, the national debt increase was lower under Cameron and Clegg and Osborne than Brown and Darling
Are you trying to argue that the national debt didn’t increase between 2010 and 2024? Because it did. Massively.
It increased at a lower rate than under Brown and Darling, certainly pre lockdown
And yet the national debt increased. Massively. Strong financial management by the Tories. Bravo.
Spending as a percentage of gdp was 47% when Brown left office in 2010, falling to 41% when Cameron left office in 2016
Maybe, but that isn’t the national debt. That’s a different statistic entirely.
It led to the decline in increase in the national debt
Maybe. But yet the national debt still increased over the 14 years you were in power. Massively.
What additional cuts would you have made to balance the budget and run a surplus?
I'd double council tax. That's the current deficit wiped out (nearly) in one go.
A freeze on hospital spending, abolish stamp duty, NICs/IT merger. Borrow as much for capital investment as the markets allow.
I honestly don't see the point in borrowing for capital investment when the cost of infrastructure is so high. We need to actually work to remove all of those barriers before we even think about that. Again, it just seems absolutely criminal to me that building a third runway at Heathrow will cost £49bn, even the short runway will come in at £21bn. This is just one example, there's suggestions that the next nuclear plant will be £70bn while Korea builds all of this similar infrastructure at a tenth of the cost. It's not as though their living standards are substantially different to ours.
It's not universally bad. We've had some good projects in Scotland. Queensferry Crossing came in under budget and on time. Small stuff, incremental stuff, tends to go ok.
I think you've fallen for the trap of thinking in terms of billions, not millions. The odd town bypass, new tram routes, a few million on cycle lanes, rail electrification, phone masts, a public health investment. That can add up to billions, but you've diversified across projects so that one disaster doesn't cause the whole investment to collapse.
Even with small projects, the process state still rears it’s ugly head.
Not very far from where I live the council decided to use some government money to build a cycle/pedestrian bridge over the river between two sites that are due for extensive redevelopment in the future. Cue outrage from local nimbies over the trauma caused by the need to cut down twelve trees. Twelve self-seeded trees that would grow back afterwards. So far we’ve had one judicial review, another in the works & the entire project has roughly doubled in cost due to all the delays.
The Aarhus Convention is a plague upon the nation.
This government came in with some sort of ambition regarding planning reform.
So far it's just tinkered a bit. The system needs a fundamental rebuilding, without spending the rest of this parliament arguing over the details.
I'm not sure there are any ministers up to it, though ?
Marc Andreessen complains to Downing Street about Online Safety Act and UK tech minister
In a sign that the government was caught off guard by the extent to which these tools would be used, ministers last week requested data from the internet regulator Ofcom about how and when VPNs were being downloaded, according to two people briefed on the move.
Kyle has said publicly that he is not considering any ban on VPNs, but officials say ministers are keen to understand how the tools are being used, particularly by children.
It's not hard to see where this is going. What happens when Ofcom come back and say, yes, VPNs are being extensively used by under-18s and the OSA is being bypassed to the extent it's a giant waste of time?
I don't believe Kyle's statements about VPNs. He's one of those morons who believe any problem can be fixed by making a new law. So the government will ban VPNs without a licence.
When people say this stuff about what's going to happen and it doesn't (eg the government were going to keep the lockdown beyond the pandemic because they were luvin it) I'd like to see some accountability. Some fessing up that "I was wrong and will learn from it "
Like I always do on the odd occasion I get things wrong.
If the government doesn't implement some kind of restriction on VPNs before they get kicked out I will happily and publicly acknowledge I was wrong. But the alternative scenario is to admit the OSA is a failure, repeal it and look like a bunch of ridiculous fools. Can't see this government being in any way willing to do that.
The only way I see a VPN ban not happening is if some organisation - Wikipedia possibly - refuses to comply with the OSA and then takes uk.gov to the ECHR and wins. But that will take more years than this administration has left.
I'm no tech expert but I'd have thought there are possibilities between do nothing (about VPNs accessing 'nasty' sites) and a ban (the chance of which imo is close to zero).
If you want to secure access to certain sites for people below the age of x, you need to have a way of proving you are over x.
1) you use official identification documents to prove this. Online banks do this. No one, will upload their passport details to a porn site, though.
2) A trusted third party could run a site that, having proved you are over x, issues one use codes (tokens) that confirm to the over x sites that you are over x, without disclosing your actual personal identity.
Either will not prevent strawman sales, logins etc.
The second option is the most practical. It could be used for a wide range of things - buying alcohol online, gambling access etc. So using it would not be immediately disreputable. You could easily imagine that Amazon could offer issuing such tokens.
I know it's difficult but just as technology makes regulation harder perhaps it can provide ways to help it too.
I don't subscribe to the 'Internet can't be messed with' pov.
As to how, you tech-literate guys will have to work it out.
I expect the two child benefit cap will go in November mostly funded by an increase in gambling taxes . This no 10 will hope will reduce the appeal of Your party .
An increase in gambling taxes is low hanging fruit and won’t be controversial for the vast majority of the public .
Good morning
Another unpopular measure according to the polls, and does nothing to address Reeves 'all my very own deep hole' in the public finances
Why doesn't she focus on all the popular ways to increase taxes and cut spending? It's exasperating.
Truth is that income tax has to rise, but she cannot do that because of her idiotic pre election promises
Also you do not raise taxes to address a huge hole in the public finances and use some of that tax raising to create another spending commitment
Do you think whoever is leading the tory party at the next GE will do into it promising to raise income tax because I don't.
Labour are a high tax high spend government and it is not in their DNA to cut spending
Conservatives are low tax low spending and I would expect a conservative government to reduce corporation tax, encourage wealth creation and abolish IHT on farmers. I would also expect a review of all net zero subsidies
Why on earth would you expect them to do that? Most of that is at odds with their time in office - particularly on renewables and farmers.
Any party that is focussed on a pensioner voting cohort like the Conservatives is going to high tax, high spend.
Cameron and Osborne certainly cut spending as a percentage of gdp and cut tax at all income levels, including a big inheritance tax cut.
Kemi has said she will take an axe to spending, especially welfare spending and net zero spending etc and at one stage even proposed means testing the triple lock
How much did the national debt increase during the last Conservative government?
Because of lockdown, Cameron and Osborne certainly cut it compared to what Brown left
You’d think someone interested in politics would understand the difference between the deficit and the debt but you’ve never been good with numbers.
You did not just say national debt, you said national debt increase, the national debt increase was lower under Cameron and Clegg and Osborne than Brown and Darling
Are you trying to argue that the national debt didn’t increase between 2010 and 2024? Because it did. Massively.
It increased at a lower rate than under Brown and Darling, certainly pre lockdown
And yet the national debt increased. Massively. Strong financial management by the Tories. Bravo.
Spending as a percentage of gdp was 47% when Brown left office in 2010, falling to 41% when Cameron left office in 2016
Maybe, but that isn’t the national debt. That’s a different statistic entirely.
It led to the decline in increase in the national debt
Maybe. But yet the national debt still increased over the 14 years you were in power. Massively.
What additional cuts would you have made to balance the budget and run a surplus?
I'd double council tax. That's the current deficit wiped out (nearly) in one go.
A freeze on hospital spending, abolish stamp duty, NICs/IT merger. Borrow as much for capital investment as the markets allow.
I honestly don't see the point in borrowing for capital investment when the cost of infrastructure is so high. We need to actually work to remove all of those barriers before we even think about that. Again, it just seems absolutely criminal to me that building a third runway at Heathrow will cost £49bn, even the short runway will come in at £21bn. This is just one example, there's suggestions that the next nuclear plant will be £70bn while Korea builds all of this similar infrastructure at a tenth of the cost. It's not as though their living standards are substantially different to ours.
It's not universally bad. We've had some good projects in Scotland. Queensferry Crossing came in under budget and on time. Small stuff, incremental stuff, tends to go ok.
I think you've fallen for the trap of thinking in terms of billions, not millions. The odd town bypass, new tram routes, a few million on cycle lanes, rail electrification, phone masts, a public health investment. That can add up to billions, but you've diversified across projects so that one disaster doesn't cause the whole investment to collapse.
Even with small projects, the process state still rears it’s ugly head.
Not very far from where I live the council decided to use some government money to build a cycle/pedestrian bridge over the river between two sites that are due for extensive redevelopment in the future. Cue outrage from local nimbies over the trauma caused by the need to cut down twelve trees. Twelve self-seeded trees that would grow back afterwards. So far we’ve had one judicial review, another in the works & the entire project has roughly doubled in cost due to all the delays.
The Aarhus Convention is a plague upon the nation.
This government came in with some sort of ambition regarding planning reform.
So far it's just tinkered a bit. The system needs a fundamental rebuilding, without spending the rest of this parliament arguing over the details.
I'm not sure there are any ministers up to it, though ?
They've all accepted they are a one term government, not up to the job, with no idea, and a wanker of a leader
This explains all their behaviour. They are now all about accruing personal wealth and future-career-prospecs. Or a pension
I expect the two child benefit cap will go in November mostly funded by an increase in gambling taxes . This no 10 will hope will reduce the appeal of Your party .
An increase in gambling taxes is low hanging fruit and won’t be controversial for the vast majority of the public .
Good morning
Another unpopular measure according to the polls, and does nothing to address Reeves 'all my very own deep hole' in the public finances
Why doesn't she focus on all the popular ways to increase taxes and cut spending? It's exasperating.
Truth is that income tax has to rise, but she cannot do that because of her idiotic pre election promises
Also you do not raise taxes to address a huge hole in the public finances and use some of that tax raising to create another spending commitment
Do you think whoever is leading the tory party at the next GE will do into it promising to raise income tax because I don't.
Labour are a high tax high spend government and it is not in their DNA to cut spending
Conservatives are low tax low spending and I would expect a conservative government to reduce corporation tax, encourage wealth creation and abolish IHT on farmers. I would also expect a review of all net zero subsidies
Why on earth would you expect them to do that? Most of that is at odds with their time in office - particularly on renewables and farmers.
Any party that is focussed on a pensioner voting cohort like the Conservatives is going to high tax, high spend.
Cameron and Osborne certainly cut spending as a percentage of gdp and cut tax at all income levels, including a big inheritance tax cut.
Kemi has said she will take an axe to spending, especially welfare spending and net zero spending etc and at one stage even proposed means testing the triple lock
How much did the national debt increase during the last Conservative government?
Because of lockdown, Cameron and Osborne certainly cut it compared to what Brown left
You’d think someone interested in politics would understand the difference between the deficit and the debt but you’ve never been good with numbers.
You did not just say national debt, you said national debt increase, the national debt increase was lower under Cameron and Clegg and Osborne than Brown and Darling
Are you trying to argue that the national debt didn’t increase between 2010 and 2024? Because it did. Massively.
It increased at a lower rate than under Brown and Darling, certainly pre lockdown
And yet the national debt increased. Massively. Strong financial management by the Tories. Bravo.
Spending as a percentage of gdp was 47% when Brown left office in 2010, falling to 41% when Cameron left office in 2016
Maybe, but that isn’t the national debt. That’s a different statistic entirely.
It led to the decline in increase in the national debt
Maybe. But yet the national debt still increased over the 14 years you were in power. Massively.
What additional cuts would you have made to balance the budget and run a surplus?
I'd double council tax. That's the current deficit wiped out (nearly) in one go.
A freeze on hospital spending, abolish stamp duty, NICs/IT merger. Borrow as much for capital investment as the markets allow.
I honestly don't see the point in borrowing for capital investment when the cost of infrastructure is so high. We need to actually work to remove all of those barriers before we even think about that. Again, it just seems absolutely criminal to me that building a third runway at Heathrow will cost £49bn, even the short runway will come in at £21bn. This is just one example, there's suggestions that the next nuclear plant will be £70bn while Korea builds all of this similar infrastructure at a tenth of the cost. It's not as though their living standards are substantially different to ours.
It's not universally bad. We've had some good projects in Scotland. Queensferry Crossing came in under budget and on time. Small stuff, incremental stuff, tends to go ok.
I think you've fallen for the trap of thinking in terms of billions, not millions. The odd town bypass, new tram routes, a few million on cycle lanes, rail electrification, phone masts, a public health investment. That can add up to billions, but you've diversified across projects so that one disaster doesn't cause the whole investment to collapse.
Yes lots of small projects can add up to a decent gain, yet it's the big projects that will move the needle. The problem we have is the government treats it like something like HS2 as a 5x 55 point unrelated tickets instead of an epic with 150x 3 point tickets.
One of my best mates was previously on the project and he was sitting around being paid £650 per day to do nothing because there just wasn't anything for him to do but they'd contracted him from a set date to a set date but that work was so badly delayed that for the whole 3 months of the contract he got paid to be "on call" and then once work finally did commence they had to call him and his crew back at an even higher rate. That's about 25 electricians of varying skill level on day rates because they declined to do the fixed price deal he offered as it was "too restrictive" due to him setting a specific time to start and finish, requiring the site to be handed in a certain way and all materials etc... to be delivered to a tight schedule and completing the project over 4.5 months. In the end it took them 3 months of doing nothing, then another 6 months of actual work and the overall cost was 2.5x what he offered in the fixed price contract.
I have no doubt that this small example isn't the only one where inept public sector project managers and consultants who don't know what they're doing end up pissing public money into the wind because there's zero repercussions.
That’s nuts, and you know that exactly the same scenario would have played out for every single other trade on the project. Thousands of people people each paid hundreds of pounds a day to do nothing productive.
That - on a massive scale - is what I saw and experienced all day every day during my time in 'investment banking'. And not a government or public sector employee in sight.
The difference being that investment banking inefficiencies are a problem for the bank management and shareholders, as opposed to taxpayers being forcibly relieved of their money under penalty of imprisonment.
Except it is a drag on everyone else and in 08/09 led to an enormous direct call on public money.
That was Gordon Brown’s fault from the beginning to the end. Many banks should have been allowed to fail, with insured deposits and safe mortgages kept in some sort of a government bank that could have been floated later.
Marc Andreessen complains to Downing Street about Online Safety Act and UK tech minister
In a sign that the government was caught off guard by the extent to which these tools would be used, ministers last week requested data from the internet regulator Ofcom about how and when VPNs were being downloaded, according to two people briefed on the move.
Kyle has said publicly that he is not considering any ban on VPNs, but officials say ministers are keen to understand how the tools are being used, particularly by children.
It's not hard to see where this is going. What happens when Ofcom come back and say, yes, VPNs are being extensively used by under-18s and the OSA is being bypassed to the extent it's a giant waste of time?
I don't believe Kyle's statements about VPNs. He's one of those morons who believe any problem can be fixed by making a new law. So the government will ban VPNs without a licence.
When people say this stuff about what's going to happen and it doesn't (eg the government were going to keep the lockdown beyond the pandemic because they were luvin it) I'd like to see some accountability. Some fessing up that "I was wrong and will learn from it "
Like I always do on the odd occasion I get things wrong.
If the government doesn't implement some kind of restriction on VPNs before they get kicked out I will happily and publicly acknowledge I was wrong. But the alternative scenario is to admit the OSA is a failure, repeal it and look like a bunch of ridiculous fools. Can't see this government being in any way willing to do that.
The only way I see a VPN ban not happening is if some organisation - Wikipedia possibly - refuses to comply with the OSA and then takes uk.gov to the ECHR and wins. But that will take more years than this administration has left.
I'm no tech expert but I'd have thought there are possibilities between do nothing (about VPNs accessing 'nasty' sites) and a ban (the chance of which imo is close to zero).
If you want to secure access to certain sites for people below the age of x, you need to have a way of proving you are over x.
1) you use official identification documents to prove this. Online banks do this. No one, will upload their passport details to a porn site, though.
2) A trusted third party could run a site that, having proved you are over x, issues one use codes (tokens) that confirm to the over x sites that you are over x, without disclosing your actual personal identity.
Either will not prevent strawman sales, logins etc.
The second option is the most practical. It could be used for a wide range of things - buying alcohol online, gambling access etc. So using it would not be immediately disreputable. You could easily imagine that Amazon could offer issuing such tokens.
I know it's difficult but just as technology makes regulation harder perhaps it can provide ways to help it too.
I don't subscribe to the 'Internet can't be messed with' pov.
As to how, you tech-literate guys will have to work it out.
You didn't read what I wrote? OK
The problem with the second method I outline (the preferred idea of professional security experts, by the way), for the politicians, is two fold.
1) They don't understand it. 2) And they don't like the idea of anonymising access. They (or more accurately, the Police and the loonier civil servants in the Home Office) want ZE! LIST!
Marc Andreessen complains to Downing Street about Online Safety Act and UK tech minister
In a sign that the government was caught off guard by the extent to which these tools would be used, ministers last week requested data from the internet regulator Ofcom about how and when VPNs were being downloaded, according to two people briefed on the move.
Kyle has said publicly that he is not considering any ban on VPNs, but officials say ministers are keen to understand how the tools are being used, particularly by children.
I expect the two child benefit cap will go in November mostly funded by an increase in gambling taxes . This no 10 will hope will reduce the appeal of Your party .
An increase in gambling taxes is low hanging fruit and won’t be controversial for the vast majority of the public .
Good morning
Another unpopular measure according to the polls, and does nothing to address Reeves 'all my very own deep hole' in the public finances
Why doesn't she focus on all the popular ways to increase taxes and cut spending? It's exasperating.
Truth is that income tax has to rise, but she cannot do that because of her idiotic pre election promises
Also you do not raise taxes to address a huge hole in the public finances and use some of that tax raising to create another spending commitment
Do you think whoever is leading the tory party at the next GE will do into it promising to raise income tax because I don't.
Labour are a high tax high spend government and it is not in their DNA to cut spending
Conservatives are low tax low spending and I would expect a conservative government to reduce corporation tax, encourage wealth creation and abolish IHT on farmers. I would also expect a review of all net zero subsidies
Why on earth would you expect them to do that? Most of that is at odds with their time in office - particularly on renewables and farmers.
Any party that is focussed on a pensioner voting cohort like the Conservatives is going to high tax, high spend.
Cameron and Osborne certainly cut spending as a percentage of gdp and cut tax at all income levels, including a big inheritance tax cut.
Kemi has said she will take an axe to spending, especially welfare spending and net zero spending etc and at one stage even proposed means testing the triple lock
How much did the national debt increase during the last Conservative government?
Because of lockdown, Cameron and Osborne certainly cut it compared to what Brown left
You’d think someone interested in politics would understand the difference between the deficit and the debt but you’ve never been good with numbers.
You did not just say national debt, you said national debt increase, the national debt increase was lower under Cameron and Clegg and Osborne than Brown and Darling
Are you trying to argue that the national debt didn’t increase between 2010 and 2024? Because it did. Massively.
It increased at a lower rate than under Brown and Darling, certainly pre lockdown
And yet the national debt increased. Massively. Strong financial management by the Tories. Bravo.
Spending as a percentage of gdp was 47% when Brown left office in 2010, falling to 41% when Cameron left office in 2016
Maybe, but that isn’t the national debt. That’s a different statistic entirely.
It led to the decline in increase in the national debt
Maybe. But yet the national debt still increased over the 14 years you were in power. Massively.
What additional cuts would you have made to balance the budget and run a surplus?
I'd double council tax. That's the current deficit wiped out (nearly) in one go.
A freeze on hospital spending, abolish stamp duty, NICs/IT merger. Borrow as much for capital investment as the markets allow.
I honestly don't see the point in borrowing for capital investment when the cost of infrastructure is so high. We need to actually work to remove all of those barriers before we even think about that. Again, it just seems absolutely criminal to me that building a third runway at Heathrow will cost £49bn, even the short runway will come in at £21bn. This is just one example, there's suggestions that the next nuclear plant will be £70bn while Korea builds all of this similar infrastructure at a tenth of the cost. It's not as though their living standards are substantially different to ours.
It's not universally bad. We've had some good projects in Scotland. Queensferry Crossing came in under budget and on time. Small stuff, incremental stuff, tends to go ok.
I think you've fallen for the trap of thinking in terms of billions, not millions. The odd town bypass, new tram routes, a few million on cycle lanes, rail electrification, phone masts, a public health investment. That can add up to billions, but you've diversified across projects so that one disaster doesn't cause the whole investment to collapse.
Yes lots of small projects can add up to a decent gain, yet it's the big projects that will move the needle. The problem we have is the government treats it like something like HS2 as a 5x 55 point unrelated tickets instead of an epic with 150x 3 point tickets.
One of my best mates was previously on the project and he was sitting around being paid £650 per day to do nothing because there just wasn't anything for him to do but they'd contracted him from a set date to a set date but that work was so badly delayed that for the whole 3 months of the contract he got paid to be "on call" and then once work finally did commence they had to call him and his crew back at an even higher rate. That's about 25 electricians of varying skill level on day rates because they declined to do the fixed price deal he offered as it was "too restrictive" due to him setting a specific time to start and finish, requiring the site to be handed in a certain way and all materials etc... to be delivered to a tight schedule and completing the project over 4.5 months. In the end it took them 3 months of doing nothing, then another 6 months of actual work and the overall cost was 2.5x what he offered in the fixed price contract.
I have no doubt that this small example isn't the only one where inept public sector project managers and consultants who don't know what they're doing end up pissing public money into the wind because there's zero repercussions.
That’s nuts, and you know that exactly the same scenario would have played out for every single other trade on the project. Thousands of people people each paid hundreds of pounds a day to do nothing productive.
That - on a massive scale - is what I saw and experienced all day every day during my time in 'investment banking'. And not a government or public sector employee in sight.
In local Government, on the rare occasions there was money, there was huge pressure to spend it and spend it quickly. That often led to poor decisions and a "spade in the ground" mentality on building projects.
Ditto with the NHS sometimes.
We recently had to spend almost £100k in an afternoon on 'anything! just buy anything!' due to some byzantine end-of-year finance rules.
As you know I have cascading problems with my teeth. I'm going thru various people to price up implants and the latest one is £5.5k (bone graft + post + crown). For one tooth.
Marc Andreessen complains to Downing Street about Online Safety Act and UK tech minister
In a sign that the government was caught off guard by the extent to which these tools would be used, ministers last week requested data from the internet regulator Ofcom about how and when VPNs were being downloaded, according to two people briefed on the move.
Kyle has said publicly that he is not considering any ban on VPNs, but officials say ministers are keen to understand how the tools are being used, particularly by children.
It's not hard to see where this is going. What happens when Ofcom come back and say, yes, VPNs are being extensively used by under-18s and the OSA is being bypassed to the extent it's a giant waste of time?
I don't believe Kyle's statements about VPNs. He's one of those morons who believe any problem can be fixed by making a new law. So the government will ban VPNs without a licence.
When people say this stuff about what's going to happen and it doesn't (eg the government were going to keep the lockdown beyond the pandemic because they were luvin it) I'd like to see some accountability. Some fessing up that "I was wrong and will learn from it "
Like I always do on the odd occasion I get things wrong.
If the government doesn't implement some kind of restriction on VPNs before they get kicked out I will happily and publicly acknowledge I was wrong. But the alternative scenario is to admit the OSA is a failure, repeal it and look like a bunch of ridiculous fools. Can't see this government being in any way willing to do that.
The only way I see a VPN ban not happening is if some organisation - Wikipedia possibly - refuses to comply with the OSA and then takes uk.gov to the ECHR and wins. But that will take more years than this administration has left.
I'm no tech expert but I'd have thought there are possibilities between do nothing (about VPNs accessing 'nasty' sites) and a ban (the chance of which imo is close to zero).
If you want to secure access to certain sites for people below the age of x, you need to have a way of proving you are over x.
1) you use official identification documents to prove this. Online banks do this. No one, will upload their passport details to a porn site, though.
2) A trusted third party could run a site that, having proved you are over x, issues one use codes (tokens) that confirm to the over x sites that you are over x, without disclosing your actual personal identity.
Either will not prevent strawman sales, logins etc.
The second option is the most practical. It could be used for a wide range of things - buying alcohol online, gambling access etc. So using it would not be immediately disreputable. You could easily imagine that Amazon could offer issuing such tokens.
Yes. Amazon and Apple are the obvious two trusted partners for such a scheme, companies who deal in payments.
Google and Facebook, not so much.
The other trusted issuers would be the banks, probably. Law firms. Both have a legal responsibly to know about their customers in great detail.
I expect the two child benefit cap will go in November mostly funded by an increase in gambling taxes . This no 10 will hope will reduce the appeal of Your party .
An increase in gambling taxes is low hanging fruit and won’t be controversial for the vast majority of the public .
Good morning
Another unpopular measure according to the polls, and does nothing to address Reeves 'all my very own deep hole' in the public finances
Why doesn't she focus on all the popular ways to increase taxes and cut spending? It's exasperating.
Truth is that income tax has to rise, but she cannot do that because of her idiotic pre election promises
Also you do not raise taxes to address a huge hole in the public finances and use some of that tax raising to create another spending commitment
Do you think whoever is leading the tory party at the next GE will do into it promising to raise income tax because I don't.
Labour are a high tax high spend government and it is not in their DNA to cut spending
Conservatives are low tax low spending and I would expect a conservative government to reduce corporation tax, encourage wealth creation and abolish IHT on farmers. I would also expect a review of all net zero subsidies
Why on earth would you expect them to do that? Most of that is at odds with their time in office - particularly on renewables and farmers.
Any party that is focussed on a pensioner voting cohort like the Conservatives is going to high tax, high spend.
Cameron and Osborne certainly cut spending as a percentage of gdp and cut tax at all income levels, including a big inheritance tax cut.
Kemi has said she will take an axe to spending, especially welfare spending and net zero spending etc and at one stage even proposed means testing the triple lock
How much did the national debt increase during the last Conservative government?
Because of lockdown, Cameron and Osborne certainly cut it compared to what Brown left
You’d think someone interested in politics would understand the difference between the deficit and the debt but you’ve never been good with numbers.
You did not just say national debt, you said national debt increase, the national debt increase was lower under Cameron and Clegg and Osborne than Brown and Darling
Are you trying to argue that the national debt didn’t increase between 2010 and 2024? Because it did. Massively.
It increased at a lower rate than under Brown and Darling, certainly pre lockdown
And yet the national debt increased. Massively. Strong financial management by the Tories. Bravo.
Spending as a percentage of gdp was 47% when Brown left office in 2010, falling to 41% when Cameron left office in 2016
Maybe, but that isn’t the national debt. That’s a different statistic entirely.
It led to the decline in increase in the national debt
Maybe. But yet the national debt still increased over the 14 years you were in power. Massively.
What additional cuts would you have made to balance the budget and run a surplus?
I'd double council tax. That's the current deficit wiped out (nearly) in one go.
A freeze on hospital spending, abolish stamp duty, NICs/IT merger. Borrow as much for capital investment as the markets allow.
I honestly don't see the point in borrowing for capital investment when the cost of infrastructure is so high. We need to actually work to remove all of those barriers before we even think about that. Again, it just seems absolutely criminal to me that building a third runway at Heathrow will cost £49bn, even the short runway will come in at £21bn. This is just one example, there's suggestions that the next nuclear plant will be £70bn while Korea builds all of this similar infrastructure at a tenth of the cost. It's not as though their living standards are substantially different to ours.
It's not universally bad. We've had some good projects in Scotland. Queensferry Crossing came in under budget and on time. Small stuff, incremental stuff, tends to go ok.
I think you've fallen for the trap of thinking in terms of billions, not millions. The odd town bypass, new tram routes, a few million on cycle lanes, rail electrification, phone masts, a public health investment. That can add up to billions, but you've diversified across projects so that one disaster doesn't cause the whole investment to collapse.
Yes lots of small projects can add up to a decent gain, yet it's the big projects that will move the needle. The problem we have is the government treats it like something like HS2 as a 5x 55 point unrelated tickets instead of an epic with 150x 3 point tickets.
One of my best mates was previously on the project and he was sitting around being paid £650 per day to do nothing because there just wasn't anything for him to do but they'd contracted him from a set date to a set date but that work was so badly delayed that for the whole 3 months of the contract he got paid to be "on call" and then once work finally did commence they had to call him and his crew back at an even higher rate. That's about 25 electricians of varying skill level on day rates because they declined to do the fixed price deal he offered as it was "too restrictive" due to him setting a specific time to start and finish, requiring the site to be handed in a certain way and all materials etc... to be delivered to a tight schedule and completing the project over 4.5 months. In the end it took them 3 months of doing nothing, then another 6 months of actual work and the overall cost was 2.5x what he offered in the fixed price contract.
I have no doubt that this small example isn't the only one where inept public sector project managers and consultants who don't know what they're doing end up pissing public money into the wind because there's zero repercussions.
That’s nuts, and you know that exactly the same scenario would have played out for every single other trade on the project. Thousands of people people each paid hundreds of pounds a day to do nothing productive.
That - on a massive scale - is what I saw and experienced all day every day during my time in 'investment banking'. And not a government or public sector employee in sight.
In local Government, on the rare occasions there was money, there was huge pressure to spend it and spend it quickly. That often led to poor decisions and a "spade in the ground" mentality on building projects.
Ditto with the NHS sometimes.
We recently had to spend almost £100k in an afternoon on 'anything! just buy anything!' due to some byzantine end-of-year finance rules.
I expect the two child benefit cap will go in November mostly funded by an increase in gambling taxes . This no 10 will hope will reduce the appeal of Your party .
An increase in gambling taxes is low hanging fruit and won’t be controversial for the vast majority of the public .
Good morning
Another unpopular measure according to the polls, and does nothing to address Reeves 'all my very own deep hole' in the public finances
Why doesn't she focus on all the popular ways to increase taxes and cut spending? It's exasperating.
Truth is that income tax has to rise, but she cannot do that because of her idiotic pre election promises
Also you do not raise taxes to address a huge hole in the public finances and use some of that tax raising to create another spending commitment
Do you think whoever is leading the tory party at the next GE will do into it promising to raise income tax because I don't.
Labour are a high tax high spend government and it is not in their DNA to cut spending
Conservatives are low tax low spending and I would expect a conservative government to reduce corporation tax, encourage wealth creation and abolish IHT on farmers. I would also expect a review of all net zero subsidies
Why on earth would you expect them to do that? Most of that is at odds with their time in office - particularly on renewables and farmers.
Any party that is focussed on a pensioner voting cohort like the Conservatives is going to high tax, high spend.
Cameron and Osborne certainly cut spending as a percentage of gdp and cut tax at all income levels, including a big inheritance tax cut.
Kemi has said she will take an axe to spending, especially welfare spending and net zero spending etc and at one stage even proposed means testing the triple lock
How much did the national debt increase during the last Conservative government?
Because of lockdown, Cameron and Osborne certainly cut it compared to what Brown left
You’d think someone interested in politics would understand the difference between the deficit and the debt but you’ve never been good with numbers.
You did not just say national debt, you said national debt increase, the national debt increase was lower under Cameron and Clegg and Osborne than Brown and Darling
Are you trying to argue that the national debt didn’t increase between 2010 and 2024? Because it did. Massively.
It increased at a lower rate than under Brown and Darling, certainly pre lockdown
And yet the national debt increased. Massively. Strong financial management by the Tories. Bravo.
Spending as a percentage of gdp was 47% when Brown left office in 2010, falling to 41% when Cameron left office in 2016
Maybe, but that isn’t the national debt. That’s a different statistic entirely.
It led to the decline in increase in the national debt
Maybe. But yet the national debt still increased over the 14 years you were in power. Massively.
What additional cuts would you have made to balance the budget and run a surplus?
I'd double council tax. That's the current deficit wiped out (nearly) in one go.
A freeze on hospital spending, abolish stamp duty, NICs/IT merger. Borrow as much for capital investment as the markets allow.
I honestly don't see the point in borrowing for capital investment when the cost of infrastructure is so high. We need to actually work to remove all of those barriers before we even think about that. Again, it just seems absolutely criminal to me that building a third runway at Heathrow will cost £49bn, even the short runway will come in at £21bn. This is just one example, there's suggestions that the next nuclear plant will be £70bn while Korea builds all of this similar infrastructure at a tenth of the cost. It's not as though their living standards are substantially different to ours.
It's not universally bad. We've had some good projects in Scotland. Queensferry Crossing came in under budget and on time. Small stuff, incremental stuff, tends to go ok.
I think you've fallen for the trap of thinking in terms of billions, not millions. The odd town bypass, new tram routes, a few million on cycle lanes, rail electrification, phone masts, a public health investment. That can add up to billions, but you've diversified across projects so that one disaster doesn't cause the whole investment to collapse.
Even with small projects, the process state still rears it’s ugly head.
Not very far from where I live the council decided to use some government money to build a cycle/pedestrian bridge over the river between two sites that are due for extensive redevelopment in the future. Cue outrage from local nimbies over the trauma caused by the need to cut down twelve trees. Twelve self-seeded trees that would grow back afterwards. So far we’ve had one judicial review, another in the works & the entire project has roughly doubled in cost due to all the delays.
The Aarhus Convention is a plague upon the nation.
Where I live, the council planted some fast growing trees. About 15 years back.
These tore up the pavement, when they got big. Because the pavements are narrow, in places, this makes it impossible to use prams, wheelchairs or walking frames. Literally you can’t get through the gap between the tree and people’s garden walls, except by scrambling over tree roots erupting from the pavement.
The sane thing to do is chop the trees down and replace. They have all the cultural value of a pine tree in one of those Swedish forest grown for wood pulp.
But no.
So the old people and mothers walk in the actual road, with the cars.
Indeed, the notion of boulevard style living in the suburbs, predicated on having trees in streets, is deeply flawed.
The roots of a tree grow twice as far as the height of the tree so can quickly undermine the nearby pavements and eventually the houses themselves. In addition, the canopy can obstruct not only buses but as I've seen in streets near me, it can actually reduce light going into people's houses.
The trees need to be properly looked after and routinely cut back but the roots remain a big problem until and unless the tree is removed. A number have in fact been taken down in Newham because of the subsidence issues they were causing.
Marc Andreessen complains to Downing Street about Online Safety Act and UK tech minister
In a sign that the government was caught off guard by the extent to which these tools would be used, ministers last week requested data from the internet regulator Ofcom about how and when VPNs were being downloaded, according to two people briefed on the move.
Kyle has said publicly that he is not considering any ban on VPNs, but officials say ministers are keen to understand how the tools are being used, particularly by children.
It's not hard to see where this is going. What happens when Ofcom come back and say, yes, VPNs are being extensively used by under-18s and the OSA is being bypassed to the extent it's a giant waste of time?
I don't believe Kyle's statements about VPNs. He's one of those morons who believe any problem can be fixed by making a new law. So the government will ban VPNs without a licence.
When people say this stuff about what's going to happen and it doesn't (eg the government were going to keep the lockdown beyond the pandemic because they were luvin it) I'd like to see some accountability. Some fessing up that "I was wrong and will learn from it "
Like I always do on the odd occasion I get things wrong.
If the government doesn't implement some kind of restriction on VPNs before they get kicked out I will happily and publicly acknowledge I was wrong. But the alternative scenario is to admit the OSA is a failure, repeal it and look like a bunch of ridiculous fools. Can't see this government being in any way willing to do that.
The only way I see a VPN ban not happening is if some organisation - Wikipedia possibly - refuses to comply with the OSA and then takes uk.gov to the ECHR and wins. But that will take more years than this administration has left.
I'm no tech expert but I'd have thought there are possibilities between do nothing (about VPNs accessing 'nasty' sites) and a ban (the chance of which imo is close to zero).
If you want to secure access to certain sites for people below the age of x, you need to have a way of proving you are over x.
1) you use official identification documents to prove this. Online banks do this. No one, will upload their passport details to a porn site, though.
2) A trusted third party could run a site that, having proved you are over x, issues one use codes (tokens) that confirm to the over x sites that you are over x, without disclosing your actual personal identity.
Either will not prevent strawman sales, logins etc.
The second option is the most practical. It could be used for a wide range of things - buying alcohol online, gambling access etc. So using it would not be immediately disreputable. You could easily imagine that Amazon could offer issuing such tokens.
I know it's difficult but just as technology makes regulation harder perhaps it can provide ways to help it too.
I don't subscribe to the 'Internet can't be messed with' pov.
As to how, you tech-literate guys will have to work it out.
You didn't read what I wrote? OK
The problem with the second method I outline (the preferred idea of professional security experts, by the way), for the politicians, is two fold.
1) They don't understand it. 2) And they don't like the idea of anonymising access. They (or more accurately, the Police and the loonier civil servants in the Home Office) want ZE! LIST!
Don't be a pompous ass. I read it, processed, and replied.
You should be grateful. Tell me you are, otherwise I might stop bothering.
I expect the two child benefit cap will go in November mostly funded by an increase in gambling taxes . This no 10 will hope will reduce the appeal of Your party .
An increase in gambling taxes is low hanging fruit and won’t be controversial for the vast majority of the public .
Good morning
Another unpopular measure according to the polls, and does nothing to address Reeves 'all my very own deep hole' in the public finances
Why doesn't she focus on all the popular ways to increase taxes and cut spending? It's exasperating.
Truth is that income tax has to rise, but she cannot do that because of her idiotic pre election promises
Also you do not raise taxes to address a huge hole in the public finances and use some of that tax raising to create another spending commitment
Do you think whoever is leading the tory party at the next GE will do into it promising to raise income tax because I don't.
Labour are a high tax high spend government and it is not in their DNA to cut spending
Conservatives are low tax low spending and I would expect a conservative government to reduce corporation tax, encourage wealth creation and abolish IHT on farmers. I would also expect a review of all net zero subsidies
Why on earth would you expect them to do that? Most of that is at odds with their time in office - particularly on renewables and farmers.
Any party that is focussed on a pensioner voting cohort like the Conservatives is going to high tax, high spend.
Cameron and Osborne certainly cut spending as a percentage of gdp and cut tax at all income levels, including a big inheritance tax cut.
Kemi has said she will take an axe to spending, especially welfare spending and net zero spending etc and at one stage even proposed means testing the triple lock
How much did the national debt increase during the last Conservative government?
Because of lockdown, Cameron and Osborne certainly cut it compared to what Brown left
You’d think someone interested in politics would understand the difference between the deficit and the debt but you’ve never been good with numbers.
You did not just say national debt, you said national debt increase, the national debt increase was lower under Cameron and Clegg and Osborne than Brown and Darling
Are you trying to argue that the national debt didn’t increase between 2010 and 2024? Because it did. Massively.
It increased at a lower rate than under Brown and Darling, certainly pre lockdown
And yet the national debt increased. Massively. Strong financial management by the Tories. Bravo.
Spending as a percentage of gdp was 47% when Brown left office in 2010, falling to 41% when Cameron left office in 2016
Maybe, but that isn’t the national debt. That’s a different statistic entirely.
It led to the decline in increase in the national debt
Maybe. But yet the national debt still increased over the 14 years you were in power. Massively.
What additional cuts would you have made to balance the budget and run a surplus?
I'd double council tax. That's the current deficit wiped out (nearly) in one go.
A freeze on hospital spending, abolish stamp duty, NICs/IT merger. Borrow as much for capital investment as the markets allow.
I honestly don't see the point in borrowing for capital investment when the cost of infrastructure is so high. We need to actually work to remove all of those barriers before we even think about that. Again, it just seems absolutely criminal to me that building a third runway at Heathrow will cost £49bn, even the short runway will come in at £21bn. This is just one example, there's suggestions that the next nuclear plant will be £70bn while Korea builds all of this similar infrastructure at a tenth of the cost. It's not as though their living standards are substantially different to ours.
It's not universally bad. We've had some good projects in Scotland. Queensferry Crossing came in under budget and on time. Small stuff, incremental stuff, tends to go ok.
I think you've fallen for the trap of thinking in terms of billions, not millions. The odd town bypass, new tram routes, a few million on cycle lanes, rail electrification, phone masts, a public health investment. That can add up to billions, but you've diversified across projects so that one disaster doesn't cause the whole investment to collapse.
Even with small projects, the process state still rears it’s ugly head.
Not very far from where I live the council decided to use some government money to build a cycle/pedestrian bridge over the river between two sites that are due for extensive redevelopment in the future. Cue outrage from local nimbies over the trauma caused by the need to cut down twelve trees. Twelve self-seeded trees that would grow back afterwards. So far we’ve had one judicial review, another in the works & the entire project has roughly doubled in cost due to all the delays.
The Aarhus Convention is a plague upon the nation.
This government came in with some sort of ambition regarding planning reform.
So far it's just tinkered a bit. The system needs a fundamental rebuilding, without spending the rest of this parliament arguing over the details.
I'm not sure there are any ministers up to it, though ?
As I said last night, Labour had the chance to push through huge reforms of planning, renting, leaseholds and generally the whole housing sector but have disappointed on each policy area. They are without a doubt worse than Rishi and Hunt. The economy has tanked, taxes are going up, public services are no different, the deficit has only gone up and will continue to do so and the unions are more belligerent than ever.
Tell me what Labour has done that's better than what we had previously?
I expect the two child benefit cap will go in November mostly funded by an increase in gambling taxes . This no 10 will hope will reduce the appeal of Your party .
An increase in gambling taxes is low hanging fruit and won’t be controversial for the vast majority of the public .
Good morning
Another unpopular measure according to the polls, and does nothing to address Reeves 'all my very own deep hole' in the public finances
Why doesn't she focus on all the popular ways to increase taxes and cut spending? It's exasperating.
Truth is that income tax has to rise, but she cannot do that because of her idiotic pre election promises
Also you do not raise taxes to address a huge hole in the public finances and use some of that tax raising to create another spending commitment
Do you think whoever is leading the tory party at the next GE will do into it promising to raise income tax because I don't.
Labour are a high tax high spend government and it is not in their DNA to cut spending
Conservatives are low tax low spending and I would expect a conservative government to reduce corporation tax, encourage wealth creation and abolish IHT on farmers. I would also expect a review of all net zero subsidies
Why on earth would you expect them to do that? Most of that is at odds with their time in office - particularly on renewables and farmers.
Any party that is focussed on a pensioner voting cohort like the Conservatives is going to high tax, high spend.
Cameron and Osborne certainly cut spending as a percentage of gdp and cut tax at all income levels, including a big inheritance tax cut.
Kemi has said she will take an axe to spending, especially welfare spending and net zero spending etc and at one stage even proposed means testing the triple lock
How much did the national debt increase during the last Conservative government?
Because of lockdown, Cameron and Osborne certainly cut it compared to what Brown left
You’d think someone interested in politics would understand the difference between the deficit and the debt but you’ve never been good with numbers.
You did not just say national debt, you said national debt increase, the national debt increase was lower under Cameron and Clegg and Osborne than Brown and Darling
Are you trying to argue that the national debt didn’t increase between 2010 and 2024? Because it did. Massively.
It increased at a lower rate than under Brown and Darling, certainly pre lockdown
And yet the national debt increased. Massively. Strong financial management by the Tories. Bravo.
Spending as a percentage of gdp was 47% when Brown left office in 2010, falling to 41% when Cameron left office in 2016
Maybe, but that isn’t the national debt. That’s a different statistic entirely.
It led to the decline in increase in the national debt
Maybe. But yet the national debt still increased over the 14 years you were in power. Massively.
What additional cuts would you have made to balance the budget and run a surplus?
I'd double council tax. That's the current deficit wiped out (nearly) in one go.
A freeze on hospital spending, abolish stamp duty, NICs/IT merger. Borrow as much for capital investment as the markets allow.
I honestly don't see the point in borrowing for capital investment when the cost of infrastructure is so high. We need to actually work to remove all of those barriers before we even think about that. Again, it just seems absolutely criminal to me that building a third runway at Heathrow will cost £49bn, even the short runway will come in at £21bn. This is just one example, there's suggestions that the next nuclear plant will be £70bn while Korea builds all of this similar infrastructure at a tenth of the cost. It's not as though their living standards are substantially different to ours.
It's not universally bad. We've had some good projects in Scotland. Queensferry Crossing came in under budget and on time. Small stuff, incremental stuff, tends to go ok.
I think you've fallen for the trap of thinking in terms of billions, not millions. The odd town bypass, new tram routes, a few million on cycle lanes, rail electrification, phone masts, a public health investment. That can add up to billions, but you've diversified across projects so that one disaster doesn't cause the whole investment to collapse.
Even with small projects, the process state still rears it’s ugly head.
Not very far from where I live the council decided to use some government money to build a cycle/pedestrian bridge over the river between two sites that are due for extensive redevelopment in the future. Cue outrage from local nimbies over the trauma caused by the need to cut down twelve trees. Twelve self-seeded trees that would grow back afterwards. So far we’ve had one judicial review, another in the works & the entire project has roughly doubled in cost due to all the delays.
The Aarhus Convention is a plague upon the nation.
Where I live, the council planted some fast growing trees. About 15 years back.
These tore up the pavement, when they got big. Because the pavements are narrow, in places, this makes it impossible to use prams, wheelchairs or walking frames. Literally you can’t get through the gap between the tree and people’s garden walls, except by scrambling over tree roots erupting from the pavement.
The sane thing to do is chop the trees down and replace. They have all the cultural value of a pine tree in one of those Swedish forest grown for wood pulp.
But no.
So the old people and mothers walk in the actual road, with the cars.
Indeed, the notion of boulevard style living in the suburbs, predicated on having trees in streets, is deeply flawed.
The roots of a tree grow twice as far as the height of the tree so can quickly undermine the nearby pavements and eventually the houses themselves. In addition, the canopy can obstruct not only buses but as I've seen in streets near me, it can actually reduce light going into people's houses.
The trees need to be properly looked after and routinely cut back but the roots remain a big problem until and unless the tree is removed. A number have in fact been taken down in Newham because of the subsidence issues they were causing.
There are trees that grow slowly, don’t reach vast size and don’t drop leaves/pollen that is nuisance.
But to use those requires thinking and long term planning.
Marc Andreessen complains to Downing Street about Online Safety Act and UK tech minister
In a sign that the government was caught off guard by the extent to which these tools would be used, ministers last week requested data from the internet regulator Ofcom about how and when VPNs were being downloaded, according to two people briefed on the move.
Kyle has said publicly that he is not considering any ban on VPNs, but officials say ministers are keen to understand how the tools are being used, particularly by children.
It's not hard to see where this is going. What happens when Ofcom come back and say, yes, VPNs are being extensively used by under-18s and the OSA is being bypassed to the extent it's a giant waste of time?
I don't believe Kyle's statements about VPNs. He's one of those morons who believe any problem can be fixed by making a new law. So the government will ban VPNs without a licence.
When people say this stuff about what's going to happen and it doesn't (eg the government were going to keep the lockdown beyond the pandemic because they were luvin it) I'd like to see some accountability. Some fessing up that "I was wrong and will learn from it "
Like I always do on the odd occasion I get things wrong.
If the government doesn't implement some kind of restriction on VPNs before they get kicked out I will happily and publicly acknowledge I was wrong. But the alternative scenario is to admit the OSA is a failure, repeal it and look like a bunch of ridiculous fools. Can't see this government being in any way willing to do that.
The only way I see a VPN ban not happening is if some organisation - Wikipedia possibly - refuses to comply with the OSA and then takes uk.gov to the ECHR and wins. But that will take more years than this administration has left.
I'm no tech expert but I'd have thought there are possibilities between do nothing (about VPNs accessing 'nasty' sites) and a ban (the chance of which imo is close to zero).
If you want to secure access to certain sites for people below the age of x, you need to have a way of proving you are over x.
1) you use official identification documents to prove this. Online banks do this. No one, will upload their passport details to a porn site, though.
2) A trusted third party could run a site that, having proved you are over x, issues one use codes (tokens) that confirm to the over x sites that you are over x, without disclosing your actual personal identity.
Either will not prevent strawman sales, logins etc.
The second option is the most practical. It could be used for a wide range of things - buying alcohol online, gambling access etc. So using it would not be immediately disreputable. You could easily imagine that Amazon could offer issuing such tokens.
I know it's difficult but just as technology makes regulation harder perhaps it can provide ways to help it too.
I don't subscribe to the 'Internet can't be messed with' pov.
As to how, you tech-literate guys will have to work it out.
You didn't read what I wrote? OK
The problem with the second method I outline (the preferred idea of professional security experts, by the way), for the politicians, is two fold.
1) They don't understand it. 2) And they don't like the idea of anonymising access. They (or more accurately, the Police and the loonier civil servants in the Home Office) want ZE! LIST!
Don't be a pompous ass. I read it, processed, and replied.
You should be grateful. Tell me you are, otherwise I might stop bothering.
Right, no more call strength turnip juice for you.
I expect the two child benefit cap will go in November mostly funded by an increase in gambling taxes . This no 10 will hope will reduce the appeal of Your party .
An increase in gambling taxes is low hanging fruit and won’t be controversial for the vast majority of the public .
Good morning
Another unpopular measure according to the polls, and does nothing to address Reeves 'all my very own deep hole' in the public finances
Why doesn't she focus on all the popular ways to increase taxes and cut spending? It's exasperating.
Truth is that income tax has to rise, but she cannot do that because of her idiotic pre election promises
Also you do not raise taxes to address a huge hole in the public finances and use some of that tax raising to create another spending commitment
Do you think whoever is leading the tory party at the next GE will do into it promising to raise income tax because I don't.
Labour are a high tax high spend government and it is not in their DNA to cut spending
Conservatives are low tax low spending and I would expect a conservative government to reduce corporation tax, encourage wealth creation and abolish IHT on farmers. I would also expect a review of all net zero subsidies
Why on earth would you expect them to do that? Most of that is at odds with their time in office - particularly on renewables and farmers.
Any party that is focussed on a pensioner voting cohort like the Conservatives is going to high tax, high spend.
Cameron and Osborne certainly cut spending as a percentage of gdp and cut tax at all income levels, including a big inheritance tax cut.
Kemi has said she will take an axe to spending, especially welfare spending and net zero spending etc and at one stage even proposed means testing the triple lock
How much did the national debt increase during the last Conservative government?
Because of lockdown, Cameron and Osborne certainly cut it compared to what Brown left
You’d think someone interested in politics would understand the difference between the deficit and the debt but you’ve never been good with numbers.
You did not just say national debt, you said national debt increase, the national debt increase was lower under Cameron and Clegg and Osborne than Brown and Darling
Are you trying to argue that the national debt didn’t increase between 2010 and 2024? Because it did. Massively.
It increased at a lower rate than under Brown and Darling, certainly pre lockdown
And yet the national debt increased. Massively. Strong financial management by the Tories. Bravo.
Spending as a percentage of gdp was 47% when Brown left office in 2010, falling to 41% when Cameron left office in 2016
Maybe, but that isn’t the national debt. That’s a different statistic entirely.
It led to the decline in increase in the national debt
Maybe. But yet the national debt still increased over the 14 years you were in power. Massively.
What additional cuts would you have made to balance the budget and run a surplus?
I'd double council tax. That's the current deficit wiped out (nearly) in one go.
A freeze on hospital spending, abolish stamp duty, NICs/IT merger. Borrow as much for capital investment as the markets allow.
I honestly don't see the point in borrowing for capital investment when the cost of infrastructure is so high. We need to actually work to remove all of those barriers before we even think about that. Again, it just seems absolutely criminal to me that building a third runway at Heathrow will cost £49bn, even the short runway will come in at £21bn. This is just one example, there's suggestions that the next nuclear plant will be £70bn while Korea builds all of this similar infrastructure at a tenth of the cost. It's not as though their living standards are substantially different to ours.
It's not universally bad. We've had some good projects in Scotland. Queensferry Crossing came in under budget and on time. Small stuff, incremental stuff, tends to go ok.
I think you've fallen for the trap of thinking in terms of billions, not millions. The odd town bypass, new tram routes, a few million on cycle lanes, rail electrification, phone masts, a public health investment. That can add up to billions, but you've diversified across projects so that one disaster doesn't cause the whole investment to collapse.
Yes lots of small projects can add up to a decent gain, yet it's the big projects that will move the needle. The problem we have is the government treats it like something like HS2 as a 5x 55 point unrelated tickets instead of an epic with 150x 3 point tickets.
One of my best mates was previously on the project and he was sitting around being paid £650 per day to do nothing because there just wasn't anything for him to do but they'd contracted him from a set date to a set date but that work was so badly delayed that for the whole 3 months of the contract he got paid to be "on call" and then once work finally did commence they had to call him and his crew back at an even higher rate. That's about 25 electricians of varying skill level on day rates because they declined to do the fixed price deal he offered as it was "too restrictive" due to him setting a specific time to start and finish, requiring the site to be handed in a certain way and all materials etc... to be delivered to a tight schedule and completing the project over 4.5 months. In the end it took them 3 months of doing nothing, then another 6 months of actual work and the overall cost was 2.5x what he offered in the fixed price contract.
I have no doubt that this small example isn't the only one where inept public sector project managers and consultants who don't know what they're doing end up pissing public money into the wind because there's zero repercussions.
That’s nuts, and you know that exactly the same scenario would have played out for every single other trade on the project. Thousands of people people each paid hundreds of pounds a day to do nothing productive.
That - on a massive scale - is what I saw and experienced all day every day during my time in 'investment banking'. And not a government or public sector employee in sight.
The difference being that investment banking inefficiencies are a problem for the bank management and shareholders, as opposed to taxpayers being forcibly relieved of their money under penalty of imprisonment.
Except it is a drag on everyone else and in 08/09 led to an enormous direct call on public money.
That was Gordon Brown’s fault from the beginning to the end. Many banks should have been allowed to fail, with insured deposits and safe mortgages kept in some sort of a government bank that could have been floated later.
Oh for heaven's sake. Are you for real?
What is the problem with banks failing? If they are not allied to fail, they should not be allowed to make profit. Profit is the reward for risk.
Beyond age 70, US mortality/survival rates are very similar to other rich countries. But between teenage years and early middle age there is a vast gulf...
...This has an outsized impact on life exp because deaths at early ages erase far more life than even a large number of older folks dying slightly early.
More years of American lives were erased by drugs, guns & road deaths in 2021 alone than from Covid during the whole pandemic.
...The result is that the US is the only developed country where even if you strip out all Covid deaths, life expectancy still dropped by a year since 2019
As you know I have cascading problems with my teeth. I'm going thru various people to price up implants and the latest one is £5.5k (bone graft + post + crown). For one tooth.
I hate Britain.
Have you considered flying to Singapore for treatment? Even with flights it will likely be cheaper and high quality.
I expect the two child benefit cap will go in November mostly funded by an increase in gambling taxes . This no 10 will hope will reduce the appeal of Your party .
An increase in gambling taxes is low hanging fruit and won’t be controversial for the vast majority of the public .
Good morning
Another unpopular measure according to the polls, and does nothing to address Reeves 'all my very own deep hole' in the public finances
Why doesn't she focus on all the popular ways to increase taxes and cut spending? It's exasperating.
Truth is that income tax has to rise, but she cannot do that because of her idiotic pre election promises
Also you do not raise taxes to address a huge hole in the public finances and use some of that tax raising to create another spending commitment
Do you think whoever is leading the tory party at the next GE will do into it promising to raise income tax because I don't.
Labour are a high tax high spend government and it is not in their DNA to cut spending
Conservatives are low tax low spending and I would expect a conservative government to reduce corporation tax, encourage wealth creation and abolish IHT on farmers. I would also expect a review of all net zero subsidies
Why on earth would you expect them to do that? Most of that is at odds with their time in office - particularly on renewables and farmers.
Any party that is focussed on a pensioner voting cohort like the Conservatives is going to high tax, high spend.
Cameron and Osborne certainly cut spending as a percentage of gdp and cut tax at all income levels, including a big inheritance tax cut.
Kemi has said she will take an axe to spending, especially welfare spending and net zero spending etc and at one stage even proposed means testing the triple lock
How much did the national debt increase during the last Conservative government?
Because of lockdown, Cameron and Osborne certainly cut it compared to what Brown left
You’d think someone interested in politics would understand the difference between the deficit and the debt but you’ve never been good with numbers.
You did not just say national debt, you said national debt increase, the national debt increase was lower under Cameron and Clegg and Osborne than Brown and Darling
Are you trying to argue that the national debt didn’t increase between 2010 and 2024? Because it did. Massively.
It increased at a lower rate than under Brown and Darling, certainly pre lockdown
And yet the national debt increased. Massively. Strong financial management by the Tories. Bravo.
Spending as a percentage of gdp was 47% when Brown left office in 2010, falling to 41% when Cameron left office in 2016
Maybe, but that isn’t the national debt. That’s a different statistic entirely.
It led to the decline in increase in the national debt
Maybe. But yet the national debt still increased over the 14 years you were in power. Massively.
What additional cuts would you have made to balance the budget and run a surplus?
I'd double council tax. That's the current deficit wiped out (nearly) in one go.
A freeze on hospital spending, abolish stamp duty, NICs/IT merger. Borrow as much for capital investment as the markets allow.
I honestly don't see the point in borrowing for capital investment when the cost of infrastructure is so high. We need to actually work to remove all of those barriers before we even think about that. Again, it just seems absolutely criminal to me that building a third runway at Heathrow will cost £49bn, even the short runway will come in at £21bn. This is just one example, there's suggestions that the next nuclear plant will be £70bn while Korea builds all of this similar infrastructure at a tenth of the cost. It's not as though their living standards are substantially different to ours.
It's not universally bad. We've had some good projects in Scotland. Queensferry Crossing came in under budget and on time. Small stuff, incremental stuff, tends to go ok.
I think you've fallen for the trap of thinking in terms of billions, not millions. The odd town bypass, new tram routes, a few million on cycle lanes, rail electrification, phone masts, a public health investment. That can add up to billions, but you've diversified across projects so that one disaster doesn't cause the whole investment to collapse.
Even with small projects, the process state still rears it’s ugly head.
Not very far from where I live the council decided to use some government money to build a cycle/pedestrian bridge over the river between two sites that are due for extensive redevelopment in the future. Cue outrage from local nimbies over the trauma caused by the need to cut down twelve trees. Twelve self-seeded trees that would grow back afterwards. So far we’ve had one judicial review, another in the works & the entire project has roughly doubled in cost due to all the delays.
The Aarhus Convention is a plague upon the nation.
This government came in with some sort of ambition regarding planning reform.
So far it's just tinkered a bit. The system needs a fundamental rebuilding, without spending the rest of this parliament arguing over the details.
I'm not sure there are any ministers up to it, though ?
Didn’t one housing minister just resign for being a crappy landlady?
IMHO the single biggest policy failure of the last three decades has been on housing.
I expect the two child benefit cap will go in November mostly funded by an increase in gambling taxes . This no 10 will hope will reduce the appeal of Your party .
An increase in gambling taxes is low hanging fruit and won’t be controversial for the vast majority of the public .
Good morning
Another unpopular measure according to the polls, and does nothing to address Reeves 'all my very own deep hole' in the public finances
Why doesn't she focus on all the popular ways to increase taxes and cut spending? It's exasperating.
Truth is that income tax has to rise, but she cannot do that because of her idiotic pre election promises
Also you do not raise taxes to address a huge hole in the public finances and use some of that tax raising to create another spending commitment
Do you think whoever is leading the tory party at the next GE will do into it promising to raise income tax because I don't.
Labour are a high tax high spend government and it is not in their DNA to cut spending
Conservatives are low tax low spending and I would expect a conservative government to reduce corporation tax, encourage wealth creation and abolish IHT on farmers. I would also expect a review of all net zero subsidies
Why on earth would you expect them to do that? Most of that is at odds with their time in office - particularly on renewables and farmers.
Any party that is focussed on a pensioner voting cohort like the Conservatives is going to high tax, high spend.
Cameron and Osborne certainly cut spending as a percentage of gdp and cut tax at all income levels, including a big inheritance tax cut.
Kemi has said she will take an axe to spending, especially welfare spending and net zero spending etc and at one stage even proposed means testing the triple lock
How much did the national debt increase during the last Conservative government?
Because of lockdown, Cameron and Osborne certainly cut it compared to what Brown left
You’d think someone interested in politics would understand the difference between the deficit and the debt but you’ve never been good with numbers.
You did not just say national debt, you said national debt increase, the national debt increase was lower under Cameron and Clegg and Osborne than Brown and Darling
Are you trying to argue that the national debt didn’t increase between 2010 and 2024? Because it did. Massively.
It increased at a lower rate than under Brown and Darling, certainly pre lockdown
And yet the national debt increased. Massively. Strong financial management by the Tories. Bravo.
Spending as a percentage of gdp was 47% when Brown left office in 2010, falling to 41% when Cameron left office in 2016
Maybe, but that isn’t the national debt. That’s a different statistic entirely.
It led to the decline in increase in the national debt
Maybe. But yet the national debt still increased over the 14 years you were in power. Massively.
What additional cuts would you have made to balance the budget and run a surplus?
I'd double council tax. That's the current deficit wiped out (nearly) in one go.
A freeze on hospital spending, abolish stamp duty, NICs/IT merger. Borrow as much for capital investment as the markets allow.
I honestly don't see the point in borrowing for capital investment when the cost of infrastructure is so high. We need to actually work to remove all of those barriers before we even think about that. Again, it just seems absolutely criminal to me that building a third runway at Heathrow will cost £49bn, even the short runway will come in at £21bn. This is just one example, there's suggestions that the next nuclear plant will be £70bn while Korea builds all of this similar infrastructure at a tenth of the cost. It's not as though their living standards are substantially different to ours.
It's not universally bad. We've had some good projects in Scotland. Queensferry Crossing came in under budget and on time. Small stuff, incremental stuff, tends to go ok.
I think you've fallen for the trap of thinking in terms of billions, not millions. The odd town bypass, new tram routes, a few million on cycle lanes, rail electrification, phone masts, a public health investment. That can add up to billions, but you've diversified across projects so that one disaster doesn't cause the whole investment to collapse.
Even with small projects, the process state still rears it’s ugly head.
Not very far from where I live the council decided to use some government money to build a cycle/pedestrian bridge over the river between two sites that are due for extensive redevelopment in the future. Cue outrage from local nimbies over the trauma caused by the need to cut down twelve trees. Twelve self-seeded trees that would grow back afterwards. So far we’ve had one judicial review, another in the works & the entire project has roughly doubled in cost due to all the delays.
The Aarhus Convention is a plague upon the nation.
This government came in with some sort of ambition regarding planning reform.
So far it's just tinkered a bit. The system needs a fundamental rebuilding, without spending the rest of this parliament arguing over the details.
I'm not sure there are any ministers up to it, though ?
Planning isn't difficult if the Local Plan is accepted by all parties as the basis for future applications and developments. The Plan outlines what can be done with areas of land, acceptable development densities and so on.
Problems start when residents think a particular area should be immune from all development and developers push for higher densities to maximise profits.
I expect the two child benefit cap will go in November mostly funded by an increase in gambling taxes . This no 10 will hope will reduce the appeal of Your party .
An increase in gambling taxes is low hanging fruit and won’t be controversial for the vast majority of the public .
Good morning
Another unpopular measure according to the polls, and does nothing to address Reeves 'all my very own deep hole' in the public finances
Why doesn't she focus on all the popular ways to increase taxes and cut spending? It's exasperating.
Truth is that income tax has to rise, but she cannot do that because of her idiotic pre election promises
Also you do not raise taxes to address a huge hole in the public finances and use some of that tax raising to create another spending commitment
Do you think whoever is leading the tory party at the next GE will do into it promising to raise income tax because I don't.
Labour are a high tax high spend government and it is not in their DNA to cut spending
Conservatives are low tax low spending and I would expect a conservative government to reduce corporation tax, encourage wealth creation and abolish IHT on farmers. I would also expect a review of all net zero subsidies
Why on earth would you expect them to do that? Most of that is at odds with their time in office - particularly on renewables and farmers.
Any party that is focussed on a pensioner voting cohort like the Conservatives is going to high tax, high spend.
Cameron and Osborne certainly cut spending as a percentage of gdp and cut tax at all income levels, including a big inheritance tax cut.
Kemi has said she will take an axe to spending, especially welfare spending and net zero spending etc and at one stage even proposed means testing the triple lock
How much did the national debt increase during the last Conservative government?
Because of lockdown, Cameron and Osborne certainly cut it compared to what Brown left
You’d think someone interested in politics would understand the difference between the deficit and the debt but you’ve never been good with numbers.
You did not just say national debt, you said national debt increase, the national debt increase was lower under Cameron and Clegg and Osborne than Brown and Darling
Are you trying to argue that the national debt didn’t increase between 2010 and 2024? Because it did. Massively.
It increased at a lower rate than under Brown and Darling, certainly pre lockdown
And yet the national debt increased. Massively. Strong financial management by the Tories. Bravo.
Spending as a percentage of gdp was 47% when Brown left office in 2010, falling to 41% when Cameron left office in 2016
Maybe, but that isn’t the national debt. That’s a different statistic entirely.
It led to the decline in increase in the national debt
Maybe. But yet the national debt still increased over the 14 years you were in power. Massively.
What additional cuts would you have made to balance the budget and run a surplus?
I'd double council tax. That's the current deficit wiped out (nearly) in one go.
A freeze on hospital spending, abolish stamp duty, NICs/IT merger. Borrow as much for capital investment as the markets allow.
I honestly don't see the point in borrowing for capital investment when the cost of infrastructure is so high. We need to actually work to remove all of those barriers before we even think about that. Again, it just seems absolutely criminal to me that building a third runway at Heathrow will cost £49bn, even the short runway will come in at £21bn. This is just one example, there's suggestions that the next nuclear plant will be £70bn while Korea builds all of this similar infrastructure at a tenth of the cost. It's not as though their living standards are substantially different to ours.
It's not universally bad. We've had some good projects in Scotland. Queensferry Crossing came in under budget and on time. Small stuff, incremental stuff, tends to go ok.
I think you've fallen for the trap of thinking in terms of billions, not millions. The odd town bypass, new tram routes, a few million on cycle lanes, rail electrification, phone masts, a public health investment. That can add up to billions, but you've diversified across projects so that one disaster doesn't cause the whole investment to collapse.
Yes lots of small projects can add up to a decent gain, yet it's the big projects that will move the needle. The problem we have is the government treats it like something like HS2 as a 5x 55 point unrelated tickets instead of an epic with 150x 3 point tickets.
One of my best mates was previously on the project and he was sitting around being paid £650 per day to do nothing because there just wasn't anything for him to do but they'd contracted him from a set date to a set date but that work was so badly delayed that for the whole 3 months of the contract he got paid to be "on call" and then once work finally did commence they had to call him and his crew back at an even higher rate. That's about 25 electricians of varying skill level on day rates because they declined to do the fixed price deal he offered as it was "too restrictive" due to him setting a specific time to start and finish, requiring the site to be handed in a certain way and all materials etc... to be delivered to a tight schedule and completing the project over 4.5 months. In the end it took them 3 months of doing nothing, then another 6 months of actual work and the overall cost was 2.5x what he offered in the fixed price contract.
I have no doubt that this small example isn't the only one where inept public sector project managers and consultants who don't know what they're doing end up pissing public money into the wind because there's zero repercussions.
That’s nuts, and you know that exactly the same scenario would have played out for every single other trade on the project. Thousands of people people each paid hundreds of pounds a day to do nothing productive.
That - on a massive scale - is what I saw and experienced all day every day during my time in 'investment banking'. And not a government or public sector employee in sight.
In local Government, on the rare occasions there was money, there was huge pressure to spend it and spend it quickly. That often led to poor decisions and a "spade in the ground" mentality on building projects.
Ditto with the NHS sometimes.
We recently had to spend almost £100k in an afternoon on 'anything! just buy anything!' due to some byzantine end-of-year finance rules.
I expect the two child benefit cap will go in November mostly funded by an increase in gambling taxes . This no 10 will hope will reduce the appeal of Your party .
An increase in gambling taxes is low hanging fruit and won’t be controversial for the vast majority of the public .
Good morning
Another unpopular measure according to the polls, and does nothing to address Reeves 'all my very own deep hole' in the public finances
Why doesn't she focus on all the popular ways to increase taxes and cut spending? It's exasperating.
Truth is that income tax has to rise, but she cannot do that because of her idiotic pre election promises
Also you do not raise taxes to address a huge hole in the public finances and use some of that tax raising to create another spending commitment
Do you think whoever is leading the tory party at the next GE will do into it promising to raise income tax because I don't.
Labour are a high tax high spend government and it is not in their DNA to cut spending
Conservatives are low tax low spending and I would expect a conservative government to reduce corporation tax, encourage wealth creation and abolish IHT on farmers. I would also expect a review of all net zero subsidies
Why on earth would you expect them to do that? Most of that is at odds with their time in office - particularly on renewables and farmers.
Any party that is focussed on a pensioner voting cohort like the Conservatives is going to high tax, high spend.
Cameron and Osborne certainly cut spending as a percentage of gdp and cut tax at all income levels, including a big inheritance tax cut.
Kemi has said she will take an axe to spending, especially welfare spending and net zero spending etc and at one stage even proposed means testing the triple lock
How much did the national debt increase during the last Conservative government?
Because of lockdown, Cameron and Osborne certainly cut it compared to what Brown left
You’d think someone interested in politics would understand the difference between the deficit and the debt but you’ve never been good with numbers.
You did not just say national debt, you said national debt increase, the national debt increase was lower under Cameron and Clegg and Osborne than Brown and Darling
Are you trying to argue that the national debt didn’t increase between 2010 and 2024? Because it did. Massively.
It increased at a lower rate than under Brown and Darling, certainly pre lockdown
And yet the national debt increased. Massively. Strong financial management by the Tories. Bravo.
Spending as a percentage of gdp was 47% when Brown left office in 2010, falling to 41% when Cameron left office in 2016
Maybe, but that isn’t the national debt. That’s a different statistic entirely.
It led to the decline in increase in the national debt
Maybe. But yet the national debt still increased over the 14 years you were in power. Massively.
What additional cuts would you have made to balance the budget and run a surplus?
I'd double council tax. That's the current deficit wiped out (nearly) in one go.
A freeze on hospital spending, abolish stamp duty, NICs/IT merger. Borrow as much for capital investment as the markets allow.
I honestly don't see the point in borrowing for capital investment when the cost of infrastructure is so high. We need to actually work to remove all of those barriers before we even think about that. Again, it just seems absolutely criminal to me that building a third runway at Heathrow will cost £49bn, even the short runway will come in at £21bn. This is just one example, there's suggestions that the next nuclear plant will be £70bn while Korea builds all of this similar infrastructure at a tenth of the cost. It's not as though their living standards are substantially different to ours.
It's not universally bad. We've had some good projects in Scotland. Queensferry Crossing came in under budget and on time. Small stuff, incremental stuff, tends to go ok.
I think you've fallen for the trap of thinking in terms of billions, not millions. The odd town bypass, new tram routes, a few million on cycle lanes, rail electrification, phone masts, a public health investment. That can add up to billions, but you've diversified across projects so that one disaster doesn't cause the whole investment to collapse.
Yes lots of small projects can add up to a decent gain, yet it's the big projects that will move the needle. The problem we have is the government treats it like something like HS2 as a 5x 55 point unrelated tickets instead of an epic with 150x 3 point tickets.
One of my best mates was previously on the project and he was sitting around being paid £650 per day to do nothing because there just wasn't anything for him to do but they'd contracted him from a set date to a set date but that work was so badly delayed that for the whole 3 months of the contract he got paid to be "on call" and then once work finally did commence they had to call him and his crew back at an even higher rate. That's about 25 electricians of varying skill level on day rates because they declined to do the fixed price deal he offered as it was "too restrictive" due to him setting a specific time to start and finish, requiring the site to be handed in a certain way and all materials etc... to be delivered to a tight schedule and completing the project over 4.5 months. In the end it took them 3 months of doing nothing, then another 6 months of actual work and the overall cost was 2.5x what he offered in the fixed price contract.
I have no doubt that this small example isn't the only one where inept public sector project managers and consultants who don't know what they're doing end up pissing public money into the wind because there's zero repercussions.
That’s nuts, and you know that exactly the same scenario would have played out for every single other trade on the project. Thousands of people people each paid hundreds of pounds a day to do nothing productive.
That - on a massive scale - is what I saw and experienced all day every day during my time in 'investment banking'. And not a government or public sector employee in sight.
The difference being that investment banking inefficiencies are a problem for the bank management and shareholders, as opposed to taxpayers being forcibly relieved of their money under penalty of imprisonment.
Except it is a drag on everyone else and in 08/09 led to an enormous direct call on public money.
That was Gordon Brown’s fault from the beginning to the end. Many banks should have been allowed to fail, with insured deposits and safe mortgages kept in some sort of a government bank that could have been floated later.
Oh for heaven's sake. Are you for real?
What is the problem with banks failing? If they are not allied to fail, they should not be allowed to make profit. Profit is the reward for risk.
Banks should be allowed to fail in that their shareholders lose all their money.
The issue is that when a traditional business goes into into insolvency, then essentially everything is frozen. So, if Joe's Widgets Ltd banks with Dodgy Bank PLC, and then Dodgy Bank PLC is put into insovency by the the Bank of England.
Well, now Joe's Widgets can't pay their employees. Which means in turn that Matt Smith who works for them can't pay his mortgage. Which means that suddenly Good Bank PLC now reports that they have new bad debt.
Remember, when you open an account with a bank, and put money in the account, then the bank owes you money. Just like it owes lots of other people money.
And the issue is cascading failures in the system.
Beyond age 70, US mortality/survival rates are very similar to other rich countries. But between teenage years and early middle age there is a vast gulf...
...This has an outsized impact on life exp because deaths at early ages erase far more life than even a large number of older folks dying slightly early.
More years of American lives were erased by drugs, guns & road deaths in 2021 alone than from Covid during the whole pandemic.
...The result is that the US is the only developed country where even if you strip out all Covid deaths, life expectancy still dropped by a year since 2019
Quite a big chunk of it is children being shot dead.
Beyond age 70, US mortality/survival rates are very similar to other rich countries. But between teenage years and early middle age there is a vast gulf...
...This has an outsized impact on life exp because deaths at early ages erase far more life than even a large number of older folks dying slightly early.
More years of American lives were erased by drugs, guns & road deaths in 2021 alone than from Covid during the whole pandemic.
...The result is that the US is the only developed country where even if you strip out all Covid deaths, life expectancy still dropped by a year since 2019
For young black men, being sent to Iraq & Afghanistan increased their life expectancy.
Especially since young black men joining the US military tend to try to go into trades to get skills. So they work in helicopter maintenance etc, if they can.
As you know I have cascading problems with my teeth. I'm going thru various people to price up implants and the latest one is £5.5k (bone graft + post + crown). For one tooth.
I hate Britain.
Have you considered flying to Singapore for treatment? Even with flights it will likely be cheaper and high quality.
I am going thru various countries. I tried Spain and Belgium on grounds of train/ferry accessibility, and now I'm looking at Europe. So far the cheapest is Prague, at approx £1K
I expect the two child benefit cap will go in November mostly funded by an increase in gambling taxes . This no 10 will hope will reduce the appeal of Your party .
An increase in gambling taxes is low hanging fruit and won’t be controversial for the vast majority of the public .
Good morning
Another unpopular measure according to the polls, and does nothing to address Reeves 'all my very own deep hole' in the public finances
Why doesn't she focus on all the popular ways to increase taxes and cut spending? It's exasperating.
Truth is that income tax has to rise, but she cannot do that because of her idiotic pre election promises
Also you do not raise taxes to address a huge hole in the public finances and use some of that tax raising to create another spending commitment
Do you think whoever is leading the tory party at the next GE will do into it promising to raise income tax because I don't.
Labour are a high tax high spend government and it is not in their DNA to cut spending
Conservatives are low tax low spending and I would expect a conservative government to reduce corporation tax, encourage wealth creation and abolish IHT on farmers. I would also expect a review of all net zero subsidies
Why on earth would you expect them to do that? Most of that is at odds with their time in office - particularly on renewables and farmers.
Any party that is focussed on a pensioner voting cohort like the Conservatives is going to high tax, high spend.
Cameron and Osborne certainly cut spending as a percentage of gdp and cut tax at all income levels, including a big inheritance tax cut.
Kemi has said she will take an axe to spending, especially welfare spending and net zero spending etc and at one stage even proposed means testing the triple lock
How much did the national debt increase during the last Conservative government?
Because of lockdown, Cameron and Osborne certainly cut it compared to what Brown left
You’d think someone interested in politics would understand the difference between the deficit and the debt but you’ve never been good with numbers.
You did not just say national debt, you said national debt increase, the national debt increase was lower under Cameron and Clegg and Osborne than Brown and Darling
Are you trying to argue that the national debt didn’t increase between 2010 and 2024? Because it did. Massively.
It increased at a lower rate than under Brown and Darling, certainly pre lockdown
And yet the national debt increased. Massively. Strong financial management by the Tories. Bravo.
Spending as a percentage of gdp was 47% when Brown left office in 2010, falling to 41% when Cameron left office in 2016
Maybe, but that isn’t the national debt. That’s a different statistic entirely.
It led to the decline in increase in the national debt
Maybe. But yet the national debt still increased over the 14 years you were in power. Massively.
What additional cuts would you have made to balance the budget and run a surplus?
I'd double council tax. That's the current deficit wiped out (nearly) in one go.
A freeze on hospital spending, abolish stamp duty, NICs/IT merger. Borrow as much for capital investment as the markets allow.
I honestly don't see the point in borrowing for capital investment when the cost of infrastructure is so high. We need to actually work to remove all of those barriers before we even think about that. Again, it just seems absolutely criminal to me that building a third runway at Heathrow will cost £49bn, even the short runway will come in at £21bn. This is just one example, there's suggestions that the next nuclear plant will be £70bn while Korea builds all of this similar infrastructure at a tenth of the cost. It's not as though their living standards are substantially different to ours.
It's not universally bad. We've had some good projects in Scotland. Queensferry Crossing came in under budget and on time. Small stuff, incremental stuff, tends to go ok.
I think you've fallen for the trap of thinking in terms of billions, not millions. The odd town bypass, new tram routes, a few million on cycle lanes, rail electrification, phone masts, a public health investment. That can add up to billions, but you've diversified across projects so that one disaster doesn't cause the whole investment to collapse.
Yes lots of small projects can add up to a decent gain, yet it's the big projects that will move the needle. The problem we have is the government treats it like something like HS2 as a 5x 55 point unrelated tickets instead of an epic with 150x 3 point tickets.
One of my best mates was previously on the project and he was sitting around being paid £650 per day to do nothing because there just wasn't anything for him to do but they'd contracted him from a set date to a set date but that work was so badly delayed that for the whole 3 months of the contract he got paid to be "on call" and then once work finally did commence they had to call him and his crew back at an even higher rate. That's about 25 electricians of varying skill level on day rates because they declined to do the fixed price deal he offered as it was "too restrictive" due to him setting a specific time to start and finish, requiring the site to be handed in a certain way and all materials etc... to be delivered to a tight schedule and completing the project over 4.5 months. In the end it took them 3 months of doing nothing, then another 6 months of actual work and the overall cost was 2.5x what he offered in the fixed price contract.
I have no doubt that this small example isn't the only one where inept public sector project managers and consultants who don't know what they're doing end up pissing public money into the wind because there's zero repercussions.
That’s nuts, and you know that exactly the same scenario would have played out for every single other trade on the project. Thousands of people people each paid hundreds of pounds a day to do nothing productive.
That - on a massive scale - is what I saw and experienced all day every day during my time in 'investment banking'. And not a government or public sector employee in sight.
The difference being that investment banking inefficiencies are a problem for the bank management and shareholders, as opposed to taxpayers being forcibly relieved of their money under penalty of imprisonment.
Except it is a drag on everyone else and in 08/09 led to an enormous direct call on public money.
That was Gordon Brown’s fault from the beginning to the end. Many banks should have been allowed to fail, with insured deposits and safe mortgages kept in some sort of a government bank that could have been floated later.
Oh for heaven's sake. Are you for real?
Yes. Brown privatised the profits but socialised the losses.
Much of today’s nightmare of government finances can be traced back to the fcuked-up response to the 2008 crisis.
One for the legal experts on here. The murderer of Harvey Willgoose has not been named as he is under 16 (although that courtesy doesn’t apply to the victim, of course). Clearly before conviction I understand why he was not named, but what is the reason or reasons for not naming convicted teenagers? I understand that there is a name widely spread on SM and that some are making the usual links. In this case not naming (which is customary?) may well lead to accusations of a cover up (Reform/Leon).
I expect the two child benefit cap will go in November mostly funded by an increase in gambling taxes . This no 10 will hope will reduce the appeal of Your party .
An increase in gambling taxes is low hanging fruit and won’t be controversial for the vast majority of the public .
Good morning
Another unpopular measure according to the polls, and does nothing to address Reeves 'all my very own deep hole' in the public finances
Why doesn't she focus on all the popular ways to increase taxes and cut spending? It's exasperating.
Truth is that income tax has to rise, but she cannot do that because of her idiotic pre election promises
Also you do not raise taxes to address a huge hole in the public finances and use some of that tax raising to create another spending commitment
Do you think whoever is leading the tory party at the next GE will do into it promising to raise income tax because I don't.
Labour are a high tax high spend government and it is not in their DNA to cut spending
Conservatives are low tax low spending and I would expect a conservative government to reduce corporation tax, encourage wealth creation and abolish IHT on farmers. I would also expect a review of all net zero subsidies
Why on earth would you expect them to do that? Most of that is at odds with their time in office - particularly on renewables and farmers.
Any party that is focussed on a pensioner voting cohort like the Conservatives is going to high tax, high spend.
Cameron and Osborne certainly cut spending as a percentage of gdp and cut tax at all income levels, including a big inheritance tax cut.
Kemi has said she will take an axe to spending, especially welfare spending and net zero spending etc and at one stage even proposed means testing the triple lock
How much did the national debt increase during the last Conservative government?
Because of lockdown, Cameron and Osborne certainly cut it compared to what Brown left
You’d think someone interested in politics would understand the difference between the deficit and the debt but you’ve never been good with numbers.
You did not just say national debt, you said national debt increase, the national debt increase was lower under Cameron and Clegg and Osborne than Brown and Darling
Are you trying to argue that the national debt didn’t increase between 2010 and 2024? Because it did. Massively.
It increased at a lower rate than under Brown and Darling, certainly pre lockdown
And yet the national debt increased. Massively. Strong financial management by the Tories. Bravo.
Spending as a percentage of gdp was 47% when Brown left office in 2010, falling to 41% when Cameron left office in 2016
Maybe, but that isn’t the national debt. That’s a different statistic entirely.
It led to the decline in increase in the national debt
Maybe. But yet the national debt still increased over the 14 years you were in power. Massively.
What additional cuts would you have made to balance the budget and run a surplus?
I'd double council tax. That's the current deficit wiped out (nearly) in one go.
A freeze on hospital spending, abolish stamp duty, NICs/IT merger. Borrow as much for capital investment as the markets allow.
I honestly don't see the point in borrowing for capital investment when the cost of infrastructure is so high. We need to actually work to remove all of those barriers before we even think about that. Again, it just seems absolutely criminal to me that building a third runway at Heathrow will cost £49bn, even the short runway will come in at £21bn. This is just one example, there's suggestions that the next nuclear plant will be £70bn while Korea builds all of this similar infrastructure at a tenth of the cost. It's not as though their living standards are substantially different to ours.
It's not universally bad. We've had some good projects in Scotland. Queensferry Crossing came in under budget and on time. Small stuff, incremental stuff, tends to go ok.
I think you've fallen for the trap of thinking in terms of billions, not millions. The odd town bypass, new tram routes, a few million on cycle lanes, rail electrification, phone masts, a public health investment. That can add up to billions, but you've diversified across projects so that one disaster doesn't cause the whole investment to collapse.
Yes lots of small projects can add up to a decent gain, yet it's the big projects that will move the needle. The problem we have is the government treats it like something like HS2 as a 5x 55 point unrelated tickets instead of an epic with 150x 3 point tickets.
One of my best mates was previously on the project and he was sitting around being paid £650 per day to do nothing because there just wasn't anything for him to do but they'd contracted him from a set date to a set date but that work was so badly delayed that for the whole 3 months of the contract he got paid to be "on call" and then once work finally did commence they had to call him and his crew back at an even higher rate. That's about 25 electricians of varying skill level on day rates because they declined to do the fixed price deal he offered as it was "too restrictive" due to him setting a specific time to start and finish, requiring the site to be handed in a certain way and all materials etc... to be delivered to a tight schedule and completing the project over 4.5 months. In the end it took them 3 months of doing nothing, then another 6 months of actual work and the overall cost was 2.5x what he offered in the fixed price contract.
I have no doubt that this small example isn't the only one where inept public sector project managers and consultants who don't know what they're doing end up pissing public money into the wind because there's zero repercussions.
That’s nuts, and you know that exactly the same scenario would have played out for every single other trade on the project. Thousands of people people each paid hundreds of pounds a day to do nothing productive.
That - on a massive scale - is what I saw and experienced all day every day during my time in 'investment banking'. And not a government or public sector employee in sight.
The difference being that investment banking inefficiencies are a problem for the bank management and shareholders, as opposed to taxpayers being forcibly relieved of their money under penalty of imprisonment.
Except it is a drag on everyone else and in 08/09 led to an enormous direct call on public money.
That was Gordon Brown’s fault from the beginning to the end. Many banks should have been allowed to fail, with insured deposits and safe mortgages kept in some sort of a government bank that could have been floated later.
Oh for heaven's sake. Are you for real?
What is the problem with banks failing? If they are not allied to fail, they should not be allowed to make profit. Profit is the reward for risk.
The problem in 2008/09 wasn't banks failing but the public order impact of a run on the banks absent a depositor guarantee. Had Northern Rock failed and people lost money, we'd have seen queues and potential public disorder outside other banks and if you want a quick road to authoritarianism, make your middle classes paupers.
RBS was close to failure - imagine the ATMs not working and card payments being declined.
Every large organisation needs to have some kind of "Will" to make clear what should happen in the event of insolvency. I fear we've not learned that lesson from the GFC but banks now know the lender of last resort will bail them out whatever the cost.
Marc Andreessen complains to Downing Street about Online Safety Act and UK tech minister
In a sign that the government was caught off guard by the extent to which these tools would be used, ministers last week requested data from the internet regulator Ofcom about how and when VPNs were being downloaded, according to two people briefed on the move.
Kyle has said publicly that he is not considering any ban on VPNs, but officials say ministers are keen to understand how the tools are being used, particularly by children.
It's not hard to see where this is going. What happens when Ofcom come back and say, yes, VPNs are being extensively used by under-18s and the OSA is being bypassed to the extent it's a giant waste of time?
I don't believe Kyle's statements about VPNs. He's one of those morons who believe any problem can be fixed by making a new law. So the government will ban VPNs without a licence.
When people say this stuff about what's going to happen and it doesn't (eg the government were going to keep the lockdown beyond the pandemic because they were luvin it) I'd like to see some accountability. Some fessing up that "I was wrong and will learn from it "
Like I always do on the odd occasion I get things wrong.
If the government doesn't implement some kind of restriction on VPNs before they get kicked out I will happily and publicly acknowledge I was wrong. But the alternative scenario is to admit the OSA is a failure, repeal it and look like a bunch of ridiculous fools. Can't see this government being in any way willing to do that.
The only way I see a VPN ban not happening is if some organisation - Wikipedia possibly - refuses to comply with the OSA and then takes uk.gov to the ECHR and wins. But that will take more years than this administration has left.
I'm no tech expert but I'd have thought there are possibilities between do nothing (about VPNs accessing 'nasty' sites) and a ban (the chance of which imo is close to zero).
If you want to secure access to certain sites for people below the age of x, you need to have a way of proving you are over x.
1) you use official identification documents to prove this. Online banks do this. No one, will upload their passport details to a porn site, though.
2) A trusted third party could run a site that, having proved you are over x, issues one use codes (tokens) that confirm to the over x sites that you are over x, without disclosing your actual personal identity.
Either will not prevent strawman sales, logins etc.
The second option is the most practical. It could be used for a wide range of things - buying alcohol online, gambling access etc. So using it would not be immediately disreputable. You could easily imagine that Amazon could offer issuing such tokens.
Yes. Amazon and Apple are the obvious two trusted partners for such a scheme, companies who deal in payments.
Google and Facebook, not so much.
The other trusted issuers would be the banks, probably. Law firms. Both have a legal responsibly to know about their customers in great detail.
But no-one wants their bank to know whether they prefer youporn or xhamster.
Law firms would want £500 to set up the credential, and £50 more every time it’s used.
Why is it better to put this on a wall rather than some random art by someone else (*waves at @TOPPING*)?
What makes this special? Why have I put it on the wall in my revamping new living room?
Answers on an antique parchment
Are you the one on the left or the one on the right?
This is a tricky one. Here's the long answer (@Sunil_Prasannan was on the right road)
So I have a long association with Gobekli Tepe. I first went, on my own shilling, on the off chance, as a youngish hungry freelancer in 2006 to write one of the first major articles on the whole place, back when it was basically unknown. The article went viral and halfway made me as a writer
I went out again in 2023 and - because by then I was well known to them - the main archaeologists showed me all the incredible new sites. Especially Karahan Tepe. Etc. These collective sites are now known as the Tas Tepeler
But then on day 3 as we were driving around Necmul the head Turkish boffin of the whole Tas Tepeler said “sod it Leon I'm going to show you something new, we only found this three months ago”. So we abruply diverted to this tiny village in the desert which had obvious Tepe like pillars propping up farm walls, it was like driving to Stonehenge and en route finding a Wiltshire village using megaliths as door frames (only much much older). And then Necmul led me past some chickens to a small stone door and at the doorway he said “the villagers found this when they were emptying a barn a few weeks ago, and they called us in”
Inside that barn was that rock frieze, perhaps 12,000 years old. With the classic Gobekli animals in profile - the horned bull - a man dying maybe - a leopard - and then the fascinating figure of a small strange man holding his penis, with the iconic chevrons on his chest - all motifs used across the Tas Tepeler. In other words, what I was seeing was pretty much final, conclusive proof that Gobekli Tepe and the tas Tepeler actually represent an entire buried 13,000 year old civilisation, which we completely do not understand and might have had writing and was highly sophisticated. Possibly as advanced as the Egyptians but 8000 years earlier. We have no idea how and why and who and what
And Necmul told me, as we stood in that barn, "only a few people have ever seen this. A handful of us archaeologists, one or two academics, now you - this is the first time it’s been revealed since the Ice Age”
The boy was a son of a local farmer who wandered in. And stood by the frieze because he was having fun and we decided he was was good for scale as we took photos
That is why this unique photo, by me, hangs on my wall, instead of any "art" by someone else
To add to the poignancy, the flat I live in now was bought entirely from the earnings from my original thriller based on my first visit to Gobekli Tepe. If these alien-Nephilim with six fingers hadn't build a mad now-buried civilisation, I wouldn't have this flat. Funny how things turn out. I wonder if that was a motivation for them. "In 13,000 years time some English dude will be able to buy a flat, because we have six fingers and we're building underground cities during the Ice Age"
I expect the two child benefit cap will go in November mostly funded by an increase in gambling taxes . This no 10 will hope will reduce the appeal of Your party .
An increase in gambling taxes is low hanging fruit and won’t be controversial for the vast majority of the public .
Good morning
Another unpopular measure according to the polls, and does nothing to address Reeves 'all my very own deep hole' in the public finances
Why doesn't she focus on all the popular ways to increase taxes and cut spending? It's exasperating.
Truth is that income tax has to rise, but she cannot do that because of her idiotic pre election promises
Also you do not raise taxes to address a huge hole in the public finances and use some of that tax raising to create another spending commitment
Do you think whoever is leading the tory party at the next GE will do into it promising to raise income tax because I don't.
Labour are a high tax high spend government and it is not in their DNA to cut spending
Conservatives are low tax low spending and I would expect a conservative government to reduce corporation tax, encourage wealth creation and abolish IHT on farmers. I would also expect a review of all net zero subsidies
Why on earth would you expect them to do that? Most of that is at odds with their time in office - particularly on renewables and farmers.
Any party that is focussed on a pensioner voting cohort like the Conservatives is going to high tax, high spend.
Cameron and Osborne certainly cut spending as a percentage of gdp and cut tax at all income levels, including a big inheritance tax cut.
Kemi has said she will take an axe to spending, especially welfare spending and net zero spending etc and at one stage even proposed means testing the triple lock
How much did the national debt increase during the last Conservative government?
Because of lockdown, Cameron and Osborne certainly cut it compared to what Brown left
You’d think someone interested in politics would understand the difference between the deficit and the debt but you’ve never been good with numbers.
You did not just say national debt, you said national debt increase, the national debt increase was lower under Cameron and Clegg and Osborne than Brown and Darling
Are you trying to argue that the national debt didn’t increase between 2010 and 2024? Because it did. Massively.
It increased at a lower rate than under Brown and Darling, certainly pre lockdown
And yet the national debt increased. Massively. Strong financial management by the Tories. Bravo.
Spending as a percentage of gdp was 47% when Brown left office in 2010, falling to 41% when Cameron left office in 2016
Maybe, but that isn’t the national debt. That’s a different statistic entirely.
It led to the decline in increase in the national debt
Maybe. But yet the national debt still increased over the 14 years you were in power. Massively.
What additional cuts would you have made to balance the budget and run a surplus?
I'd double council tax. That's the current deficit wiped out (nearly) in one go.
A freeze on hospital spending, abolish stamp duty, NICs/IT merger. Borrow as much for capital investment as the markets allow.
I honestly don't see the point in borrowing for capital investment when the cost of infrastructure is so high. We need to actually work to remove all of those barriers before we even think about that. Again, it just seems absolutely criminal to me that building a third runway at Heathrow will cost £49bn, even the short runway will come in at £21bn. This is just one example, there's suggestions that the next nuclear plant will be £70bn while Korea builds all of this similar infrastructure at a tenth of the cost. It's not as though their living standards are substantially different to ours.
It's not universally bad. We've had some good projects in Scotland. Queensferry Crossing came in under budget and on time. Small stuff, incremental stuff, tends to go ok.
I think you've fallen for the trap of thinking in terms of billions, not millions. The odd town bypass, new tram routes, a few million on cycle lanes, rail electrification, phone masts, a public health investment. That can add up to billions, but you've diversified across projects so that one disaster doesn't cause the whole investment to collapse.
Yes lots of small projects can add up to a decent gain, yet it's the big projects that will move the needle. The problem we have is the government treats it like something like HS2 as a 5x 55 point unrelated tickets instead of an epic with 150x 3 point tickets.
One of my best mates was previously on the project and he was sitting around being paid £650 per day to do nothing because there just wasn't anything for him to do but they'd contracted him from a set date to a set date but that work was so badly delayed that for the whole 3 months of the contract he got paid to be "on call" and then once work finally did commence they had to call him and his crew back at an even higher rate. That's about 25 electricians of varying skill level on day rates because they declined to do the fixed price deal he offered as it was "too restrictive" due to him setting a specific time to start and finish, requiring the site to be handed in a certain way and all materials etc... to be delivered to a tight schedule and completing the project over 4.5 months. In the end it took them 3 months of doing nothing, then another 6 months of actual work and the overall cost was 2.5x what he offered in the fixed price contract.
I have no doubt that this small example isn't the only one where inept public sector project managers and consultants who don't know what they're doing end up pissing public money into the wind because there's zero repercussions.
That’s nuts, and you know that exactly the same scenario would have played out for every single other trade on the project. Thousands of people people each paid hundreds of pounds a day to do nothing productive.
That - on a massive scale - is what I saw and experienced all day every day during my time in 'investment banking'. And not a government or public sector employee in sight.
The difference being that investment banking inefficiencies are a problem for the bank management and shareholders, as opposed to taxpayers being forcibly relieved of their money under penalty of imprisonment.
Except it is a drag on everyone else and in 08/09 led to an enormous direct call on public money.
That was Gordon Brown’s fault from the beginning to the end. Many banks should have been allowed to fail, with insured deposits and safe mortgages kept in some sort of a government bank that could have been floated later.
Oh for heaven's sake. Are you for real?
What is the problem with banks failing? If they are not allied to fail, they should not be allowed to make profit. Profit is the reward for risk.
The problem in 2008/09 wasn't banks failing but the public order impact of a run on the banks absent a depositor guarantee. Had Northern Rock failed and people lost money, we'd have seen queues and potential public disorder outside other banks and if you want a quick road to authoritarianism, make your middle classes paupers.
RBS was close to failure - imagine the ATMs not working and card payments being declined.
Every large organisation needs to have some kind of "Will" to make clear what should happen in the event of insolvency. I fear we've not learned that lesson from the GFC but banks now know the lender of last resort will bail them out whatever the cost.
The issue is that all banks deeply entwined with each other. And the insolvency of one, if it causes depositors not to be able to withdraw money or for companies to pay staff, can mean the insolvency of others.
All the 'living wills' in the world doesn't solve the problem of interconnectness.
I expect the two child benefit cap will go in November mostly funded by an increase in gambling taxes . This no 10 will hope will reduce the appeal of Your party .
An increase in gambling taxes is low hanging fruit and won’t be controversial for the vast majority of the public .
Good morning
Another unpopular measure according to the polls, and does nothing to address Reeves 'all my very own deep hole' in the public finances
Why doesn't she focus on all the popular ways to increase taxes and cut spending? It's exasperating.
Truth is that income tax has to rise, but she cannot do that because of her idiotic pre election promises
Also you do not raise taxes to address a huge hole in the public finances and use some of that tax raising to create another spending commitment
Do you think whoever is leading the tory party at the next GE will do into it promising to raise income tax because I don't.
Labour are a high tax high spend government and it is not in their DNA to cut spending
Conservatives are low tax low spending and I would expect a conservative government to reduce corporation tax, encourage wealth creation and abolish IHT on farmers. I would also expect a review of all net zero subsidies
Why on earth would you expect them to do that? Most of that is at odds with their time in office - particularly on renewables and farmers.
Any party that is focussed on a pensioner voting cohort like the Conservatives is going to high tax, high spend.
Cameron and Osborne certainly cut spending as a percentage of gdp and cut tax at all income levels, including a big inheritance tax cut.
Kemi has said she will take an axe to spending, especially welfare spending and net zero spending etc and at one stage even proposed means testing the triple lock
How much did the national debt increase during the last Conservative government?
Because of lockdown, Cameron and Osborne certainly cut it compared to what Brown left
You’d think someone interested in politics would understand the difference between the deficit and the debt but you’ve never been good with numbers.
You did not just say national debt, you said national debt increase, the national debt increase was lower under Cameron and Clegg and Osborne than Brown and Darling
Are you trying to argue that the national debt didn’t increase between 2010 and 2024? Because it did. Massively.
It increased at a lower rate than under Brown and Darling, certainly pre lockdown
And yet the national debt increased. Massively. Strong financial management by the Tories. Bravo.
Spending as a percentage of gdp was 47% when Brown left office in 2010, falling to 41% when Cameron left office in 2016
Maybe, but that isn’t the national debt. That’s a different statistic entirely.
It led to the decline in increase in the national debt
Maybe. But yet the national debt still increased over the 14 years you were in power. Massively.
What additional cuts would you have made to balance the budget and run a surplus?
I'd double council tax. That's the current deficit wiped out (nearly) in one go.
A freeze on hospital spending, abolish stamp duty, NICs/IT merger. Borrow as much for capital investment as the markets allow.
I honestly don't see the point in borrowing for capital investment when the cost of infrastructure is so high. We need to actually work to remove all of those barriers before we even think about that. Again, it just seems absolutely criminal to me that building a third runway at Heathrow will cost £49bn, even the short runway will come in at £21bn. This is just one example, there's suggestions that the next nuclear plant will be £70bn while Korea builds all of this similar infrastructure at a tenth of the cost. It's not as though their living standards are substantially different to ours.
It's not universally bad. We've had some good projects in Scotland. Queensferry Crossing came in under budget and on time. Small stuff, incremental stuff, tends to go ok.
I think you've fallen for the trap of thinking in terms of billions, not millions. The odd town bypass, new tram routes, a few million on cycle lanes, rail electrification, phone masts, a public health investment. That can add up to billions, but you've diversified across projects so that one disaster doesn't cause the whole investment to collapse.
Yes lots of small projects can add up to a decent gain, yet it's the big projects that will move the needle. The problem we have is the government treats it like something like HS2 as a 5x 55 point unrelated tickets instead of an epic with 150x 3 point tickets.
One of my best mates was previously on the project and he was sitting around being paid £650 per day to do nothing because there just wasn't anything for him to do but they'd contracted him from a set date to a set date but that work was so badly delayed that for the whole 3 months of the contract he got paid to be "on call" and then once work finally did commence they had to call him and his crew back at an even higher rate. That's about 25 electricians of varying skill level on day rates because they declined to do the fixed price deal he offered as it was "too restrictive" due to him setting a specific time to start and finish, requiring the site to be handed in a certain way and all materials etc... to be delivered to a tight schedule and completing the project over 4.5 months. In the end it took them 3 months of doing nothing, then another 6 months of actual work and the overall cost was 2.5x what he offered in the fixed price contract.
I have no doubt that this small example isn't the only one where inept public sector project managers and consultants who don't know what they're doing end up pissing public money into the wind because there's zero repercussions.
That’s nuts, and you know that exactly the same scenario would have played out for every single other trade on the project. Thousands of people people each paid hundreds of pounds a day to do nothing productive.
That - on a massive scale - is what I saw and experienced all day every day during my time in 'investment banking'. And not a government or public sector employee in sight.
The difference being that investment banking inefficiencies are a problem for the bank management and shareholders, as opposed to taxpayers being forcibly relieved of their money under penalty of imprisonment.
Except it is a drag on everyone else and in 08/09 led to an enormous direct call on public money.
That was Gordon Brown’s fault from the beginning to the end. Many banks should have been allowed to fail, with insured deposits and safe mortgages kept in some sort of a government bank that could have been floated later.
Oh for heaven's sake. Are you for real?
What is the problem with banks failing? If they are not allied to fail, they should not be allowed to make profit. Profit is the reward for risk.
Banks should be allowed to fail in that their shareholders lose all their money.
The issue is that when a traditional business goes into into insolvency, then essentially everything is frozen. So, if Joe's Widgets Ltd banks with Dodgy Bank PLC, and then Dodgy Bank PLC is put into insovency by the the Bank of England.
Well, now Joe's Widgets can't pay their employees. Which means in turn that Matt Smith who works for them can't pay his mortgage. Which means that suddenly Good Bank PLC now reports that they have new bad debt.
Remember, when you open an account with a bank, and put money in the account, then the bank owes you money. Just like it owes lots of other people money.
And the issue is cascading failures in the system.
11/10
Which is why the concept of Living Wills for socially important organisations is a thing.
I expect the two child benefit cap will go in November mostly funded by an increase in gambling taxes . This no 10 will hope will reduce the appeal of Your party .
An increase in gambling taxes is low hanging fruit and won’t be controversial for the vast majority of the public .
Good morning
Another unpopular measure according to the polls, and does nothing to address Reeves 'all my very own deep hole' in the public finances
Why doesn't she focus on all the popular ways to increase taxes and cut spending? It's exasperating.
Truth is that income tax has to rise, but she cannot do that because of her idiotic pre election promises
Also you do not raise taxes to address a huge hole in the public finances and use some of that tax raising to create another spending commitment
Do you think whoever is leading the tory party at the next GE will do into it promising to raise income tax because I don't.
Labour are a high tax high spend government and it is not in their DNA to cut spending
Conservatives are low tax low spending and I would expect a conservative government to reduce corporation tax, encourage wealth creation and abolish IHT on farmers. I would also expect a review of all net zero subsidies
Why on earth would you expect them to do that? Most of that is at odds with their time in office - particularly on renewables and farmers.
Any party that is focussed on a pensioner voting cohort like the Conservatives is going to high tax, high spend.
Cameron and Osborne certainly cut spending as a percentage of gdp and cut tax at all income levels, including a big inheritance tax cut.
Kemi has said she will take an axe to spending, especially welfare spending and net zero spending etc and at one stage even proposed means testing the triple lock
How much did the national debt increase during the last Conservative government?
Because of lockdown, Cameron and Osborne certainly cut it compared to what Brown left
You’d think someone interested in politics would understand the difference between the deficit and the debt but you’ve never been good with numbers.
You did not just say national debt, you said national debt increase, the national debt increase was lower under Cameron and Clegg and Osborne than Brown and Darling
Are you trying to argue that the national debt didn’t increase between 2010 and 2024? Because it did. Massively.
It increased at a lower rate than under Brown and Darling, certainly pre lockdown
And yet the national debt increased. Massively. Strong financial management by the Tories. Bravo.
Spending as a percentage of gdp was 47% when Brown left office in 2010, falling to 41% when Cameron left office in 2016
Maybe, but that isn’t the national debt. That’s a different statistic entirely.
It led to the decline in increase in the national debt
Maybe. But yet the national debt still increased over the 14 years you were in power. Massively.
What additional cuts would you have made to balance the budget and run a surplus?
I'd double council tax. That's the current deficit wiped out (nearly) in one go.
A freeze on hospital spending, abolish stamp duty, NICs/IT merger. Borrow as much for capital investment as the markets allow.
I honestly don't see the point in borrowing for capital investment when the cost of infrastructure is so high. We need to actually work to remove all of those barriers before we even think about that. Again, it just seems absolutely criminal to me that building a third runway at Heathrow will cost £49bn, even the short runway will come in at £21bn. This is just one example, there's suggestions that the next nuclear plant will be £70bn while Korea builds all of this similar infrastructure at a tenth of the cost. It's not as though their living standards are substantially different to ours.
It's not universally bad. We've had some good projects in Scotland. Queensferry Crossing came in under budget and on time. Small stuff, incremental stuff, tends to go ok.
I think you've fallen for the trap of thinking in terms of billions, not millions. The odd town bypass, new tram routes, a few million on cycle lanes, rail electrification, phone masts, a public health investment. That can add up to billions, but you've diversified across projects so that one disaster doesn't cause the whole investment to collapse.
Yes lots of small projects can add up to a decent gain, yet it's the big projects that will move the needle. The problem we have is the government treats it like something like HS2 as a 5x 55 point unrelated tickets instead of an epic with 150x 3 point tickets.
One of my best mates was previously on the project and he was sitting around being paid £650 per day to do nothing because there just wasn't anything for him to do but they'd contracted him from a set date to a set date but that work was so badly delayed that for the whole 3 months of the contract he got paid to be "on call" and then once work finally did commence they had to call him and his crew back at an even higher rate. That's about 25 electricians of varying skill level on day rates because they declined to do the fixed price deal he offered as it was "too restrictive" due to him setting a specific time to start and finish, requiring the site to be handed in a certain way and all materials etc... to be delivered to a tight schedule and completing the project over 4.5 months. In the end it took them 3 months of doing nothing, then another 6 months of actual work and the overall cost was 2.5x what he offered in the fixed price contract.
I have no doubt that this small example isn't the only one where inept public sector project managers and consultants who don't know what they're doing end up pissing public money into the wind because there's zero repercussions.
That’s nuts, and you know that exactly the same scenario would have played out for every single other trade on the project. Thousands of people people each paid hundreds of pounds a day to do nothing productive.
That - on a massive scale - is what I saw and experienced all day every day during my time in 'investment banking'. And not a government or public sector employee in sight.
The difference being that investment banking inefficiencies are a problem for the bank management and shareholders, as opposed to taxpayers being forcibly relieved of their money under penalty of imprisonment.
Except it is a drag on everyone else and in 08/09 led to an enormous direct call on public money.
That was Gordon Brown’s fault from the beginning to the end. Many banks should have been allowed to fail, with insured deposits and safe mortgages kept in some sort of a government bank that could have been floated later.
Oh for heaven's sake. Are you for real?
What is the problem with banks failing? If they are not allied to fail, they should not be allowed to make profit. Profit is the reward for risk.
The problem in 2008/09 wasn't banks failing but the public order impact of a run on the banks absent a depositor guarantee. Had Northern Rock failed and people lost money, we'd have seen queues and potential public disorder outside other banks and if you want a quick road to authoritarianism, make your middle classes paupers.
RBS was close to failure - imagine the ATMs not working and card payments being declined.
Every large organisation needs to have some kind of "Will" to make clear what should happen in the event of insolvency. I fear we've not learned that lesson from the GFC but banks now know the lender of last resort will bail them out whatever the cost.
The issue is that all banks deeply entwined with each other. And the insolvency of one, if it causes depositors not to be able to withdraw money or for companies to pay staff, can mean the insolvency of others.
All the 'living wills' in the world doesn't solve the problem of interconnectness.
Again, what's to stop the BoE guaranteeing liquidity for customer deposits and then winding down the failed banks? We should not have nationalised RBS, Northern Rock or HBOS. They should all have been allowed to fail, customer deposits guaranteed and the BoE could have stepped in with emergency liquidity to enable that. The rest are able to swerve the bankrupt ones and go to their shareholders to raise capital.
As you know I have cascading problems with my teeth. I'm going thru various people to price up implants and the latest one is £5.5k (bone graft + post + crown). For one tooth.
I hate Britain.
Have you considered flying to Singapore for treatment? Even with flights it will likely be cheaper and high quality.
I am going thru various countries. I tried Spain and Belgium on grounds of train/ferry accessibility, and now I'm looking at Europe. So far the cheapest is Prague, at approx £1K
Look at Dubai as well. Summer is off-season there, and the clinics are up to UK standards.
I expect the two child benefit cap will go in November mostly funded by an increase in gambling taxes . This no 10 will hope will reduce the appeal of Your party .
An increase in gambling taxes is low hanging fruit and won’t be controversial for the vast majority of the public .
Good morning
Another unpopular measure according to the polls, and does nothing to address Reeves 'all my very own deep hole' in the public finances
Why doesn't she focus on all the popular ways to increase taxes and cut spending? It's exasperating.
Truth is that income tax has to rise, but she cannot do that because of her idiotic pre election promises
Also you do not raise taxes to address a huge hole in the public finances and use some of that tax raising to create another spending commitment
Do you think whoever is leading the tory party at the next GE will do into it promising to raise income tax because I don't.
Labour are a high tax high spend government and it is not in their DNA to cut spending
Conservatives are low tax low spending and I would expect a conservative government to reduce corporation tax, encourage wealth creation and abolish IHT on farmers. I would also expect a review of all net zero subsidies
Why on earth would you expect them to do that? Most of that is at odds with their time in office - particularly on renewables and farmers.
Any party that is focussed on a pensioner voting cohort like the Conservatives is going to high tax, high spend.
Cameron and Osborne certainly cut spending as a percentage of gdp and cut tax at all income levels, including a big inheritance tax cut.
Kemi has said she will take an axe to spending, especially welfare spending and net zero spending etc and at one stage even proposed means testing the triple lock
How much did the national debt increase during the last Conservative government?
Because of lockdown, Cameron and Osborne certainly cut it compared to what Brown left
You’d think someone interested in politics would understand the difference between the deficit and the debt but you’ve never been good with numbers.
You did not just say national debt, you said national debt increase, the national debt increase was lower under Cameron and Clegg and Osborne than Brown and Darling
Are you trying to argue that the national debt didn’t increase between 2010 and 2024? Because it did. Massively.
It increased at a lower rate than under Brown and Darling, certainly pre lockdown
And yet the national debt increased. Massively. Strong financial management by the Tories. Bravo.
Spending as a percentage of gdp was 47% when Brown left office in 2010, falling to 41% when Cameron left office in 2016
Maybe, but that isn’t the national debt. That’s a different statistic entirely.
It led to the decline in increase in the national debt
Maybe. But yet the national debt still increased over the 14 years you were in power. Massively.
What additional cuts would you have made to balance the budget and run a surplus?
I'd double council tax. That's the current deficit wiped out (nearly) in one go.
A freeze on hospital spending, abolish stamp duty, NICs/IT merger. Borrow as much for capital investment as the markets allow.
I honestly don't see the point in borrowing for capital investment when the cost of infrastructure is so high. We need to actually work to remove all of those barriers before we even think about that. Again, it just seems absolutely criminal to me that building a third runway at Heathrow will cost £49bn, even the short runway will come in at £21bn. This is just one example, there's suggestions that the next nuclear plant will be £70bn while Korea builds all of this similar infrastructure at a tenth of the cost. It's not as though their living standards are substantially different to ours.
It's not universally bad. We've had some good projects in Scotland. Queensferry Crossing came in under budget and on time. Small stuff, incremental stuff, tends to go ok.
I think you've fallen for the trap of thinking in terms of billions, not millions. The odd town bypass, new tram routes, a few million on cycle lanes, rail electrification, phone masts, a public health investment. That can add up to billions, but you've diversified across projects so that one disaster doesn't cause the whole investment to collapse.
Even with small projects, the process state still rears it’s ugly head.
Not very far from where I live the council decided to use some government money to build a cycle/pedestrian bridge over the river between two sites that are due for extensive redevelopment in the future. Cue outrage from local nimbies over the trauma caused by the need to cut down twelve trees. Twelve self-seeded trees that would grow back afterwards. So far we’ve had one judicial review, another in the works & the entire project has roughly doubled in cost due to all the delays.
The Aarhus Convention is a plague upon the nation.
Where I live, the council planted some fast growing trees. About 15 years back.
These tore up the pavement, when they got big. Because the pavements are narrow, in places, this makes it impossible to use prams, wheelchairs or walking frames. Literally you can’t get through the gap between the tree and people’s garden walls, except by scrambling over tree roots erupting from the pavement.
The sane thing to do is chop the trees down and replace. They have all the cultural value of a pine tree in one of those Swedish forest grown for wood pulp.
But no.
So the old people and mothers walk in the actual road, with the cars.
Indeed, the notion of boulevard style living in the suburbs, predicated on having trees in streets, is deeply flawed.
The roots of a tree grow twice as far as the height of the tree so can quickly undermine the nearby pavements and eventually the houses themselves. In addition, the canopy can obstruct not only buses but as I've seen in streets near me, it can actually reduce light going into people's houses.
The trees need to be properly looked after and routinely cut back but the roots remain a big problem until and unless the tree is removed. A number have in fact been taken down in Newham because of the subsidence issues they were causing.
I'm not sure that height is a good guide.
Arborists tend to use 2-3x the spread of the crown, or 12x the diameter of the trunk at 1.5m height in each direction.
Marc Andreessen complains to Downing Street about Online Safety Act and UK tech minister
In a sign that the government was caught off guard by the extent to which these tools would be used, ministers last week requested data from the internet regulator Ofcom about how and when VPNs were being downloaded, according to two people briefed on the move.
Kyle has said publicly that he is not considering any ban on VPNs, but officials say ministers are keen to understand how the tools are being used, particularly by children.
It's not hard to see where this is going. What happens when Ofcom come back and say, yes, VPNs are being extensively used by under-18s and the OSA is being bypassed to the extent it's a giant waste of time?
I don't believe Kyle's statements about VPNs. He's one of those morons who believe any problem can be fixed by making a new law. So the government will ban VPNs without a licence.
When people say this stuff about what's going to happen and it doesn't (eg the government were going to keep the lockdown beyond the pandemic because they were luvin it) I'd like to see some accountability. Some fessing up that "I was wrong and will learn from it "
Like I always do on the odd occasion I get things wrong.
If the government doesn't implement some kind of restriction on VPNs before they get kicked out I will happily and publicly acknowledge I was wrong. But the alternative scenario is to admit the OSA is a failure, repeal it and look like a bunch of ridiculous fools. Can't see this government being in any way willing to do that.
The only way I see a VPN ban not happening is if some organisation - Wikipedia possibly - refuses to comply with the OSA and then takes uk.gov to the ECHR and wins. But that will take more years than this administration has left.
{firing-up-the-palantir-gesture}
1) they will ban VPNs 2) companies say they will have to stop working in the U.K. 3) the government will come up with VPN registration - even trying to demand control from the VPN provider if what the customer is doing 4) after multiple rounds of unworkable legislation, it turns out that at least one of the licensed VPNs is run by terrorists. Another is run by organised crime. At least one is owned by Donald Trump.
{staggers back from palantir}
And - of course - teenagers work out various vpn-over-https type systems, so it all becomes irrelevent. (Or people simply remote desktop to computers outside the UK and watch their porn from there.)
Why is it better to put this on a wall rather than some random art by someone else (*waves at @TOPPING*)?
What makes this special? Why have I put it on the wall in my revamping new living room?
Answers on an antique parchment
Are you the one on the left or the one on the right?
This is a tricky one. Here's the long answer (@Sunil_Prasannan was on the right road)
So I have a long association with Gobekli Tepe. I first went, on my own shilling, on the off chance, as a youngish hungry freelancer in 2006 to write one of the first major articles on the whole place, back when it was basically unknown. The article went viral and halfway made me as a writer
I went out again in 2023 and - because by then I was well known to them - the main archaeologists showed me all the incredible new sites. Especially Karahan Tepe. Etc. These collective sites are now known as the Tas Tepeler
But then on day 3 as we were driving around Necmul the head Turkish boffin of the whole Tas Tepeler said “sod it Leon I'm going to show you something new, we only found this three months ago”. So we abruply diverted to this tiny village in the desert which had obvious Tepe like pillars propping up farm walls, it was like driving to Stonehenge and en route finding a Wiltshire village using megaliths as door frames (only much much older). And then Necmul led me past some chickens to a small stone door and at the doorway he said “the villagers found this when they were emptying a barn a few weeks ago, and they called us in”
Inside that barn was that rock frieze, perhaps 12,000 years old. With the classic Gobekli animals in profile - the horned bull - a man dying maybe - a leopard - and then the fascinating figure of a small strange man holding his penis, with the iconic chevrons on his chest - all motifs used across the Tas Tepeler. In other words, what I was seeing was pretty much final, conclusive proof that Gobekli Tepe and the tas Tepeler actually represent an entire buried 13,000 year old civilisation, which we completely do not understand and might have had writing and was highly sophisticated. Possibly as advanced as the Egyptians but 8000 years earlier. We have no idea how and why and who and what
And Necmul told me, as we stood in that barn, "only a few people have ever seen this. A handful of us archaeologists, one or two academics, now you - this is the first time it’s been revealed since the Ice Age”
The boy was a son of a local farmer who wandered in. And stood by the frieze because he was having fun and we decided he was was good for scale as we took photos
That is why this unique photo, by me, hangs on my wall, instead of any "art" by someone else
To add to the poignancy, the flat I live in now was bought entirely from the earnings from my original thriller based on my first visit to Gobekli Tepe. If these alien-Nephilim with six fingers hadn't build a mad now-buried civilisation, I wouldn't have this flat. Funny how things turn out. I wonder if that was a motivation for them. "In 13,000 years time some English dude will be able to buy a flat, because we have six fingers and we're building underground cities during the Ice Age"
You should really get someone to pitch you to Joe Rogan as a podcast interview. He’s totally obsessed by stuff like Gobekli Tepe.
I expect the two child benefit cap will go in November mostly funded by an increase in gambling taxes . This no 10 will hope will reduce the appeal of Your party .
An increase in gambling taxes is low hanging fruit and won’t be controversial for the vast majority of the public .
Good morning
Another unpopular measure according to the polls, and does nothing to address Reeves 'all my very own deep hole' in the public finances
Why doesn't she focus on all the popular ways to increase taxes and cut spending? It's exasperating.
Truth is that income tax has to rise, but she cannot do that because of her idiotic pre election promises
Also you do not raise taxes to address a huge hole in the public finances and use some of that tax raising to create another spending commitment
Do you think whoever is leading the tory party at the next GE will do into it promising to raise income tax because I don't.
Labour are a high tax high spend government and it is not in their DNA to cut spending
Conservatives are low tax low spending and I would expect a conservative government to reduce corporation tax, encourage wealth creation and abolish IHT on farmers. I would also expect a review of all net zero subsidies
Why on earth would you expect them to do that? Most of that is at odds with their time in office - particularly on renewables and farmers.
Any party that is focussed on a pensioner voting cohort like the Conservatives is going to high tax, high spend.
Cameron and Osborne certainly cut spending as a percentage of gdp and cut tax at all income levels, including a big inheritance tax cut.
Kemi has said she will take an axe to spending, especially welfare spending and net zero spending etc and at one stage even proposed means testing the triple lock
How much did the national debt increase during the last Conservative government?
Because of lockdown, Cameron and Osborne certainly cut it compared to what Brown left
You’d think someone interested in politics would understand the difference between the deficit and the debt but you’ve never been good with numbers.
You did not just say national debt, you said national debt increase, the national debt increase was lower under Cameron and Clegg and Osborne than Brown and Darling
Are you trying to argue that the national debt didn’t increase between 2010 and 2024? Because it did. Massively.
It increased at a lower rate than under Brown and Darling, certainly pre lockdown
And yet the national debt increased. Massively. Strong financial management by the Tories. Bravo.
Spending as a percentage of gdp was 47% when Brown left office in 2010, falling to 41% when Cameron left office in 2016
Maybe, but that isn’t the national debt. That’s a different statistic entirely.
It led to the decline in increase in the national debt
Maybe. But yet the national debt still increased over the 14 years you were in power. Massively.
What additional cuts would you have made to balance the budget and run a surplus?
I'd double council tax. That's the current deficit wiped out (nearly) in one go.
A freeze on hospital spending, abolish stamp duty, NICs/IT merger. Borrow as much for capital investment as the markets allow.
I honestly don't see the point in borrowing for capital investment when the cost of infrastructure is so high. We need to actually work to remove all of those barriers before we even think about that. Again, it just seems absolutely criminal to me that building a third runway at Heathrow will cost £49bn, even the short runway will come in at £21bn. This is just one example, there's suggestions that the next nuclear plant will be £70bn while Korea builds all of this similar infrastructure at a tenth of the cost. It's not as though their living standards are substantially different to ours.
It's not universally bad. We've had some good projects in Scotland. Queensferry Crossing came in under budget and on time. Small stuff, incremental stuff, tends to go ok.
I think you've fallen for the trap of thinking in terms of billions, not millions. The odd town bypass, new tram routes, a few million on cycle lanes, rail electrification, phone masts, a public health investment. That can add up to billions, but you've diversified across projects so that one disaster doesn't cause the whole investment to collapse.
Even with small projects, the process state still rears it’s ugly head.
Not very far from where I live the council decided to use some government money to build a cycle/pedestrian bridge over the river between two sites that are due for extensive redevelopment in the future. Cue outrage from local nimbies over the trauma caused by the need to cut down twelve trees. Twelve self-seeded trees that would grow back afterwards. So far we’ve had one judicial review, another in the works & the entire project has roughly doubled in cost due to all the delays.
The Aarhus Convention is a plague upon the nation.
Where I live, the council planted some fast growing trees. About 15 years back.
These tore up the pavement, when they got big. Because the pavements are narrow, in places, this makes it impossible to use prams, wheelchairs or walking frames. Literally you can’t get through the gap between the tree and people’s garden walls, except by scrambling over tree roots erupting from the pavement.
The sane thing to do is chop the trees down and replace. They have all the cultural value of a pine tree in one of those Swedish forest grown for wood pulp.
But no.
So the old people and mothers walk in the actual road, with the cars.
Indeed, the notion of boulevard style living in the suburbs, predicated on having trees in streets, is deeply flawed.
The roots of a tree grow twice as far as the height of the tree so can quickly undermine the nearby pavements and eventually the houses themselves. In addition, the canopy can obstruct not only buses but as I've seen in streets near me, it can actually reduce light going into people's houses.
The trees need to be properly looked after and routinely cut back but the roots remain a big problem until and unless the tree is removed. A number have in fact been taken down in Newham because of the subsidence issues they were causing.
There are trees that grow slowly, don’t reach vast size and don’t drop leaves/pollen that is nuisance.
But to use those requires thinking and long term planning.
There are also medium size trees , and smaller versions of larger ones.
I expect the two child benefit cap will go in November mostly funded by an increase in gambling taxes . This no 10 will hope will reduce the appeal of Your party .
An increase in gambling taxes is low hanging fruit and won’t be controversial for the vast majority of the public .
Good morning
Another unpopular measure according to the polls, and does nothing to address Reeves 'all my very own deep hole' in the public finances
Why doesn't she focus on all the popular ways to increase taxes and cut spending? It's exasperating.
Truth is that income tax has to rise, but she cannot do that because of her idiotic pre election promises
Also you do not raise taxes to address a huge hole in the public finances and use some of that tax raising to create another spending commitment
Do you think whoever is leading the tory party at the next GE will do into it promising to raise income tax because I don't.
Labour are a high tax high spend government and it is not in their DNA to cut spending
Conservatives are low tax low spending and I would expect a conservative government to reduce corporation tax, encourage wealth creation and abolish IHT on farmers. I would also expect a review of all net zero subsidies
Why on earth would you expect them to do that? Most of that is at odds with their time in office - particularly on renewables and farmers.
Any party that is focussed on a pensioner voting cohort like the Conservatives is going to high tax, high spend.
Cameron and Osborne certainly cut spending as a percentage of gdp and cut tax at all income levels, including a big inheritance tax cut.
Kemi has said she will take an axe to spending, especially welfare spending and net zero spending etc and at one stage even proposed means testing the triple lock
How much did the national debt increase during the last Conservative government?
Because of lockdown, Cameron and Osborne certainly cut it compared to what Brown left
You’d think someone interested in politics would understand the difference between the deficit and the debt but you’ve never been good with numbers.
You did not just say national debt, you said national debt increase, the national debt increase was lower under Cameron and Clegg and Osborne than Brown and Darling
Are you trying to argue that the national debt didn’t increase between 2010 and 2024? Because it did. Massively.
It increased at a lower rate than under Brown and Darling, certainly pre lockdown
And yet the national debt increased. Massively. Strong financial management by the Tories. Bravo.
Spending as a percentage of gdp was 47% when Brown left office in 2010, falling to 41% when Cameron left office in 2016
Maybe, but that isn’t the national debt. That’s a different statistic entirely.
It led to the decline in increase in the national debt
Maybe. But yet the national debt still increased over the 14 years you were in power. Massively.
What additional cuts would you have made to balance the budget and run a surplus?
I'd double council tax. That's the current deficit wiped out (nearly) in one go.
A freeze on hospital spending, abolish stamp duty, NICs/IT merger. Borrow as much for capital investment as the markets allow.
I honestly don't see the point in borrowing for capital investment when the cost of infrastructure is so high. We need to actually work to remove all of those barriers before we even think about that. Again, it just seems absolutely criminal to me that building a third runway at Heathrow will cost £49bn, even the short runway will come in at £21bn. This is just one example, there's suggestions that the next nuclear plant will be £70bn while Korea builds all of this similar infrastructure at a tenth of the cost. It's not as though their living standards are substantially different to ours.
It's not universally bad. We've had some good projects in Scotland. Queensferry Crossing came in under budget and on time. Small stuff, incremental stuff, tends to go ok.
I think you've fallen for the trap of thinking in terms of billions, not millions. The odd town bypass, new tram routes, a few million on cycle lanes, rail electrification, phone masts, a public health investment. That can add up to billions, but you've diversified across projects so that one disaster doesn't cause the whole investment to collapse.
Yes lots of small projects can add up to a decent gain, yet it's the big projects that will move the needle. The problem we have is the government treats it like something like HS2 as a 5x 55 point unrelated tickets instead of an epic with 150x 3 point tickets.
One of my best mates was previously on the project and he was sitting around being paid £650 per day to do nothing because there just wasn't anything for him to do but they'd contracted him from a set date to a set date but that work was so badly delayed that for the whole 3 months of the contract he got paid to be "on call" and then once work finally did commence they had to call him and his crew back at an even higher rate. That's about 25 electricians of varying skill level on day rates because they declined to do the fixed price deal he offered as it was "too restrictive" due to him setting a specific time to start and finish, requiring the site to be handed in a certain way and all materials etc... to be delivered to a tight schedule and completing the project over 4.5 months. In the end it took them 3 months of doing nothing, then another 6 months of actual work and the overall cost was 2.5x what he offered in the fixed price contract.
I have no doubt that this small example isn't the only one where inept public sector project managers and consultants who don't know what they're doing end up pissing public money into the wind because there's zero repercussions.
That’s nuts, and you know that exactly the same scenario would have played out for every single other trade on the project. Thousands of people people each paid hundreds of pounds a day to do nothing productive.
That - on a massive scale - is what I saw and experienced all day every day during my time in 'investment banking'. And not a government or public sector employee in sight.
The difference being that investment banking inefficiencies are a problem for the bank management and shareholders, as opposed to taxpayers being forcibly relieved of their money under penalty of imprisonment.
Except it is a drag on everyone else and in 08/09 led to an enormous direct call on public money.
That was Gordon Brown’s fault from the beginning to the end. Many banks should have been allowed to fail, with insured deposits and safe mortgages kept in some sort of a government bank that could have been floated later.
Oh for heaven's sake. Are you for real?
What is the problem with banks failing? If they are not allied to fail, they should not be allowed to make profit. Profit is the reward for risk.
The problem in 2008/09 wasn't banks failing but the public order impact of a run on the banks absent a depositor guarantee. Had Northern Rock failed and people lost money, we'd have seen queues and potential public disorder outside other banks and if you want a quick road to authoritarianism, make your middle classes paupers.
RBS was close to failure - imagine the ATMs not working and card payments being declined.
Every large organisation needs to have some kind of "Will" to make clear what should happen in the event of insolvency. I fear we've not learned that lesson from the GFC but banks now know the lender of last resort will bail them out whatever the cost.
The issue is that all banks deeply entwined with each other. And the insolvency of one, if it causes depositors not to be able to withdraw money or for companies to pay staff, can mean the insolvency of others.
All the 'living wills' in the world doesn't solve the problem of interconnectness.
In 2008/09, that interdependency meant credit was effectively frozen as banks stopped lending to each other and that only worsened the situation.
By 2010, the only organisations investing in investment property were pension funds and local councils and those among the latter who got in early got some really good rental returns for a while.
I'm no tech expert but I'd have thought there are possibilities between do nothing (about VPNs accessing 'nasty' sites) and a ban (the chance of which imo is close to zero).
There's no technical solution to this. VPNs are designed to resist external control. The government could require VPN providers to do age checks, but most of them are not based in the UK and would just ignore that.
There are ways for web sites to determine your location even when using a VPN (browser fingerprinting is the main one, which is already used to track people for advertising) but they're all fairly easy to bypass. If people can use VPNs the OSA loses the bulk of its effectiveness. The only way to make the OSA anything but a huge waste of time is to restrict VPN use. That's it.
The real answer is to scrap the OSA and implement a technical solution, not a legal one. The Internet Engineering Task Force already has a standard designed for this type of scenario, called Privacy Pass.
Essentially you would use a government web site or app to prove you're over 18 and it gives you a bunch of cryptographic tokens. There's no database of tokens, they get generated on the fly.
These tokens are installed into your web browser and whenever you access a 'mature' site a token gets sent to prove you have the right to access the site, and then the browser deletes it. There's no personal information in the token, so sites don't know who you are. It's all transparent to the user, if you have the tokens mature sites will load just like any other with no extra steps.
The system isn't perfect, but it does not require giving personal information to possibly dodgy or hackable companies and it would make complying with the law easy for even small sites. I don't buy the 'protect the children' justification for the OSA to a large degree because systems like Privacy Pass exist - the only reason for ignoring them in favour of a much less effective ID based system like the OSA specifies is because you specifically want the ability to know who is accessing 'unsuitable' information.
Just slightly O/T, but I've just had that there @Pro_Rata (and family) in my bookshop. Very nice to see them!
Very happy to pop in to The Crow Road and @jamesdoyle fine bookshop on our way home from Sussex this morning. We weren't sure what our plans would end up being, but having noted the bookshop earlier in the week, the girls were up for that on the way back, whilst my eldest son elected to look after the car and listen to music.
Feedback: my elder daughter appreciated the lack of tiktok fiction and great idea to have a lovely chilled bookshop dog that allowed us to assess the scale!
The big old haul northwards is done and the cases are in now after a very enjoyable holiday, a new stretch of coast for us and all of the attractions we targetted lived up to expectation - my wife has had Fishbourne Palace in particular on her bucket list for many a year.
I'd worried, we'd booked late and our house was on the edge of Bognor (apparently Britain's most disappointing seaside town per Which). I could easily see why this might be, the central shopping area was particularly shonky, and each adjoining village with a beach, including where we stayed, makes it difficult to visit if you are not actually staying there in a manner that is perhaps slightly unbritish. They are very much local beaches for local people. But we enjoyed the beach we did have access to, and a half plan to bolt to West Wittering for a day trip turned out not to be necessary.
Why is it better to put this on a wall rather than some random art by someone else (*waves at @TOPPING*)?
What makes this special? Why have I put it on the wall in my revamping new living room?
Answers on an antique parchment
Are you the one on the left or the one on the right?
This is a tricky one. Here's the long answer (@Sunil_Prasannan was on the right road)
So I have a long association with Gobekli Tepe. I first went, on my own shilling, on the off chance, as a youngish hungry freelancer in 2006 to write one of the first major articles on the whole place, back when it was basically unknown. The article went viral and halfway made me as a writer
I went out again in 2023 and - because by then I was well known to them - the main archaeologists showed me all the incredible new sites. Especially Karahan Tepe. Etc. These collective sites are now known as the Tas Tepeler
But then on day 3 as we were driving around Necmul the head Turkish boffin of the whole Tas Tepeler said “sod it Leon I'm going to show you something new, we only found this three months ago”. So we abruply diverted to this tiny village in the desert which had obvious Tepe like pillars propping up farm walls, it was like driving to Stonehenge and en route finding a Wiltshire village using megaliths as door frames (only much much older). And then Necmul led me past some chickens to a small stone door and at the doorway he said “the villagers found this when they were emptying a barn a few weeks ago, and they called us in”
Inside that barn was that rock frieze, perhaps 12,000 years old. With the classic Gobekli animals in profile - the horned bull - a man dying maybe - a leopard - and then the fascinating figure of a small strange man holding his penis, with the iconic chevrons on his chest - all motifs used across the Tas Tepeler. In other words, what I was seeing was pretty much final, conclusive proof that Gobekli Tepe and the tas Tepeler actually represent an entire buried 13,000 year old civilisation, which we completely do not understand and might have had writing and was highly sophisticated. Possibly as advanced as the Egyptians but 8000 years earlier. We have no idea how and why and who and what
And Necmul told me, as we stood in that barn, "only a few people have ever seen this. A handful of us archaeologists, one or two academics, now you - this is the first time it’s been revealed since the Ice Age”
The boy was a son of a local farmer who wandered in. And stood by the frieze because he was having fun and we decided he was was good for scale as we took photos
That is why this unique photo, by me, hangs on my wall, instead of any "art" by someone else
To add to the poignancy, the flat I live in now was bought entirely from the earnings from my original thriller based on my first visit to Gobekli Tepe. If these alien-Nephilim with six fingers hadn't build a mad now-buried civilisation, I wouldn't have this flat. Funny how things turn out. I wonder if that was a motivation for them. "In 13,000 years time some English dude will be able to buy a flat, because we have six fingers and we're building underground cities during the Ice Age"
You should really get someone to pitch you to Joe Rogan as a podcast interview. He’s totally obsessed by stuff like Gobekli Tepe.
He also said that Candace Owens allegations about Ms Macron actually being a man* were obviously true, because otherwise she (Owens) would have been sued. I think he said her six part expose was one of the most impressive things he'd ever watched.
* And that's only the tip of the bonkersness of the Owens claims.
Why is it better to put this on a wall rather than some random art by someone else (*waves at @TOPPING*)?
What makes this special? Why have I put it on the wall in my revamping new living room?
Answers on an antique parchment
Are you the one on the left or the one on the right?
This is a tricky one. Here's the long answer (@Sunil_Prasannan was on the right road)
So I have a long association with Gobekli Tepe. I first went, on my own shilling, on the off chance, as a youngish hungry freelancer in 2006 to write one of the first major articles on the whole place, back when it was basically unknown. The article went viral and halfway made me as a writer
I went out again in 2023 and - because by then I was well known to them - the main archaeologists showed me all the incredible new sites. Especially Karahan Tepe. Etc. These collective sites are now known as the Tas Tepeler
But then on day 3 as we were driving around Necmul the head Turkish boffin of the whole Tas Tepeler said “sod it Leon I'm going to show you something new, we only found this three months ago”. So we abruply diverted to this tiny village in the desert which had obvious Tepe like pillars propping up farm walls, it was like driving to Stonehenge and en route finding a Wiltshire village using megaliths as door frames (only much much older). And then Necmul led me past some chickens to a small stone door and at the doorway he said “the villagers found this when they were emptying a barn a few weeks ago, and they called us in”
Inside that barn was that rock frieze, perhaps 12,000 years old. With the classic Gobekli animals in profile - the horned bull - a man dying maybe - a leopard - and then the fascinating figure of a small strange man holding his penis, with the iconic chevrons on his chest - all motifs used across the Tas Tepeler. In other words, what I was seeing was pretty much final, conclusive proof that Gobekli Tepe and the tas Tepeler actually represent an entire buried 13,000 year old civilisation, which we completely do not understand and might have had writing and was highly sophisticated. Possibly as advanced as the Egyptians but 8000 years earlier. We have no idea how and why and who and what
And Necmul told me, as we stood in that barn, "only a few people have ever seen this. A handful of us archaeologists, one or two academics, now you - this is the first time it’s been revealed since the Ice Age”
The boy was a son of a local farmer who wandered in. And stood by the frieze because he was having fun and we decided he was was good for scale as we took photos
That is why this unique photo, by me, hangs on my wall, instead of any "art" by someone else
To add to the poignancy, the flat I live in now was bought entirely from the earnings from my original thriller based on my first visit to Gobekli Tepe. If these alien-Nephilim with six fingers hadn't build a mad now-buried civilisation, I wouldn't have this flat. Funny how things turn out. I wonder if that was a motivation for them. "In 13,000 years time some English dude will be able to buy a flat, because we have six fingers and we're building underground cities during the Ice Age"
You should really get someone to pitch you to Joe Rogan as a podcast interview. He’s totally obsessed by stuff like Gobekli Tepe.
He also said that Candace Owens allegations about Ms Macron actually being a man* were obviously true, because otherwise she (Owens) would have been sued. I think he said her six part expose was one of the most impressive things he'd ever watched.
* And that's only the tip of the bonkersness of the Owens claims.
Pete Hegseth shares a clip saying women shouldn’t have the right to vote, the 19th Amendment should be “repealed,” and women should “submit” to their husbands: “All of Christ for All of Life” https://x.com/peoplefor/status/1953838030495666259
Why is it better to put this on a wall rather than some random art by someone else (*waves at @TOPPING*)?
What makes this special? Why have I put it on the wall in my revamping new living room?
Answers on an antique parchment
Are you the one on the left or the one on the right?
This is a tricky one. Here's the long answer (@Sunil_Prasannan was on the right road)
So I have a long association with Gobekli Tepe. I first went, on my own shilling, on the off chance, as a youngish hungry freelancer in 2006 to write one of the first major articles on the whole place, back when it was basically unknown. The article went viral and halfway made me as a writer
I went out again in 2023 and - because by then I was well known to them - the main archaeologists showed me all the incredible new sites. Especially Karahan Tepe. Etc. These collective sites are now known as the Tas Tepeler
But then on day 3 as we were driving around Necmul the head Turkish boffin of the whole Tas Tepeler said “sod it Leon I'm going to show you something new, we only found this three months ago”. So we abruply diverted to this tiny village in the desert which had obvious Tepe like pillars propping up farm walls, it was like driving to Stonehenge and en route finding a Wiltshire village using megaliths as door frames (only much much older). And then Necmul led me past some chickens to a small stone door and at the doorway he said “the villagers found this when they were emptying a barn a few weeks ago, and they called us in”
Inside that barn was that rock frieze, perhaps 12,000 years old. With the classic Gobekli animals in profile - the horned bull - a man dying maybe - a leopard - and then the fascinating figure of a small strange man holding his penis, with the iconic chevrons on his chest - all motifs used across the Tas Tepeler. In other words, what I was seeing was pretty much final, conclusive proof that Gobekli Tepe and the tas Tepeler actually represent an entire buried 13,000 year old civilisation, which we completely do not understand and might have had writing and was highly sophisticated. Possibly as advanced as the Egyptians but 8000 years earlier. We have no idea how and why and who and what
And Necmul told me, as we stood in that barn, "only a few people have ever seen this. A handful of us archaeologists, one or two academics, now you - this is the first time it’s been revealed since the Ice Age”
The boy was a son of a local farmer who wandered in. And stood by the frieze because he was having fun and we decided he was was good for scale as we took photos
That is why this unique photo, by me, hangs on my wall, instead of any "art" by someone else
To add to the poignancy, the flat I live in now was bought entirely from the earnings from my original thriller based on my first visit to Gobekli Tepe. If these alien-Nephilim with six fingers hadn't build a mad now-buried civilisation, I wouldn't have this flat. Funny how things turn out. I wonder if that was a motivation for them. "In 13,000 years time some English dude will be able to buy a flat, because we have six fingers and we're building underground cities during the Ice Age"
You should really get someone to pitch you to Joe Rogan as a podcast interview. He’s totally obsessed by stuff like Gobekli Tepe.
He also said that Candace Owens allegations about Ms Macron actually being a man* were obviously true, because otherwise she (Owens) would have been sued. I think he said her six part expose was one of the most impressive things he'd ever watched.
* And that's only the tip of the bonkersness of the Owens claims.
Isn’t Candace Owens now getting sued by Macron?
Yes.
My point is that Rogan is a really bright and interesting guy, who ends up being a net negative for the world, because he's happy to spread the kind of shit that is clearly completely bat shit crazy.
I'm no tech expert but I'd have thought there are possibilities between do nothing (about VPNs accessing 'nasty' sites) and a ban (the chance of which imo is close to zero).
There's no technical solution to this. VPNs are designed to resist external control. The government could require VPN providers to do age checks, but most of them are not based in the UK and would just ignore that.
There are ways for web sites to determine your location even when using a VPN (browser fingerprinting is the main one, which is already used to track people for advertising) but they're all fairly easy to bypass. If people can use VPNs the OSA loses the bulk of its effectiveness. The only way to make the OSA anything but a huge waste of time is to restrict VPN use. That's it.
The real answer is to scrap the OSA and implement a technical solution, not a legal one. The Internet Engineering Task Force already has a standard designed for this type of scenario, called Privacy Pass.
Essentially you would use a government web site or app to prove you're over 18 and it gives you a bunch of cryptographic tokens. There's no database of tokens, they get generated on the fly.
These tokens are installed into your web browser and whenever you access a 'mature' site a token gets sent to prove you have the right to access the site, and then the browser deletes it. There's no personal information in the token, so sites don't know who you are. It's all transparent to the user, if you have the tokens mature sites will load just like any other with no extra steps.
The system isn't perfect, but it does not require giving personal information to possibly dodgy or hackable companies and it would make complying with the law easy for even small sites. I don't buy the 'protect the children' justification for the OSA to a large degree because systems like Privacy Pass exist - the only reason for ignoring them in favour of a much less effective ID based system like the OSA specifies is because you specifically want the ability to know who is accessing 'unsuitable' information.
This can still be evaded by just remote desktoping to a machine where such controls do not exist.
Why is it better to put this on a wall rather than some random art by someone else (*waves at @TOPPING*)?
What makes this special? Why have I put it on the wall in my revamping new living room?
Answers on an antique parchment
Are you the one on the left or the one on the right?
This is a tricky one. Here's the long answer (@Sunil_Prasannan was on the right road)
So I have a long association with Gobekli Tepe. I first went, on my own shilling, on the off chance, as a youngish hungry freelancer in 2006 to write one of the first major articles on the whole place, back when it was basically unknown. The article went viral and halfway made me as a writer
I went out again in 2023 and - because by then I was well known to them - the main archaeologists showed me all the incredible new sites. Especially Karahan Tepe. Etc. These collective sites are now known as the Tas Tepeler
But then on day 3 as we were driving around Necmul the head Turkish boffin of the whole Tas Tepeler said “sod it Leon I'm going to show you something new, we only found this three months ago”. So we abruply diverted to this tiny village in the desert which had obvious Tepe like pillars propping up farm walls, it was like driving to Stonehenge and en route finding a Wiltshire village using megaliths as door frames (only much much older). And then Necmul led me past some chickens to a small stone door and at the doorway he said “the villagers found this when they were emptying a barn a few weeks ago, and they called us in”
Inside that barn was that rock frieze, perhaps 12,000 years old. With the classic Gobekli animals in profile - the horned bull - a man dying maybe - a leopard - and then the fascinating figure of a small strange man holding his penis, with the iconic chevrons on his chest - all motifs used across the Tas Tepeler. In other words, what I was seeing was pretty much final, conclusive proof that Gobekli Tepe and the tas Tepeler actually represent an entire buried 13,000 year old civilisation, which we completely do not understand and might have had writing and was highly sophisticated. Possibly as advanced as the Egyptians but 8000 years earlier. We have no idea how and why and who and what
And Necmul told me, as we stood in that barn, "only a few people have ever seen this. A handful of us archaeologists, one or two academics, now you - this is the first time it’s been revealed since the Ice Age”
The boy was a son of a local farmer who wandered in. And stood by the frieze because he was having fun and we decided he was was good for scale as we took photos
That is why this unique photo, by me, hangs on my wall, instead of any "art" by someone else
To add to the poignancy, the flat I live in now was bought entirely from the earnings from my original thriller based on my first visit to Gobekli Tepe. If these alien-Nephilim with six fingers hadn't build a mad now-buried civilisation, I wouldn't have this flat. Funny how things turn out. I wonder if that was a motivation for them. "In 13,000 years time some English dude will be able to buy a flat, because we have six fingers and we're building underground cities during the Ice Age"
You should really get someone to pitch you to Joe Rogan as a podcast interview. He’s totally obsessed by stuff like Gobekli Tepe.
I'm thinking of writing a non-fiction book about it; I like Graham Hancock but he does go a bit mad with his relentless thesis
You don't need any of his comet-strike, global-civilisation-is-hidden stuff to make Gobekli and the Tas Tepeler completely mindblowing
Who built it? How? Without writing, or pottery, or agriculture? Really???? In 12,000BC (some latest datings put it back to 15,000 BC). Also they had kitchens, and running water, and advanced urban rituals - in theatres and shrines - and all this at a time when humanity was supposedly living in caves. But if they did not have agriculture how did they feed these towns? Becuase these are basically small but highly sophisticated towns being unearthed
What was their religion? What's with the six fingers and SCARY skull cults? Why do they have the same clothes? A uniform? Ritual scars? What's the obsession with penises? The blood chambers? The vulture worship? The exquisite stone work? Where did they learn all this? WERE THEY JUST FUCKING ALIENS????
I have a theory that mainstream archaeologists avoid the whole subject because it so so mad, aberrant and jarringly weird, and surreal, as soon as you talk about it you sound mad. So they tiptoe around it, to preserve their careers
Anyway, now one of the most iconic photos of the whole place (and I have taken quite a few iconic photos of Gobekli Tepe, often used in TV documentaries) is now proudly hanging on my wall
Why is it better to put this on a wall rather than some random art by someone else (*waves at @TOPPING*)?
What makes this special? Why have I put it on the wall in my revamping new living room?
Answers on an antique parchment
Are you the one on the left or the one on the right?
This is a tricky one. Here's the long answer (@Sunil_Prasannan was on the right road)
So I have a long association with Gobekli Tepe. I first went, on my own shilling, on the off chance, as a youngish hungry freelancer in 2006 to write one of the first major articles on the whole place, back when it was basically unknown. The article went viral and halfway made me as a writer
I went out again in 2023 and - because by then I was well known to them - the main archaeologists showed me all the incredible new sites. Especially Karahan Tepe. Etc. These collective sites are now known as the Tas Tepeler
But then on day 3 as we were driving around Necmul the head Turkish boffin of the whole Tas Tepeler said “sod it Leon I'm going to show you something new, we only found this three months ago”. So we abruply diverted to this tiny village in the desert which had obvious Tepe like pillars propping up farm walls, it was like driving to Stonehenge and en route finding a Wiltshire village using megaliths as door frames (only much much older). And then Necmul led me past some chickens to a small stone door and at the doorway he said “the villagers found this when they were emptying a barn a few weeks ago, and they called us in”
Inside that barn was that rock frieze, perhaps 12,000 years old. With the classic Gobekli animals in profile - the horned bull - a man dying maybe - a leopard - and then the fascinating figure of a small strange man holding his penis, with the iconic chevrons on his chest - all motifs used across the Tas Tepeler. In other words, what I was seeing was pretty much final, conclusive proof that Gobekli Tepe and the tas Tepeler actually represent an entire buried 13,000 year old civilisation, which we completely do not understand and might have had writing and was highly sophisticated. Possibly as advanced as the Egyptians but 8000 years earlier. We have no idea how and why and who and what
And Necmul told me, as we stood in that barn, "only a few people have ever seen this. A handful of us archaeologists, one or two academics, now you - this is the first time it’s been revealed since the Ice Age”
The boy was a son of a local farmer who wandered in. And stood by the frieze because he was having fun and we decided he was was good for scale as we took photos
That is why this unique photo, by me, hangs on my wall, instead of any "art" by someone else
To add to the poignancy, the flat I live in now was bought entirely from the earnings from my original thriller based on my first visit to Gobekli Tepe. If these alien-Nephilim with six fingers hadn't build a mad now-buried civilisation, I wouldn't have this flat. Funny how things turn out. I wonder if that was a motivation for them. "In 13,000 years time some English dude will be able to buy a flat, because we have six fingers and we're building underground cities during the Ice Age"
You should really get someone to pitch you to Joe Rogan as a podcast interview. He’s totally obsessed by stuff like Gobekli Tepe.
He also said that Candace Owens allegations about Ms Macron actually being a man* were obviously true, because otherwise she (Owens) would have been sued. I think he said her six part expose was one of the most impressive things he'd ever watched.
* And that's only the tip of the bonkersness of the Owens claims.
Isn’t Candace Owens now getting sued by Macron?
Yes.
My point is that Rogan is a really bright and interesting guy, who ends up being a net negative for the world, because he's happy to spread the kind of shit that is clearly completely bat shit crazy.
As Rogan says himself, he’s a stupid comedian, but inquisitive and honest in his own thoughts.
As I’ve said before, it’s way better to have the likes of Rogan and Jordon Peterson be role models to young men, than the likes of Andrew Tate and Nick Fuentes.
Marc Andreessen complains to Downing Street about Online Safety Act and UK tech minister
In a sign that the government was caught off guard by the extent to which these tools would be used, ministers last week requested data from the internet regulator Ofcom about how and when VPNs were being downloaded, according to two people briefed on the move.
Kyle has said publicly that he is not considering any ban on VPNs, but officials say ministers are keen to understand how the tools are being used, particularly by children.
It's not hard to see where this is going. What happens when Ofcom come back and say, yes, VPNs are being extensively used by under-18s and the OSA is being bypassed to the extent it's a giant waste of time?
I don't believe Kyle's statements about VPNs. He's one of those morons who believe any problem can be fixed by making a new law. So the government will ban VPNs without a licence.
When people say this stuff about what's going to happen and it doesn't (eg the government were going to keep the lockdown beyond the pandemic because they were luvin it) I'd like to see some accountability. Some fessing up that "I was wrong and will learn from it "
Like I always do on the odd occasion I get things wrong.
If the government doesn't implement some kind of restriction on VPNs before they get kicked out I will happily and publicly acknowledge I was wrong. But the alternative scenario is to admit the OSA is a failure, repeal it and look like a bunch of ridiculous fools. Can't see this government being in any way willing to do that.
The only way I see a VPN ban not happening is if some organisation - Wikipedia possibly - refuses to comply with the OSA and then takes uk.gov to the ECHR and wins. But that will take more years than this administration has left.
{firing-up-the-palantir-gesture}
1) they will ban VPNs 2) companies say they will have to stop working in the U.K. 3) the government will come up with VPN registration - even trying to demand control from the VPN provider if what the customer is doing 4) after multiple rounds of unworkable legislation, it turns out that at least one of the licensed VPNs is run by terrorists. Another is run by organised crime. At least one is owned by Donald Trump.
{staggers back from palantir}
And - of course - teenagers work out various vpn-over-https type systems, so it all becomes irrelevent. (Or people simply remote desktop to computers outside the UK and watch their porn from there.)
Was it not the case that one of the correspondents to this site used a setup that meant their posts appeared to come from the ip address that was on the list of ip addresses infected by botnet software?
I recall the person in question arguing that it was just their slightly homebrew VPN…
Why is it better to put this on a wall rather than some random art by someone else (*waves at @TOPPING*)?
What makes this special? Why have I put it on the wall in my revamping new living room?
Answers on an antique parchment
Are you the one on the left or the one on the right?
This is a tricky one. Here's the long answer (@Sunil_Prasannan was on the right road)
So I have a long association with Gobekli Tepe. I first went, on my own shilling, on the off chance, as a youngish hungry freelancer in 2006 to write one of the first major articles on the whole place, back when it was basically unknown. The article went viral and halfway made me as a writer
I went out again in 2023 and - because by then I was well known to them - the main archaeologists showed me all the incredible new sites. Especially Karahan Tepe. Etc. These collective sites are now known as the Tas Tepeler
But then on day 3 as we were driving around Necmul the head Turkish boffin of the whole Tas Tepeler said “sod it Leon I'm going to show you something new, we only found this three months ago”. So we abruply diverted to this tiny village in the desert which had obvious Tepe like pillars propping up farm walls, it was like driving to Stonehenge and en route finding a Wiltshire village using megaliths as door frames (only much much older). And then Necmul led me past some chickens to a small stone door and at the doorway he said “the villagers found this when they were emptying a barn a few weeks ago, and they called us in”
Inside that barn was that rock frieze, perhaps 12,000 years old. With the classic Gobekli animals in profile - the horned bull - a man dying maybe - a leopard - and then the fascinating figure of a small strange man holding his penis, with the iconic chevrons on his chest - all motifs used across the Tas Tepeler. In other words, what I was seeing was pretty much final, conclusive proof that Gobekli Tepe and the tas Tepeler actually represent an entire buried 13,000 year old civilisation, which we completely do not understand and might have had writing and was highly sophisticated. Possibly as advanced as the Egyptians but 8000 years earlier. We have no idea how and why and who and what
And Necmul told me, as we stood in that barn, "only a few people have ever seen this. A handful of us archaeologists, one or two academics, now you - this is the first time it’s been revealed since the Ice Age”
The boy was a son of a local farmer who wandered in. And stood by the frieze because he was having fun and we decided he was was good for scale as we took photos
That is why this unique photo, by me, hangs on my wall, instead of any "art" by someone else
To add to the poignancy, the flat I live in now was bought entirely from the earnings from my original thriller based on my first visit to Gobekli Tepe. If these alien-Nephilim with six fingers hadn't build a mad now-buried civilisation, I wouldn't have this flat. Funny how things turn out. I wonder if that was a motivation for them. "In 13,000 years time some English dude will be able to buy a flat, because we have six fingers and we're building underground cities during the Ice Age"
You should really get someone to pitch you to Joe Rogan as a podcast interview. He’s totally obsessed by stuff like Gobekli Tepe.
He also said that Candace Owens allegations about Ms Macron actually being a man* were obviously true, because otherwise she (Owens) would have been sued. I think he said her six part expose was one of the most impressive things he'd ever watched.
* And that's only the tip of the bonkersness of the Owens claims.
Isn’t Candace Owens now getting sued by Macron?
Yes.
My point is that Rogan is a really bright and interesting guy, who ends up being a net negative for the world, because he's happy to spread the kind of shit that is clearly completely bat shit crazy.
As Rogan says himself, he’s a stupid comedian, but inquisitive and honest in his own thoughts.
As I’ve said before, it’s way better to have the likes of Rogan and Jordon Peterson be role models to young men, than the likes of Andrew Tate and Nick Fuentes.
Fortunately there's no possibility whatsoever that her testimony will be in any way influenced by the fact that DJT has just let her out of prison.
The prison she is at is used for low risk prisoners towards the end of their sentences - the day release stuff is supposed to be part of the process of getting them ready to leave prison.
I would say that if I were her lawyer, I would advise her not to leave the facility.
Between all the conspiracy loons, a country where firearms are ubiquitous and the current ferment, her life would be very much in danger.
Why is it better to put this on a wall rather than some random art by someone else (*waves at @TOPPING*)?
What makes this special? Why have I put it on the wall in my revamping new living room?
Answers on an antique parchment
Are you the one on the left or the one on the right?
This is a tricky one. Here's the long answer (@Sunil_Prasannan was on the right road)
So I have a long association with Gobekli Tepe. I first went, on my own shilling, on the off chance, as a youngish hungry freelancer in 2006 to write one of the first major articles on the whole place, back when it was basically unknown. The article went viral and halfway made me as a writer
I went out again in 2023 and - because by then I was well known to them - the main archaeologists showed me all the incredible new sites. Especially Karahan Tepe. Etc. These collective sites are now known as the Tas Tepeler
But then on day 3 as we were driving around Necmul the head Turkish boffin of the whole Tas Tepeler said “sod it Leon I'm going to show you something new, we only found this three months ago”. So we abruply diverted to this tiny village in the desert which had obvious Tepe like pillars propping up farm walls, it was like driving to Stonehenge and en route finding a Wiltshire village using megaliths as door frames (only much much older). And then Necmul led me past some chickens to a small stone door and at the doorway he said “the villagers found this when they were emptying a barn a few weeks ago, and they called us in”
Inside that barn was that rock frieze, perhaps 12,000 years old. With the classic Gobekli animals in profile - the horned bull - a man dying maybe - a leopard - and then the fascinating figure of a small strange man holding his penis, with the iconic chevrons on his chest - all motifs used across the Tas Tepeler. In other words, what I was seeing was pretty much final, conclusive proof that Gobekli Tepe and the tas Tepeler actually represent an entire buried 13,000 year old civilisation, which we completely do not understand and might have had writing and was highly sophisticated. Possibly as advanced as the Egyptians but 8000 years earlier. We have no idea how and why and who and what
And Necmul told me, as we stood in that barn, "only a few people have ever seen this. A handful of us archaeologists, one or two academics, now you - this is the first time it’s been revealed since the Ice Age”
The boy was a son of a local farmer who wandered in. And stood by the frieze because he was having fun and we decided he was was good for scale as we took photos
That is why this unique photo, by me, hangs on my wall, instead of any "art" by someone else
To add to the poignancy, the flat I live in now was bought entirely from the earnings from my original thriller based on my first visit to Gobekli Tepe. If these alien-Nephilim with six fingers hadn't build a mad now-buried civilisation, I wouldn't have this flat. Funny how things turn out. I wonder if that was a motivation for them. "In 13,000 years time some English dude will be able to buy a flat, because we have six fingers and we're building underground cities during the Ice Age"
You should really get someone to pitch you to Joe Rogan as a podcast interview. He’s totally obsessed by stuff like Gobekli Tepe.
He also said that Candace Owens allegations about Ms Macron actually being a man* were obviously true, because otherwise she (Owens) would have been sued. I think he said her six part expose was one of the most impressive things he'd ever watched.
* And that's only the tip of the bonkersness of the Owens claims.
Isn’t Candace Owens now getting sued by Macron?
Yes.
My point is that Rogan is a really bright and interesting guy, who ends up being a net negative for the world, because he's happy to spread the kind of shit that is clearly completely bat shit crazy.
As Rogan says himself, he’s a stupid comedian, but inquisitive and honest in his own thoughts.
As I’ve said before, it’s way better to have the likes of Rogan and Jordon Peterson be role models to young men, than the likes of Andrew Tate and Nick Fuentes.
I'd rather drink piss than eat shit, but fortunately that are many other alternatives to doing either.
Fortunately there's no possibility whatsoever that her testimony will be in any way influenced by the fact that DJT has just let her out of prison.
The prison she is at is used for low risk prisoners towards the end of their sentences - the day release stuff is supposed to be part of the process of getting them ready to leave prison.
I would say that if I were her lawyer, I would advise her not to leave the facility.
Between all the conspiracy loons, a country where firearms are ubiquitous and the current ferment, her life would be very much in danger.
It would be very convenient for some if she was silenced.
Why is it better to put this on a wall rather than some random art by someone else (*waves at @TOPPING*)?
What makes this special? Why have I put it on the wall in my revamping new living room?
Answers on an antique parchment
Are you the one on the left or the one on the right?
This is a tricky one. Here's the long answer (@Sunil_Prasannan was on the right road)
So I have a long association with Gobekli Tepe. I first went, on my own shilling, on the off chance, as a youngish hungry freelancer in 2006 to write one of the first major articles on the whole place, back when it was basically unknown. The article went viral and halfway made me as a writer
I went out again in 2023 and - because by then I was well known to them - the main archaeologists showed me all the incredible new sites. Especially Karahan Tepe. Etc. These collective sites are now known as the Tas Tepeler
But then on day 3 as we were driving around Necmul the head Turkish boffin of the whole Tas Tepeler said “sod it Leon I'm going to show you something new, we only found this three months ago”. So we abruply diverted to this tiny village in the desert which had obvious Tepe like pillars propping up farm walls, it was like driving to Stonehenge and en route finding a Wiltshire village using megaliths as door frames (only much much older). And then Necmul led me past some chickens to a small stone door and at the doorway he said “the villagers found this when they were emptying a barn a few weeks ago, and they called us in”
Inside that barn was that rock frieze, perhaps 12,000 years old. With the classic Gobekli animals in profile - the horned bull - a man dying maybe - a leopard - and then the fascinating figure of a small strange man holding his penis, with the iconic chevrons on his chest - all motifs used across the Tas Tepeler. In other words, what I was seeing was pretty much final, conclusive proof that Gobekli Tepe and the tas Tepeler actually represent an entire buried 13,000 year old civilisation, which we completely do not understand and might have had writing and was highly sophisticated. Possibly as advanced as the Egyptians but 8000 years earlier. We have no idea how and why and who and what
And Necmul told me, as we stood in that barn, "only a few people have ever seen this. A handful of us archaeologists, one or two academics, now you - this is the first time it’s been revealed since the Ice Age”
The boy was a son of a local farmer who wandered in. And stood by the frieze because he was having fun and we decided he was was good for scale as we took photos
That is why this unique photo, by me, hangs on my wall, instead of any "art" by someone else
To add to the poignancy, the flat I live in now was bought entirely from the earnings from my original thriller based on my first visit to Gobekli Tepe. If these alien-Nephilim with six fingers hadn't build a mad now-buried civilisation, I wouldn't have this flat. Funny how things turn out. I wonder if that was a motivation for them. "In 13,000 years time some English dude will be able to buy a flat, because we have six fingers and we're building underground cities during the Ice Age"
You should really get someone to pitch you to Joe Rogan as a podcast interview. He’s totally obsessed by stuff like Gobekli Tepe.
He also said that Candace Owens allegations about Ms Macron actually being a man* were obviously true, because otherwise she (Owens) would have been sued. I think he said her six part expose was one of the most impressive things he'd ever watched.
* And that's only the tip of the bonkersness of the Owens claims.
Isn’t Candace Owens now getting sued by Macron?
Yes.
My point is that Rogan is a really bright and interesting guy, who ends up being a net negative for the world, because he's happy to spread the kind of shit that is clearly completely bat shit crazy.
As Rogan says himself, he’s a stupid comedian, but inquisitive and honest in his own thoughts.
As I’ve said before, it’s way better to have the likes of Rogan and Jordon Peterson be role models to young men, than the likes of Andrew Tate and Nick Fuentes.
He’s petty stupid if he doesn’t realise that stage 1 of successful batshit conspiracy theories is superficial plausibility.
Lots of “documents”, a narrative that hangs together etc.
It’s like con men. The original pitch is basic, basic stuff.
Fortunately there's no possibility whatsoever that her testimony will be in any way influenced by the fact that DJT has just let her out of prison.
The prison she is at is used for low risk prisoners towards the end of their sentences - the day release stuff is supposed to be part of the process of getting them ready to leave prison.
I would say that if I were her lawyer, I would advise her not to leave the facility.
Between all the conspiracy loons, a country where firearms are ubiquitous and the current ferment, her life would be very much in danger.
It would be very convenient for some if she was silenced.
Indeed. On all seventeen sides of this farce.
Those who simply want the truth, plus criminal convictions of the guilty are at the back of the queue on this one.
Why is it better to put this on a wall rather than some random art by someone else (*waves at @TOPPING*)?
What makes this special? Why have I put it on the wall in my revamping new living room?
Answers on an antique parchment
Are you the one on the left or the one on the right?
This is a tricky one. Here's the long answer (@Sunil_Prasannan was on the right road)
So I have a long association with Gobekli Tepe. I first went, on my own shilling, on the off chance, as a youngish hungry freelancer in 2006 to write one of the first major articles on the whole place, back when it was basically unknown. The article went viral and halfway made me as a writer
I went out again in 2023 and - because by then I was well known to them - the main archaeologists showed me all the incredible new sites. Especially Karahan Tepe. Etc. These collective sites are now known as the Tas Tepeler
But then on day 3 as we were driving around Necmul the head Turkish boffin of the whole Tas Tepeler said “sod it Leon I'm going to show you something new, we only found this three months ago”. So we abruply diverted to this tiny village in the desert which had obvious Tepe like pillars propping up farm walls, it was like driving to Stonehenge and en route finding a Wiltshire village using megaliths as door frames (only much much older). And then Necmul led me past some chickens to a small stone door and at the doorway he said “the villagers found this when they were emptying a barn a few weeks ago, and they called us in”
Inside that barn was that rock frieze, perhaps 12,000 years old. With the classic Gobekli animals in profile - the horned bull - a man dying maybe - a leopard - and then the fascinating figure of a small strange man holding his penis, with the iconic chevrons on his chest - all motifs used across the Tas Tepeler. In other words, what I was seeing was pretty much final, conclusive proof that Gobekli Tepe and the tas Tepeler actually represent an entire buried 13,000 year old civilisation, which we completely do not understand and might have had writing and was highly sophisticated. Possibly as advanced as the Egyptians but 8000 years earlier. We have no idea how and why and who and what
And Necmul told me, as we stood in that barn, "only a few people have ever seen this. A handful of us archaeologists, one or two academics, now you - this is the first time it’s been revealed since the Ice Age”
The boy was a son of a local farmer who wandered in. And stood by the frieze because he was having fun and we decided he was was good for scale as we took photos
That is why this unique photo, by me, hangs on my wall, instead of any "art" by someone else
To add to the poignancy, the flat I live in now was bought entirely from the earnings from my original thriller based on my first visit to Gobekli Tepe. If these alien-Nephilim with six fingers hadn't build a mad now-buried civilisation, I wouldn't have this flat. Funny how things turn out. I wonder if that was a motivation for them. "In 13,000 years time some English dude will be able to buy a flat, because we have six fingers and we're building underground cities during the Ice Age"
You should really get someone to pitch you to Joe Rogan as a podcast interview. He’s totally obsessed by stuff like Gobekli Tepe.
He also said that Candace Owens allegations about Ms Macron actually being a man* were obviously true, because otherwise she (Owens) would have been sued. I think he said her six part expose was one of the most impressive things he'd ever watched.
* And that's only the tip of the bonkersness of the Owens claims.
Isn’t Candace Owens now getting sued by Macron?
Yes.
My point is that Rogan is a really bright and interesting guy, who ends up being a net negative for the world, because he's happy to spread the kind of shit that is clearly completely bat shit crazy.
As Rogan says himself, he’s a stupid comedian, but inquisitive and honest in his own thoughts.
As I’ve said before, it’s way better to have the likes of Rogan and Jordon Peterson be role models to young men, than the likes of Andrew Tate and Nick Fuentes.
I'd rather drink piss than eat shit, but fortunately that are many other alternatives to doing either.
Okay, so who should be the role models to young men? The lack of positive role models to young men is a massive problem in the US, and likely in the UK as well.
Why is it better to put this on a wall rather than some random art by someone else (*waves at @TOPPING*)?
What makes this special? Why have I put it on the wall in my revamping new living room?
Answers on an antique parchment
Are you the one on the left or the one on the right?
This is a tricky one. Here's the long answer (@Sunil_Prasannan was on the right road)
So I have a long association with Gobekli Tepe. I first went, on my own shilling, on the off chance, as a youngish hungry freelancer in 2006 to write one of the first major articles on the whole place, back when it was basically unknown. The article went viral and halfway made me as a writer
I went out again in 2023 and - because by then I was well known to them - the main archaeologists showed me all the incredible new sites. Especially Karahan Tepe. Etc. These collective sites are now known as the Tas Tepeler
But then on day 3 as we were driving around Necmul the head Turkish boffin of the whole Tas Tepeler said “sod it Leon I'm going to show you something new, we only found this three months ago”. So we abruply diverted to this tiny village in the desert which had obvious Tepe like pillars propping up farm walls, it was like driving to Stonehenge and en route finding a Wiltshire village using megaliths as door frames (only much much older). And then Necmul led me past some chickens to a small stone door and at the doorway he said “the villagers found this when they were emptying a barn a few weeks ago, and they called us in”
Inside that barn was that rock frieze, perhaps 12,000 years old. With the classic Gobekli animals in profile - the horned bull - a man dying maybe - a leopard - and then the fascinating figure of a small strange man holding his penis, with the iconic chevrons on his chest - all motifs used across the Tas Tepeler. In other words, what I was seeing was pretty much final, conclusive proof that Gobekli Tepe and the tas Tepeler actually represent an entire buried 13,000 year old civilisation, which we completely do not understand and might have had writing and was highly sophisticated. Possibly as advanced as the Egyptians but 8000 years earlier. We have no idea how and why and who and what
And Necmul told me, as we stood in that barn, "only a few people have ever seen this. A handful of us archaeologists, one or two academics, now you - this is the first time it’s been revealed since the Ice Age”
The boy was a son of a local farmer who wandered in. And stood by the frieze because he was having fun and we decided he was was good for scale as we took photos
That is why this unique photo, by me, hangs on my wall, instead of any "art" by someone else
To add to the poignancy, the flat I live in now was bought entirely from the earnings from my original thriller based on my first visit to Gobekli Tepe. If these alien-Nephilim with six fingers hadn't build a mad now-buried civilisation, I wouldn't have this flat. Funny how things turn out. I wonder if that was a motivation for them. "In 13,000 years time some English dude will be able to buy a flat, because we have six fingers and we're building underground cities during the Ice Age"
You should really get someone to pitch you to Joe Rogan as a podcast interview. He’s totally obsessed by stuff like Gobekli Tepe.
He also said that Candace Owens allegations about Ms Macron actually being a man* were obviously true, because otherwise she (Owens) would have been sued. I think he said her six part expose was one of the most impressive things he'd ever watched.
* And that's only the tip of the bonkersness of the Owens claims.
Isn’t Candace Owens now getting sued by Macron?
Yes.
My point is that Rogan is a really bright and interesting guy, who ends up being a net negative for the world, because he's happy to spread the kind of shit that is clearly completely bat shit crazy.
As Rogan says himself, he’s a stupid comedian, but inquisitive and honest in his own thoughts.
As I’ve said before, it’s way better to have the likes of Rogan and Jordon Peterson be role models to young men, than the likes of Andrew Tate and Nick Fuentes.
I'd rather drink piss than eat shit, but fortunately that are many other alternatives to doing either.
Okay, so who should be the role models to young men?
Why is it better to put this on a wall rather than some random art by someone else (*waves at @TOPPING*)?
What makes this special? Why have I put it on the wall in my revamping new living room?
Answers on an antique parchment
Are you the one on the left or the one on the right?
This is a tricky one. Here's the long answer (@Sunil_Prasannan was on the right road)
So I have a long association with Gobekli Tepe. I first went, on my own shilling, on the off chance, as a youngish hungry freelancer in 2006 to write one of the first major articles on the whole place, back when it was basically unknown. The article went viral and halfway made me as a writer
I went out again in 2023 and - because by then I was well known to them - the main archaeologists showed me all the incredible new sites. Especially Karahan Tepe. Etc. These collective sites are now known as the Tas Tepeler
But then on day 3 as we were driving around Necmul the head Turkish boffin of the whole Tas Tepeler said “sod it Leon I'm going to show you something new, we only found this three months ago”. So we abruply diverted to this tiny village in the desert which had obvious Tepe like pillars propping up farm walls, it was like driving to Stonehenge and en route finding a Wiltshire village using megaliths as door frames (only much much older). And then Necmul led me past some chickens to a small stone door and at the doorway he said “the villagers found this when they were emptying a barn a few weeks ago, and they called us in”
Inside that barn was that rock frieze, perhaps 12,000 years old. With the classic Gobekli animals in profile - the horned bull - a man dying maybe - a leopard - and then the fascinating figure of a small strange man holding his penis, with the iconic chevrons on his chest - all motifs used across the Tas Tepeler. In other words, what I was seeing was pretty much final, conclusive proof that Gobekli Tepe and the tas Tepeler actually represent an entire buried 13,000 year old civilisation, which we completely do not understand and might have had writing and was highly sophisticated. Possibly as advanced as the Egyptians but 8000 years earlier. We have no idea how and why and who and what
And Necmul told me, as we stood in that barn, "only a few people have ever seen this. A handful of us archaeologists, one or two academics, now you - this is the first time it’s been revealed since the Ice Age”
The boy was a son of a local farmer who wandered in. And stood by the frieze because he was having fun and we decided he was was good for scale as we took photos
That is why this unique photo, by me, hangs on my wall, instead of any "art" by someone else
To add to the poignancy, the flat I live in now was bought entirely from the earnings from my original thriller based on my first visit to Gobekli Tepe. If these alien-Nephilim with six fingers hadn't build a mad now-buried civilisation, I wouldn't have this flat. Funny how things turn out. I wonder if that was a motivation for them. "In 13,000 years time some English dude will be able to buy a flat, because we have six fingers and we're building underground cities during the Ice Age"
You should really get someone to pitch you to Joe Rogan as a podcast interview. He’s totally obsessed by stuff like Gobekli Tepe.
He also said that Candace Owens allegations about Ms Macron actually being a man* were obviously true, because otherwise she (Owens) would have been sued. I think he said her six part expose was one of the most impressive things he'd ever watched.
* And that's only the tip of the bonkersness of the Owens claims.
Isn’t Candace Owens now getting sued by Macron?
Yes.
My point is that Rogan is a really bright and interesting guy, who ends up being a net negative for the world, because he's happy to spread the kind of shit that is clearly completely bat shit crazy.
As Rogan says himself, he’s a stupid comedian, but inquisitive and honest in his own thoughts.
As I’ve said before, it’s way better to have the likes of Rogan and Jordon Peterson be role models to young men, than the likes of Andrew Tate and Nick Fuentes.
I'd rather drink piss than eat shit, but fortunately that are many other alternatives to doing either.
Okay, so who should be the role models to young men?
Why is it better to put this on a wall rather than some random art by someone else (*waves at @TOPPING*)?
What makes this special? Why have I put it on the wall in my revamping new living room?
Answers on an antique parchment
Are you the one on the left or the one on the right?
This is a tricky one. Here's the long answer (@Sunil_Prasannan was on the right road)
So I have a long association with Gobekli Tepe. I first went, on my own shilling, on the off chance, as a youngish hungry freelancer in 2006 to write one of the first major articles on the whole place, back when it was basically unknown. The article went viral and halfway made me as a writer
I went out again in 2023 and - because by then I was well known to them - the main archaeologists showed me all the incredible new sites. Especially Karahan Tepe. Etc. These collective sites are now known as the Tas Tepeler
But then on day 3 as we were driving around Necmul the head Turkish boffin of the whole Tas Tepeler said “sod it Leon I'm going to show you something new, we only found this three months ago”. So we abruply diverted to this tiny village in the desert which had obvious Tepe like pillars propping up farm walls, it was like driving to Stonehenge and en route finding a Wiltshire village using megaliths as door frames (only much much older). And then Necmul led me past some chickens to a small stone door and at the doorway he said “the villagers found this when they were emptying a barn a few weeks ago, and they called us in”
Inside that barn was that rock frieze, perhaps 12,000 years old. With the classic Gobekli animals in profile - the horned bull - a man dying maybe - a leopard - and then the fascinating figure of a small strange man holding his penis, with the iconic chevrons on his chest - all motifs used across the Tas Tepeler. In other words, what I was seeing was pretty much final, conclusive proof that Gobekli Tepe and the tas Tepeler actually represent an entire buried 13,000 year old civilisation, which we completely do not understand and might have had writing and was highly sophisticated. Possibly as advanced as the Egyptians but 8000 years earlier. We have no idea how and why and who and what
And Necmul told me, as we stood in that barn, "only a few people have ever seen this. A handful of us archaeologists, one or two academics, now you - this is the first time it’s been revealed since the Ice Age”
The boy was a son of a local farmer who wandered in. And stood by the frieze because he was having fun and we decided he was was good for scale as we took photos
That is why this unique photo, by me, hangs on my wall, instead of any "art" by someone else
To add to the poignancy, the flat I live in now was bought entirely from the earnings from my original thriller based on my first visit to Gobekli Tepe. If these alien-Nephilim with six fingers hadn't build a mad now-buried civilisation, I wouldn't have this flat. Funny how things turn out. I wonder if that was a motivation for them. "In 13,000 years time some English dude will be able to buy a flat, because we have six fingers and we're building underground cities during the Ice Age"
You should really get someone to pitch you to Joe Rogan as a podcast interview. He’s totally obsessed by stuff like Gobekli Tepe.
He also said that Candace Owens allegations about Ms Macron actually being a man* were obviously true, because otherwise she (Owens) would have been sued. I think he said her six part expose was one of the most impressive things he'd ever watched.
* And that's only the tip of the bonkersness of the Owens claims.
Isn’t Candace Owens now getting sued by Macron?
Yes
“CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH YOU MAY REGRET IT CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH YOU JUST MIGHT GET IT”
Why is it better to put this on a wall rather than some random art by someone else (*waves at @TOPPING*)?
What makes this special? Why have I put it on the wall in my revamping new living room?
Answers on an antique parchment
Are you the one on the left or the one on the right?
This is a tricky one. Here's the long answer (@Sunil_Prasannan was on the right road)
So I have a long association with Gobekli Tepe. I first went, on my own shilling, on the off chance, as a youngish hungry freelancer in 2006 to write one of the first major articles on the whole place, back when it was basically unknown. The article went viral and halfway made me as a writer
I went out again in 2023 and - because by then I was well known to them - the main archaeologists showed me all the incredible new sites. Especially Karahan Tepe. Etc. These collective sites are now known as the Tas Tepeler
But then on day 3 as we were driving around Necmul the head Turkish boffin of the whole Tas Tepeler said “sod it Leon I'm going to show you something new, we only found this three months ago”. So we abruply diverted to this tiny village in the desert which had obvious Tepe like pillars propping up farm walls, it was like driving to Stonehenge and en route finding a Wiltshire village using megaliths as door frames (only much much older). And then Necmul led me past some chickens to a small stone door and at the doorway he said “the villagers found this when they were emptying a barn a few weeks ago, and they called us in”
Inside that barn was that rock frieze, perhaps 12,000 years old. With the classic Gobekli animals in profile - the horned bull - a man dying maybe - a leopard - and then the fascinating figure of a small strange man holding his penis, with the iconic chevrons on his chest - all motifs used across the Tas Tepeler. In other words, what I was seeing was pretty much final, conclusive proof that Gobekli Tepe and the tas Tepeler actually represent an entire buried 13,000 year old civilisation, which we completely do not understand and might have had writing and was highly sophisticated. Possibly as advanced as the Egyptians but 8000 years earlier. We have no idea how and why and who and what
And Necmul told me, as we stood in that barn, "only a few people have ever seen this. A handful of us archaeologists, one or two academics, now you - this is the first time it’s been revealed since the Ice Age”
The boy was a son of a local farmer who wandered in. And stood by the frieze because he was having fun and we decided he was was good for scale as we took photos
That is why this unique photo, by me, hangs on my wall, instead of any "art" by someone else
To add to the poignancy, the flat I live in now was bought entirely from the earnings from my original thriller based on my first visit to Gobekli Tepe. If these alien-Nephilim with six fingers hadn't build a mad now-buried civilisation, I wouldn't have this flat. Funny how things turn out. I wonder if that was a motivation for them. "In 13,000 years time some English dude will be able to buy a flat, because we have six fingers and we're building underground cities during the Ice Age"
You should really get someone to pitch you to Joe Rogan as a podcast interview. He’s totally obsessed by stuff like Gobekli Tepe.
I'm thinking of writing a non-fiction book about it; I like Graham Hancock but he does go a bit mad with his relentless thesis
You don't need any of his comet-strike, global-civilisation-is-hidden stuff to make Gobekli and the Tas Tepeler completely mindblowing
Who built it? How? Without writing, or pottery, or agriculture? Really???? In 12,000BC (some latest datings put it back to 15,000 BC). Also they had kitchens, and running water, and advanced urban rituals - in theatres and shrines - and all this at a time when humanity was supposedly living in caves. But if they did not have agriculture how did they feed these towns? Becuase these are basically small but highly sophisticated towns being unearthed
What was their religion? What's with the six fingers and SCARY skull cults? Why do they have the same clothes? A uniform? Ritual scars? What's the obsession with penises? The blood chambers? The vulture worship? The exquisite stone work? Where did they learn all this? WERE THEY JUST FUCKING ALIENS????
I have a theory that mainstream archaeologists avoid the whole subject because it so so mad, aberrant and jarringly weird, and surreal, as soon as you talk about it you sound mad. So they tiptoe around it, to preserve their careers
Anyway, now one of the most iconic photos of the whole place (and I have taken quite a few iconic photos of Gobekli Tepe, often used in TV documentaries) is now proudly hanging on my wall
I know I keep saying this, but:
Ancient coastlines, dude. Ancient coastlines surely hold the key. The total amount of land lost at end of the Ice Age due to sea level rise (between 14,000 and 8,000 years ago) was roughly 25 MILLION sq.km. (10 MILLION sq. miles). How much archaeology has been undertaken on Doggerland, the floor of the Persian Gulf, the lost Sunda Shelf bounded by Malaysia and Indonesia, or the former land bridge between New Guinea and Oz?
This can still be evaded by just remote desktoping to a machine where such controls do not exist.
How many teenagers have someone in a foreign country willing to let them remote into a PC? Some, but probably less than know how to download a VPN...
Microsoft has just added a freemium vpn to their Edge browser. Others have similar. Whether these have the feature of appearing to come from a country not subject to the OSA, I've not looked.
Why is it better to put this on a wall rather than some random art by someone else (*waves at @TOPPING*)?
What makes this special? Why have I put it on the wall in my revamping new living room?
Answers on an antique parchment
Are you the one on the left or the one on the right?
This is a tricky one. Here's the long answer (@Sunil_Prasannan was on the right road)
So I have a long association with Gobekli Tepe. I first went, on my own shilling, on the off chance, as a youngish hungry freelancer in 2006 to write one of the first major articles on the whole place, back when it was basically unknown. The article went viral and halfway made me as a writer
I went out again in 2023 and - because by then I was well known to them - the main archaeologists showed me all the incredible new sites. Especially Karahan Tepe. Etc. These collective sites are now known as the Tas Tepeler
But then on day 3 as we were driving around Necmul the head Turkish boffin of the whole Tas Tepeler said “sod it Leon I'm going to show you something new, we only found this three months ago”. So we abruply diverted to this tiny village in the desert which had obvious Tepe like pillars propping up farm walls, it was like driving to Stonehenge and en route finding a Wiltshire village using megaliths as door frames (only much much older). And then Necmul led me past some chickens to a small stone door and at the doorway he said “the villagers found this when they were emptying a barn a few weeks ago, and they called us in”
Inside that barn was that rock frieze, perhaps 12,000 years old. With the classic Gobekli animals in profile - the horned bull - a man dying maybe - a leopard - and then the fascinating figure of a small strange man holding his penis, with the iconic chevrons on his chest - all motifs used across the Tas Tepeler. In other words, what I was seeing was pretty much final, conclusive proof that Gobekli Tepe and the tas Tepeler actually represent an entire buried 13,000 year old civilisation, which we completely do not understand and might have had writing and was highly sophisticated. Possibly as advanced as the Egyptians but 8000 years earlier. We have no idea how and why and who and what
And Necmul told me, as we stood in that barn, "only a few people have ever seen this. A handful of us archaeologists, one or two academics, now you - this is the first time it’s been revealed since the Ice Age”
The boy was a son of a local farmer who wandered in. And stood by the frieze because he was having fun and we decided he was was good for scale as we took photos
That is why this unique photo, by me, hangs on my wall, instead of any "art" by someone else
To add to the poignancy, the flat I live in now was bought entirely from the earnings from my original thriller based on my first visit to Gobekli Tepe. If these alien-Nephilim with six fingers hadn't build a mad now-buried civilisation, I wouldn't have this flat. Funny how things turn out. I wonder if that was a motivation for them. "In 13,000 years time some English dude will be able to buy a flat, because we have six fingers and we're building underground cities during the Ice Age"
You should really get someone to pitch you to Joe Rogan as a podcast interview. He’s totally obsessed by stuff like Gobekli Tepe.
I'm thinking of writing a non-fiction book about it; I like Graham Hancock but he does go a bit mad with his relentless thesis
You don't need any of his comet-strike, global-civilisation-is-hidden stuff to make Gobekli and the Tas Tepeler completely mindblowing
Who built it? How? Without writing, or pottery, or agriculture? Really???? In 12,000BC (some latest datings put it back to 15,000 BC). Also they had kitchens, and running water, and advanced urban rituals - in theatres and shrines - and all this at a time when humanity was supposedly living in caves. But if they did not have agriculture how did they feed these towns? Becuase these are basically small but highly sophisticated towns being unearthed
What was their religion? What's with the six fingers and SCARY skull cults? Why do they have the same clothes? A uniform? Ritual scars? What's the obsession with penises? The blood chambers? The vulture worship? The exquisite stone work? Where did they learn all this? WERE THEY JUST FUCKING ALIENS????
I have a theory that mainstream archaeologists avoid the whole subject because it so so mad, aberrant and jarringly weird, and surreal, as soon as you talk about it you sound mad. So they tiptoe around it, to preserve their careers
Anyway, now one of the most iconic photos of the whole place (and I have taken quite a few iconic photos of Gobekli Tepe, often used in TV documentaries) is now proudly hanging on my wall
Without going all the way with Graham Hancock, it does seem that pre-industrial civilisations can be very sophisticated, far more sophisticated than we would once have believed, but they can also vanish extremely rapidly, if they get hit by disease, adverse environmental changes, declining food supplies, or destroyed by enemies.
One example is Portuguese and Spanish explorers recording well-populated Indian cities in the Amazon basin in the late 1500’s, which largely disappeared without trace, and were covered by jungle. These were largely thought to be travellers’ tales, until modern archaeologists confirmed their existence. They likely collapsed due to diseases contacted from Europeans. The descendants of the survivors rapidly forgot their technical knowledge, as the economic basis for urban life disappeared.
Paradoxically, that much-reduced population can appear healthier than the former much bigger urban population, but that’s a survivorship bias.
And, I wonder if we see a reverse effect, with the coming of agriculture and the formation of the first towns. It may not be that the population grew weaker, it’s just that the weak now survived in greater numbers than before, as populations expanded.
Why is it better to put this on a wall rather than some random art by someone else (*waves at @TOPPING*)?
What makes this special? Why have I put it on the wall in my revamping new living room?
Answers on an antique parchment
Are you the one on the left or the one on the right?
This is a tricky one. Here's the long answer (@Sunil_Prasannan was on the right road)
So I have a long association with Gobekli Tepe. I first went, on my own shilling, on the off chance, as a youngish hungry freelancer in 2006 to write one of the first major articles on the whole place, back when it was basically unknown. The article went viral and halfway made me as a writer
I went out again in 2023 and - because by then I was well known to them - the main archaeologists showed me all the incredible new sites. Especially Karahan Tepe. Etc. These collective sites are now known as the Tas Tepeler
But then on day 3 as we were driving around Necmul the head Turkish boffin of the whole Tas Tepeler said “sod it Leon I'm going to show you something new, we only found this three months ago”. So we abruply diverted to this tiny village in the desert which had obvious Tepe like pillars propping up farm walls, it was like driving to Stonehenge and en route finding a Wiltshire village using megaliths as door frames (only much much older). And then Necmul led me past some chickens to a small stone door and at the doorway he said “the villagers found this when they were emptying a barn a few weeks ago, and they called us in”
Inside that barn was that rock frieze, perhaps 12,000 years old. With the classic Gobekli animals in profile - the horned bull - a man dying maybe - a leopard - and then the fascinating figure of a small strange man holding his penis, with the iconic chevrons on his chest - all motifs used across the Tas Tepeler. In other words, what I was seeing was pretty much final, conclusive proof that Gobekli Tepe and the tas Tepeler actually represent an entire buried 13,000 year old civilisation, which we completely do not understand and might have had writing and was highly sophisticated. Possibly as advanced as the Egyptians but 8000 years earlier. We have no idea how and why and who and what
And Necmul told me, as we stood in that barn, "only a few people have ever seen this. A handful of us archaeologists, one or two academics, now you - this is the first time it’s been revealed since the Ice Age”
The boy was a son of a local farmer who wandered in. And stood by the frieze because he was having fun and we decided he was was good for scale as we took photos
That is why this unique photo, by me, hangs on my wall, instead of any "art" by someone else
To add to the poignancy, the flat I live in now was bought entirely from the earnings from my original thriller based on my first visit to Gobekli Tepe. If these alien-Nephilim with six fingers hadn't build a mad now-buried civilisation, I wouldn't have this flat. Funny how things turn out. I wonder if that was a motivation for them. "In 13,000 years time some English dude will be able to buy a flat, because we have six fingers and we're building underground cities during the Ice Age"
You should really get someone to pitch you to Joe Rogan as a podcast interview. He’s totally obsessed by stuff like Gobekli Tepe.
He also said that Candace Owens allegations about Ms Macron actually being a man* were obviously true, because otherwise she (Owens) would have been sued. I think he said her six part expose was one of the most impressive things he'd ever watched.
* And that's only the tip of the bonkersness of the Owens claims.
Isn’t Candace Owens now getting sued by Macron?
Yes.
My point is that Rogan is a really bright and interesting guy, who ends up being a net negative for the world, because he's happy to spread the kind of shit that is clearly completely bat shit crazy.
As Rogan says himself, he’s a stupid comedian, but inquisitive and honest in his own thoughts.
As I’ve said before, it’s way better to have the likes of Rogan and Jordon Peterson be role models to young men, than the likes of Andrew Tate and Nick Fuentes.
I'd rather drink piss than eat shit, but fortunately that are many other alternatives to doing either.
Okay, so who should be the role models to young men? The lack of positive role models to young men is a massive problem in the US, and likely in the UK as well.
Do you live in such a blinkered MAGA social media bubble that you can't think of anyone outside Rogan, Peterson, Tate and Fuentes?
Possible role models for young men... different young men are into different things, but some obvious suggestions would be the Vlogbrothers (Hank and John Green), Marcus Rashford, Ali Abdaal, Joe Wicks, Russ Cook, Terry Crews.
Why is it better to put this on a wall rather than some random art by someone else (*waves at @TOPPING*)?
What makes this special? Why have I put it on the wall in my revamping new living room?
Answers on an antique parchment
Are you the one on the left or the one on the right?
This is a tricky one. Here's the long answer (@Sunil_Prasannan was on the right road)
So I have a long association with Gobekli Tepe. I first went, on my own shilling, on the off chance, as a youngish hungry freelancer in 2006 to write one of the first major articles on the whole place, back when it was basically unknown. The article went viral and halfway made me as a writer
I went out again in 2023 and - because by then I was well known to them - the main archaeologists showed me all the incredible new sites. Especially Karahan Tepe. Etc. These collective sites are now known as the Tas Tepeler
But then on day 3 as we were driving around Necmul the head Turkish boffin of the whole Tas Tepeler said “sod it Leon I'm going to show you something new, we only found this three months ago”. So we abruply diverted to this tiny village in the desert which had obvious Tepe like pillars propping up farm walls, it was like driving to Stonehenge and en route finding a Wiltshire village using megaliths as door frames (only much much older). And then Necmul led me past some chickens to a small stone door and at the doorway he said “the villagers found this when they were emptying a barn a few weeks ago, and they called us in”
Inside that barn was that rock frieze, perhaps 12,000 years old. With the classic Gobekli animals in profile - the horned bull - a man dying maybe - a leopard - and then the fascinating figure of a small strange man holding his penis, with the iconic chevrons on his chest - all motifs used across the Tas Tepeler. In other words, what I was seeing was pretty much final, conclusive proof that Gobekli Tepe and the tas Tepeler actually represent an entire buried 13,000 year old civilisation, which we completely do not understand and might have had writing and was highly sophisticated. Possibly as advanced as the Egyptians but 8000 years earlier. We have no idea how and why and who and what
And Necmul told me, as we stood in that barn, "only a few people have ever seen this. A handful of us archaeologists, one or two academics, now you - this is the first time it’s been revealed since the Ice Age”
The boy was a son of a local farmer who wandered in. And stood by the frieze because he was having fun and we decided he was was good for scale as we took photos
That is why this unique photo, by me, hangs on my wall, instead of any "art" by someone else
To add to the poignancy, the flat I live in now was bought entirely from the earnings from my original thriller based on my first visit to Gobekli Tepe. If these alien-Nephilim with six fingers hadn't build a mad now-buried civilisation, I wouldn't have this flat. Funny how things turn out. I wonder if that was a motivation for them. "In 13,000 years time some English dude will be able to buy a flat, because we have six fingers and we're building underground cities during the Ice Age"
You should really get someone to pitch you to Joe Rogan as a podcast interview. He’s totally obsessed by stuff like Gobekli Tepe.
He also said that Candace Owens allegations about Ms Macron actually being a man* were obviously true, because otherwise she (Owens) would have been sued. I think he said her six part expose was one of the most impressive things he'd ever watched.
* And that's only the tip of the bonkersness of the Owens claims.
Isn’t Candace Owens now getting sued by Macron?
Yes.
My point is that Rogan is a really bright and interesting guy, who ends up being a net negative for the world, because he's happy to spread the kind of shit that is clearly completely bat shit crazy.
As Rogan says himself, he’s a stupid comedian, but inquisitive and honest in his own thoughts.
As I’ve said before, it’s way better to have the likes of Rogan and Jordon Peterson be role models to young men, than the likes of Andrew Tate and Nick Fuentes.
I'd rather drink piss than eat shit, but fortunately that are many other alternatives to doing either.
Okay, so who should be the role models to young men? The lack of positive role models to young men is a massive problem in the US, and likely in the UK as well.
Winston Churchill. The Duke of Wellington Lord Nelson. The Duke of Marlborough.
Better than some idiot who can kick a ball or throw a punch slightly better than some other idiot anyway.
Why is it better to put this on a wall rather than some random art by someone else (*waves at @TOPPING*)?
What makes this special? Why have I put it on the wall in my revamping new living room?
Answers on an antique parchment
Are you the one on the left or the one on the right?
This is a tricky one. Here's the long answer (@Sunil_Prasannan was on the right road)
So I have a long association with Gobekli Tepe. I first went, on my own shilling, on the off chance, as a youngish hungry freelancer in 2006 to write one of the first major articles on the whole place, back when it was basically unknown. The article went viral and halfway made me as a writer
I went out again in 2023 and - because by then I was well known to them - the main archaeologists showed me all the incredible new sites. Especially Karahan Tepe. Etc. These collective sites are now known as the Tas Tepeler
But then on day 3 as we were driving around Necmul the head Turkish boffin of the whole Tas Tepeler said “sod it Leon I'm going to show you something new, we only found this three months ago”. So we abruply diverted to this tiny village in the desert which had obvious Tepe like pillars propping up farm walls, it was like driving to Stonehenge and en route finding a Wiltshire village using megaliths as door frames (only much much older). And then Necmul led me past some chickens to a small stone door and at the doorway he said “the villagers found this when they were emptying a barn a few weeks ago, and they called us in”
Inside that barn was that rock frieze, perhaps 12,000 years old. With the classic Gobekli animals in profile - the horned bull - a man dying maybe - a leopard - and then the fascinating figure of a small strange man holding his penis, with the iconic chevrons on his chest - all motifs used across the Tas Tepeler. In other words, what I was seeing was pretty much final, conclusive proof that Gobekli Tepe and the tas Tepeler actually represent an entire buried 13,000 year old civilisation, which we completely do not understand and might have had writing and was highly sophisticated. Possibly as advanced as the Egyptians but 8000 years earlier. We have no idea how and why and who and what
And Necmul told me, as we stood in that barn, "only a few people have ever seen this. A handful of us archaeologists, one or two academics, now you - this is the first time it’s been revealed since the Ice Age”
The boy was a son of a local farmer who wandered in. And stood by the frieze because he was having fun and we decided he was was good for scale as we took photos
That is why this unique photo, by me, hangs on my wall, instead of any "art" by someone else
To add to the poignancy, the flat I live in now was bought entirely from the earnings from my original thriller based on my first visit to Gobekli Tepe. If these alien-Nephilim with six fingers hadn't build a mad now-buried civilisation, I wouldn't have this flat. Funny how things turn out. I wonder if that was a motivation for them. "In 13,000 years time some English dude will be able to buy a flat, because we have six fingers and we're building underground cities during the Ice Age"
You should really get someone to pitch you to Joe Rogan as a podcast interview. He’s totally obsessed by stuff like Gobekli Tepe.
I'm thinking of writing a non-fiction book about it; I like Graham Hancock but he does go a bit mad with his relentless thesis
You don't need any of his comet-strike, global-civilisation-is-hidden stuff to make Gobekli and the Tas Tepeler completely mindblowing
Who built it? How? Without writing, or pottery, or agriculture? Really???? In 12,000BC (some latest datings put it back to 15,000 BC). Also they had kitchens, and running water, and advanced urban rituals - in theatres and shrines - and all this at a time when humanity was supposedly living in caves. But if they did not have agriculture how did they feed these towns? Becuase these are basically small but highly sophisticated towns being unearthed
What was their religion? What's with the six fingers and SCARY skull cults? Why do they have the same clothes? A uniform? Ritual scars? What's the obsession with penises? The blood chambers? The vulture worship? The exquisite stone work? Where did they learn all this? WERE THEY JUST FUCKING ALIENS????
I have a theory that mainstream archaeologists avoid the whole subject because it so so mad, aberrant and jarringly weird, and surreal, as soon as you talk about it you sound mad. So they tiptoe around it, to preserve their careers
Anyway, now one of the most iconic photos of the whole place (and I have taken quite a few iconic photos of Gobekli Tepe, often used in TV documentaries) is now proudly hanging on my wall
Without going all the way with Graham Hancock, it does seem that pre-industrial civilisations can be very sophisticated, far more sophisticated than we would once have believed, but they can also vanish extremely rapidly, if they get hit by disease, adverse environmental changes, declining food supplies, or destroyed by enemies.
One example is Portuguese and Spanish explorers recording well-populated Indian cities in the Amazon basin in the late 1500’s, which largely disappeared without trace, and were covered by jungle. These were largely thought to be travellers’ tales, until modern archaeologists confirmed their existence. They likely collapsed due to diseases contacted from Europeans. The descendants of the survivors rapidly forgot their technical knowledge, as the economic basis for urban life disappeared.
Paradoxically, that much-reduced population can appear healthier than the former much bigger urban population, but that’s a survivorship bias.
And, I wonder if we see a reverse effect, with the coming of agriculture and the formation of the first towns. It may not be that the population grew weaker, it’s just that the weak now survived in greater numbers than before, as populations expanded.
Indeed. And @Sunil_Prasannan is on to something with his sea-level coastline thesis
I find it entirely conceivable that a truly advanced human civilisation rose declined and fell before the end of the ice age, and was essentially obliterated - with just fragments of folk memory and maybe some technology surviving in scattered places
Indeed the Tas Tepeler are essentially that. Utterly inexplicable in terms of regular archaeological timelines
And of course what we see in Turkey may be the END of their civilisation - not its peak flowering
Personally I reckon they had writing. 8000 years before Sumer. Privately I’ve had archaeologists out there agree with me. But they don’t go on record because it is risky to sound like “Graham Hancock”
Why is it better to put this on a wall rather than some random art by someone else (*waves at @TOPPING*)?
What makes this special? Why have I put it on the wall in my revamping new living room?
Answers on an antique parchment
Are you the one on the left or the one on the right?
This is a tricky one. Here's the long answer (@Sunil_Prasannan was on the right road)
So I have a long association with Gobekli Tepe. I first went, on my own shilling, on the off chance, as a youngish hungry freelancer in 2006 to write one of the first major articles on the whole place, back when it was basically unknown. The article went viral and halfway made me as a writer
I went out again in 2023 and - because by then I was well known to them - the main archaeologists showed me all the incredible new sites. Especially Karahan Tepe. Etc. These collective sites are now known as the Tas Tepeler
But then on day 3 as we were driving around Necmul the head Turkish boffin of the whole Tas Tepeler said “sod it Leon I'm going to show you something new, we only found this three months ago”. So we abruply diverted to this tiny village in the desert which had obvious Tepe like pillars propping up farm walls, it was like driving to Stonehenge and en route finding a Wiltshire village using megaliths as door frames (only much much older). And then Necmul led me past some chickens to a small stone door and at the doorway he said “the villagers found this when they were emptying a barn a few weeks ago, and they called us in”
Inside that barn was that rock frieze, perhaps 12,000 years old. With the classic Gobekli animals in profile - the horned bull - a man dying maybe - a leopard - and then the fascinating figure of a small strange man holding his penis, with the iconic chevrons on his chest - all motifs used across the Tas Tepeler. In other words, what I was seeing was pretty much final, conclusive proof that Gobekli Tepe and the tas Tepeler actually represent an entire buried 13,000 year old civilisation, which we completely do not understand and might have had writing and was highly sophisticated. Possibly as advanced as the Egyptians but 8000 years earlier. We have no idea how and why and who and what
And Necmul told me, as we stood in that barn, "only a few people have ever seen this. A handful of us archaeologists, one or two academics, now you - this is the first time it’s been revealed since the Ice Age”
The boy was a son of a local farmer who wandered in. And stood by the frieze because he was having fun and we decided he was was good for scale as we took photos
That is why this unique photo, by me, hangs on my wall, instead of any "art" by someone else
To add to the poignancy, the flat I live in now was bought entirely from the earnings from my original thriller based on my first visit to Gobekli Tepe. If these alien-Nephilim with six fingers hadn't build a mad now-buried civilisation, I wouldn't have this flat. Funny how things turn out. I wonder if that was a motivation for them. "In 13,000 years time some English dude will be able to buy a flat, because we have six fingers and we're building underground cities during the Ice Age"
You should really get someone to pitch you to Joe Rogan as a podcast interview. He’s totally obsessed by stuff like Gobekli Tepe.
I'm thinking of writing a non-fiction book about it; I like Graham Hancock but he does go a bit mad with his relentless thesis
You don't need any of his comet-strike, global-civilisation-is-hidden stuff to make Gobekli and the Tas Tepeler completely mindblowing
Who built it? How? Without writing, or pottery, or agriculture? Really???? In 12,000BC (some latest datings put it back to 15,000 BC). Also they had kitchens, and running water, and advanced urban rituals - in theatres and shrines - and all this at a time when humanity was supposedly living in caves. But if they did not have agriculture how did they feed these towns? Becuase these are basically small but highly sophisticated towns being unearthed
What was their religion? What's with the six fingers and SCARY skull cults? Why do they have the same clothes? A uniform? Ritual scars? What's the obsession with penises? The blood chambers? The vulture worship? The exquisite stone work? Where did they learn all this? WERE THEY JUST FUCKING ALIENS????
I have a theory that mainstream archaeologists avoid the whole subject because it so so mad, aberrant and jarringly weird, and surreal, as soon as you talk about it you sound mad. So they tiptoe around it, to preserve their careers
Anyway, now one of the most iconic photos of the whole place (and I have taken quite a few iconic photos of Gobekli Tepe, often used in TV documentaries) is now proudly hanging on my wall
Without going all the way with Graham Hancock, it does seem that pre-industrial civilisations can be very sophisticated, far more sophisticated than we would once have believed, but they can also vanish extremely rapidly, if they get hit by disease, adverse environmental changes, declining food supplies, or destroyed by enemies.
One example is Portuguese and Spanish explorers recording well-populated Indian cities in the Amazon basin in the late 1500’s, which largely disappeared without trace, and were covered by jungle. These were largely thought to be travellers’ tales, until modern archaeologists confirmed their existence. They likely collapsed due to diseases contacted from Europeans. The descendants of the survivors rapidly forgot their technical knowledge, as the economic basis for urban life disappeared.
Paradoxically, that much-reduced population can appear healthier than the former much bigger urban population, but that’s a survivorship bias.
And, I wonder if we see a reverse effect, with the coming of agriculture and the formation of the first towns. It may not be that the population grew weaker, it’s just that the weak now survived in greater numbers than before, as populations expanded.
Indeed. And @Sunil_Prasannan is on to something with his sea-level coastline thesis
I find it entirely conceivable that a truly advanced human civilisation rose declined and fell before the end of the ice age, and was essentially obliterated - with just fragments of folk memory and maybe some technology surviving in scattered places
Indeed the Tas Tepeler are essentially that. Utterly inexplicable in terms of regular archaeological timelines
And of course what we see in Turkey may be the END of their civilisation - not its peak flowering
Personally I reckon they had writing. 8000 years before Sumer. Privately I’ve had archaeologists out there agree with me. But they don’t go on record because it is risky to sound like “Graham Hancock”
Why is it better to put this on a wall rather than some random art by someone else (*waves at @TOPPING*)?
What makes this special? Why have I put it on the wall in my revamping new living room?
Answers on an antique parchment
Are you the one on the left or the one on the right?
This is a tricky one. Here's the long answer (@Sunil_Prasannan was on the right road)
So I have a long association with Gobekli Tepe. I first went, on my own shilling, on the off chance, as a youngish hungry freelancer in 2006 to write one of the first major articles on the whole place, back when it was basically unknown. The article went viral and halfway made me as a writer
I went out again in 2023 and - because by then I was well known to them - the main archaeologists showed me all the incredible new sites. Especially Karahan Tepe. Etc. These collective sites are now known as the Tas Tepeler
But then on day 3 as we were driving around Necmul the head Turkish boffin of the whole Tas Tepeler said “sod it Leon I'm going to show you something new, we only found this three months ago”. So we abruply diverted to this tiny village in the desert which had obvious Tepe like pillars propping up farm walls, it was like driving to Stonehenge and en route finding a Wiltshire village using megaliths as door frames (only much much older). And then Necmul led me past some chickens to a small stone door and at the doorway he said “the villagers found this when they were emptying a barn a few weeks ago, and they called us in”
Inside that barn was that rock frieze, perhaps 12,000 years old. With the classic Gobekli animals in profile - the horned bull - a man dying maybe - a leopard - and then the fascinating figure of a small strange man holding his penis, with the iconic chevrons on his chest - all motifs used across the Tas Tepeler. In other words, what I was seeing was pretty much final, conclusive proof that Gobekli Tepe and the tas Tepeler actually represent an entire buried 13,000 year old civilisation, which we completely do not understand and might have had writing and was highly sophisticated. Possibly as advanced as the Egyptians but 8000 years earlier. We have no idea how and why and who and what
And Necmul told me, as we stood in that barn, "only a few people have ever seen this. A handful of us archaeologists, one or two academics, now you - this is the first time it’s been revealed since the Ice Age”
The boy was a son of a local farmer who wandered in. And stood by the frieze because he was having fun and we decided he was was good for scale as we took photos
That is why this unique photo, by me, hangs on my wall, instead of any "art" by someone else
To add to the poignancy, the flat I live in now was bought entirely from the earnings from my original thriller based on my first visit to Gobekli Tepe. If these alien-Nephilim with six fingers hadn't build a mad now-buried civilisation, I wouldn't have this flat. Funny how things turn out. I wonder if that was a motivation for them. "In 13,000 years time some English dude will be able to buy a flat, because we have six fingers and we're building underground cities during the Ice Age"
You should really get someone to pitch you to Joe Rogan as a podcast interview. He’s totally obsessed by stuff like Gobekli Tepe.
I'm thinking of writing a non-fiction book about it; I like Graham Hancock but he does go a bit mad with his relentless thesis
You don't need any of his comet-strike, global-civilisation-is-hidden stuff to make Gobekli and the Tas Tepeler completely mindblowing
Who built it? How? Without writing, or pottery, or agriculture? Really???? In 12,000BC (some latest datings put it back to 15,000 BC). Also they had kitchens, and running water, and advanced urban rituals - in theatres and shrines - and all this at a time when humanity was supposedly living in caves. But if they did not have agriculture how did they feed these towns? Becuase these are basically small but highly sophisticated towns being unearthed
What was their religion? What's with the six fingers and SCARY skull cults? Why do they have the same clothes? A uniform? Ritual scars? What's the obsession with penises? The blood chambers? The vulture worship? The exquisite stone work? Where did they learn all this? WERE THEY JUST FUCKING ALIENS????
I have a theory that mainstream archaeologists avoid the whole subject because it so so mad, aberrant and jarringly weird, and surreal, as soon as you talk about it you sound mad. So they tiptoe around it, to preserve their careers
Anyway, now one of the most iconic photos of the whole place (and I have taken quite a few iconic photos of Gobekli Tepe, often used in TV documentaries) is now proudly hanging on my wall
Without going all the way with Graham Hancock, it does seem that pre-industrial civilisations can be very sophisticated, far more sophisticated than we would once have believed, but they can also vanish extremely rapidly, if they get hit by disease, adverse environmental changes, declining food supplies, or destroyed by enemies.
One example is Portuguese and Spanish explorers recording well-populated Indian cities in the Amazon basin in the late 1500’s, which largely disappeared without trace, and were covered by jungle. These were largely thought to be travellers’ tales, until modern archaeologists confirmed their existence. They likely collapsed due to diseases contacted from Europeans. The descendants of the survivors rapidly forgot their technical knowledge, as the economic basis for urban life disappeared.
Paradoxically, that much-reduced population can appear healthier than the former much bigger urban population, but that’s a survivorship bias.
And, I wonder if we see a reverse effect, with the coming of agriculture and the formation of the first towns. It may not be that the population grew weaker, it’s just that the weak now survived in greater numbers than before, as populations expanded.
Indeed. And @Sunil_Prasannan is on to something with his sea-level coastline thesis
I find it entirely conceivable that a truly advanced human civilisation rose declined and fell before the end of the ice age, and was essentially obliterated - with just fragments of folk memory and maybe some technology surviving in scattered places
Indeed the Tas Tepeler are essentially that. Utterly inexplicable in terms of regular archaeological timelines
And of course what we see in Turkey may be the END of their civilisation - not its peak flowering
Personally I reckon they had writing. 8000 years before Sumer. Privately I’ve had archaeologists out there agree with me. But they don’t go on record because it is risky to sound like “Graham Hancock”
Did these previous civilisations or what could have been observed of them 10,000 years ago create the pervasive legends of the flood that is found in so many places around the middle east in particular, I wonder.
Why is it better to put this on a wall rather than some random art by someone else (*waves at @TOPPING*)?
What makes this special? Why have I put it on the wall in my revamping new living room?
Answers on an antique parchment
Are you the one on the left or the one on the right?
This is a tricky one. Here's the long answer (@Sunil_Prasannan was on the right road)
So I have a long association with Gobekli Tepe. I first went, on my own shilling, on the off chance, as a youngish hungry freelancer in 2006 to write one of the first major articles on the whole place, back when it was basically unknown. The article went viral and halfway made me as a writer
I went out again in 2023 and - because by then I was well known to them - the main archaeologists showed me all the incredible new sites. Especially Karahan Tepe. Etc. These collective sites are now known as the Tas Tepeler
But then on day 3 as we were driving around Necmul the head Turkish boffin of the whole Tas Tepeler said “sod it Leon I'm going to show you something new, we only found this three months ago”. So we abruply diverted to this tiny village in the desert which had obvious Tepe like pillars propping up farm walls, it was like driving to Stonehenge and en route finding a Wiltshire village using megaliths as door frames (only much much older). And then Necmul led me past some chickens to a small stone door and at the doorway he said “the villagers found this when they were emptying a barn a few weeks ago, and they called us in”
Inside that barn was that rock frieze, perhaps 12,000 years old. With the classic Gobekli animals in profile - the horned bull - a man dying maybe - a leopard - and then the fascinating figure of a small strange man holding his penis, with the iconic chevrons on his chest - all motifs used across the Tas Tepeler. In other words, what I was seeing was pretty much final, conclusive proof that Gobekli Tepe and the tas Tepeler actually represent an entire buried 13,000 year old civilisation, which we completely do not understand and might have had writing and was highly sophisticated. Possibly as advanced as the Egyptians but 8000 years earlier. We have no idea how and why and who and what
And Necmul told me, as we stood in that barn, "only a few people have ever seen this. A handful of us archaeologists, one or two academics, now you - this is the first time it’s been revealed since the Ice Age”
The boy was a son of a local farmer who wandered in. And stood by the frieze because he was having fun and we decided he was was good for scale as we took photos
That is why this unique photo, by me, hangs on my wall, instead of any "art" by someone else
To add to the poignancy, the flat I live in now was bought entirely from the earnings from my original thriller based on my first visit to Gobekli Tepe. If these alien-Nephilim with six fingers hadn't build a mad now-buried civilisation, I wouldn't have this flat. Funny how things turn out. I wonder if that was a motivation for them. "In 13,000 years time some English dude will be able to buy a flat, because we have six fingers and we're building underground cities during the Ice Age"
You should really get someone to pitch you to Joe Rogan as a podcast interview. He’s totally obsessed by stuff like Gobekli Tepe.
I'm thinking of writing a non-fiction book about it; I like Graham Hancock but he does go a bit mad with his relentless thesis
You don't need any of his comet-strike, global-civilisation-is-hidden stuff to make Gobekli and the Tas Tepeler completely mindblowing
Who built it? How? Without writing, or pottery, or agriculture? Really???? In 12,000BC (some latest datings put it back to 15,000 BC). Also they had kitchens, and running water, and advanced urban rituals - in theatres and shrines - and all this at a time when humanity was supposedly living in caves. But if they did not have agriculture how did they feed these towns? Becuase these are basically small but highly sophisticated towns being unearthed
What was their religion? What's with the six fingers and SCARY skull cults? Why do they have the same clothes? A uniform? Ritual scars? What's the obsession with penises? The blood chambers? The vulture worship? The exquisite stone work? Where did they learn all this? WERE THEY JUST FUCKING ALIENS????
I have a theory that mainstream archaeologists avoid the whole subject because it so so mad, aberrant and jarringly weird, and surreal, as soon as you talk about it you sound mad. So they tiptoe around it, to preserve their careers
Anyway, now one of the most iconic photos of the whole place (and I have taken quite a few iconic photos of Gobekli Tepe, often used in TV documentaries) is now proudly hanging on my wall
It's a great photo, imbued with meaning but just weird to have it on your wall by the equally weird "modern" lamp.
I suppose as you live on your own it's nice to have all these markers around the place that remind you of this, that, or the other, just that that's not how most people process memories.
Now of course everyone these days takes 50 photos of anything and then never looks at them (example is concerts - everyone stands there with their phones above their heads filming), just that for someone such as yourself it is a weird thing to do. Like poshos who put pictures of themselves playing polo or at School or college up in the loo. Sure it gives an ego buzz but other than that it shouldn't be front and centre of your interior design plan.
Anyway, I hope it gives you the right sensation when you look at it every day so each to their own.
And regarding Gobekli Tepe the SYSK (Stuff You Should Know) podcast did a good episode on it but/and managed to make it sound a lot less sensational than you hold it to be.
Why is it better to put this on a wall rather than some random art by someone else (*waves at @TOPPING*)?
What makes this special? Why have I put it on the wall in my revamping new living room?
Answers on an antique parchment
Are you the one on the left or the one on the right?
This is a tricky one. Here's the long answer (@Sunil_Prasannan was on the right road)
So I have a long association with Gobekli Tepe. I first went, on my own shilling, on the off chance, as a youngish hungry freelancer in 2006 to write one of the first major articles on the whole place, back when it was basically unknown. The article went viral and halfway made me as a writer
I went out again in 2023 and - because by then I was well known to them - the main archaeologists showed me all the incredible new sites. Especially Karahan Tepe. Etc. These collective sites are now known as the Tas Tepeler
But then on day 3 as we were driving around Necmul the head Turkish boffin of the whole Tas Tepeler said “sod it Leon I'm going to show you something new, we only found this three months ago”. So we abruply diverted to this tiny village in the desert which had obvious Tepe like pillars propping up farm walls, it was like driving to Stonehenge and en route finding a Wiltshire village using megaliths as door frames (only much much older). And then Necmul led me past some chickens to a small stone door and at the doorway he said “the villagers found this when they were emptying a barn a few weeks ago, and they called us in”
Inside that barn was that rock frieze, perhaps 12,000 years old. With the classic Gobekli animals in profile - the horned bull - a man dying maybe - a leopard - and then the fascinating figure of a small strange man holding his penis, with the iconic chevrons on his chest - all motifs used across the Tas Tepeler. In other words, what I was seeing was pretty much final, conclusive proof that Gobekli Tepe and the tas Tepeler actually represent an entire buried 13,000 year old civilisation, which we completely do not understand and might have had writing and was highly sophisticated. Possibly as advanced as the Egyptians but 8000 years earlier. We have no idea how and why and who and what
And Necmul told me, as we stood in that barn, "only a few people have ever seen this. A handful of us archaeologists, one or two academics, now you - this is the first time it’s been revealed since the Ice Age”
The boy was a son of a local farmer who wandered in. And stood by the frieze because he was having fun and we decided he was was good for scale as we took photos
That is why this unique photo, by me, hangs on my wall, instead of any "art" by someone else
To add to the poignancy, the flat I live in now was bought entirely from the earnings from my original thriller based on my first visit to Gobekli Tepe. If these alien-Nephilim with six fingers hadn't build a mad now-buried civilisation, I wouldn't have this flat. Funny how things turn out. I wonder if that was a motivation for them. "In 13,000 years time some English dude will be able to buy a flat, because we have six fingers and we're building underground cities during the Ice Age"
You should really get someone to pitch you to Joe Rogan as a podcast interview. He’s totally obsessed by stuff like Gobekli Tepe.
I'm thinking of writing a non-fiction book about it; I like Graham Hancock but he does go a bit mad with his relentless thesis
You don't need any of his comet-strike, global-civilisation-is-hidden stuff to make Gobekli and the Tas Tepeler completely mindblowing
Who built it? How? Without writing, or pottery, or agriculture? Really???? In 12,000BC (some latest datings put it back to 15,000 BC). Also they had kitchens, and running water, and advanced urban rituals - in theatres and shrines - and all this at a time when humanity was supposedly living in caves. But if they did not have agriculture how did they feed these towns? Becuase these are basically small but highly sophisticated towns being unearthed
What was their religion? What's with the six fingers and SCARY skull cults? Why do they have the same clothes? A uniform? Ritual scars? What's the obsession with penises? The blood chambers? The vulture worship? The exquisite stone work? Where did they learn all this? WERE THEY JUST FUCKING ALIENS????
I have a theory that mainstream archaeologists avoid the whole subject because it so so mad, aberrant and jarringly weird, and surreal, as soon as you talk about it you sound mad. So they tiptoe around it, to preserve their careers
Anyway, now one of the most iconic photos of the whole place (and I have taken quite a few iconic photos of Gobekli Tepe, often used in TV documentaries) is now proudly hanging on my wall
Without going all the way with Graham Hancock, it does seem that pre-industrial civilisations can be very sophisticated, far more sophisticated than we would once have believed, but they can also vanish extremely rapidly, if they get hit by disease, adverse environmental changes, declining food supplies, or destroyed by enemies.
One example is Portuguese and Spanish explorers recording well-populated Indian cities in the Amazon basin in the late 1500’s, which largely disappeared without trace, and were covered by jungle. These were largely thought to be travellers’ tales, until modern archaeologists confirmed their existence. They likely collapsed due to diseases contacted from Europeans. The descendants of the survivors rapidly forgot their technical knowledge, as the economic basis for urban life disappeared.
Paradoxically, that much-reduced population can appear healthier than the former much bigger urban population, but that’s a survivorship bias.
And, I wonder if we see a reverse effect, with the coming of agriculture and the formation of the first towns. It may not be that the population grew weaker, it’s just that the weak now survived in greater numbers than before, as populations expanded.
Indeed. And @Sunil_Prasannan is on to something with his sea-level coastline thesis
I find it entirely conceivable that a truly advanced human civilisation rose declined and fell before the end of the ice age, and was essentially obliterated - with just fragments of folk memory and maybe some technology surviving in scattered places
Indeed the Tas Tepeler are essentially that. Utterly inexplicable in terms of regular archaeological timelines
And of course what we see in Turkey may be the END of their civilisation - not its peak flowering
Personally I reckon they had writing. 8000 years before Sumer. Privately I’ve had archaeologists out there agree with me. But they don’t go on record because it is risky to sound like “Graham Hancock”
Did these previous civilisations or what could have been observed of them 10,000 years ago create the pervasive legends of the flood that is found in so many places around the middle east in particular, I wonder.
I’ve wondered that. The idea of a great early civilisation being swept away is basically The Flood. Why it should not be aurally preserved and then eventually written down?
Ditto the garden of Eden myth. That is surely the decline from hunter gathering to farming turned into a biblical story. We used to wander a garden plucking fruit and eating game, then we were cast out of this paradise, and Adam had to “till the field with the sweat of his brow” - ie he had to farm
As we’ve discussed on pb, the shift to farming meant more food for more people, but actual daily life got worse for nearly everyone - more work, more zoonotic diseases, shorter lives, and smaller stature. Humans literally shrank
Marc Andreessen complains to Downing Street about Online Safety Act and UK tech minister
In a sign that the government was caught off guard by the extent to which these tools would be used, ministers last week requested data from the internet regulator Ofcom about how and when VPNs were being downloaded, according to two people briefed on the move.
Kyle has said publicly that he is not considering any ban on VPNs, but officials say ministers are keen to understand how the tools are being used, particularly by children.
It's not hard to see where this is going. What happens when Ofcom come back and say, yes, VPNs are being extensively used by under-18s and the OSA is being bypassed to the extent it's a giant waste of time?
I don't believe Kyle's statements about VPNs. He's one of those morons who believe any problem can be fixed by making a new law. So the government will ban VPNs without a licence.
When people say this stuff about what's going to happen and it doesn't (eg the government were going to keep the lockdown beyond the pandemic because they were luvin it) I'd like to see some accountability. Some fessing up that "I was wrong and will learn from it "
Like I always do on the odd occasion I get things wrong.
If the government doesn't implement some kind of restriction on VPNs before they get kicked out I will happily and publicly acknowledge I was wrong. But the alternative scenario is to admit the OSA is a failure, repeal it and look like a bunch of ridiculous fools. Can't see this government being in any way willing to do that.
The only way I see a VPN ban not happening is if some organisation - Wikipedia possibly - refuses to comply with the OSA and then takes uk.gov to the ECHR and wins. But that will take more years than this administration has left.
I'm no tech expert but I'd have thought there are possibilities between do nothing (about VPNs accessing 'nasty' sites) and a ban (the chance of which imo is close to zero).
If you want to secure access to certain sites for people below the age of x, you need to have a way of proving you are over x.
1) you use official identification documents to prove this. Online banks do this. No one, will upload their passport details to a porn site, though.
2) A trusted third party could run a site that, having proved you are over x, issues one use codes (tokens) that confirm to the over x sites that you are over x, without disclosing your actual personal identity.
Either will not prevent strawman sales, logins etc.
The second option is the most practical. It could be used for a wide range of things - buying alcohol online, gambling access etc. So using it would not be immediately disreputable. You could easily imagine that Amazon could offer issuing such tokens.
I know it's difficult but just as technology makes regulation harder perhaps it can provide ways to help it too.
I don't subscribe to the 'Internet can't be messed with' pov.
As to how, you tech-literate guys will have to work it out.
You didn't read what I wrote? OK
The problem with the second method I outline (the preferred idea of professional security experts, by the way), for the politicians, is two fold.
1) They don't understand it. 2) And they don't like the idea of anonymising access. They (or more accurately, the Police and the loonier civil servants in the Home Office) want ZE! LIST!
Don't be a pompous ass. I read it, processed, and replied.
You should be grateful. Tell me you are, otherwise I might stop bothering.
Right, no more call strength turnip juice for you.
Why is it better to put this on a wall rather than some random art by someone else (*waves at @TOPPING*)?
What makes this special? Why have I put it on the wall in my revamping new living room?
Answers on an antique parchment
Are you the one on the left or the one on the right?
This is a tricky one. Here's the long answer (@Sunil_Prasannan was on the right road)
So I have a long association with Gobekli Tepe. I first went, on my own shilling, on the off chance, as a youngish hungry freelancer in 2006 to write one of the first major articles on the whole place, back when it was basically unknown. The article went viral and halfway made me as a writer
I went out again in 2023 and - because by then I was well known to them - the main archaeologists showed me all the incredible new sites. Especially Karahan Tepe. Etc. These collective sites are now known as the Tas Tepeler
But then on day 3 as we were driving around Necmul the head Turkish boffin of the whole Tas Tepeler said “sod it Leon I'm going to show you something new, we only found this three months ago”. So we abruply diverted to this tiny village in the desert which had obvious Tepe like pillars propping up farm walls, it was like driving to Stonehenge and en route finding a Wiltshire village using megaliths as door frames (only much much older). And then Necmul led me past some chickens to a small stone door and at the doorway he said “the villagers found this when they were emptying a barn a few weeks ago, and they called us in”
Inside that barn was that rock frieze, perhaps 12,000 years old. With the classic Gobekli animals in profile - the horned bull - a man dying maybe - a leopard - and then the fascinating figure of a small strange man holding his penis, with the iconic chevrons on his chest - all motifs used across the Tas Tepeler. In other words, what I was seeing was pretty much final, conclusive proof that Gobekli Tepe and the tas Tepeler actually represent an entire buried 13,000 year old civilisation, which we completely do not understand and might have had writing and was highly sophisticated. Possibly as advanced as the Egyptians but 8000 years earlier. We have no idea how and why and who and what
And Necmul told me, as we stood in that barn, "only a few people have ever seen this. A handful of us archaeologists, one or two academics, now you - this is the first time it’s been revealed since the Ice Age”
The boy was a son of a local farmer who wandered in. And stood by the frieze because he was having fun and we decided he was was good for scale as we took photos
That is why this unique photo, by me, hangs on my wall, instead of any "art" by someone else
To add to the poignancy, the flat I live in now was bought entirely from the earnings from my original thriller based on my first visit to Gobekli Tepe. If these alien-Nephilim with six fingers hadn't build a mad now-buried civilisation, I wouldn't have this flat. Funny how things turn out. I wonder if that was a motivation for them. "In 13,000 years time some English dude will be able to buy a flat, because we have six fingers and we're building underground cities during the Ice Age"
You should really get someone to pitch you to Joe Rogan as a podcast interview. He’s totally obsessed by stuff like Gobekli Tepe.
I'm thinking of writing a non-fiction book about it; I like Graham Hancock but he does go a bit mad with his relentless thesis
You don't need any of his comet-strike, global-civilisation-is-hidden stuff to make Gobekli and the Tas Tepeler completely mindblowing
Who built it? How? Without writing, or pottery, or agriculture? Really???? In 12,000BC (some latest datings put it back to 15,000 BC). Also they had kitchens, and running water, and advanced urban rituals - in theatres and shrines - and all this at a time when humanity was supposedly living in caves. But if they did not have agriculture how did they feed these towns? Becuase these are basically small but highly sophisticated towns being unearthed
What was their religion? What's with the six fingers and SCARY skull cults? Why do they have the same clothes? A uniform? Ritual scars? What's the obsession with penises? The blood chambers? The vulture worship? The exquisite stone work? Where did they learn all this? WERE THEY JUST FUCKING ALIENS????
I have a theory that mainstream archaeologists avoid the whole subject because it so so mad, aberrant and jarringly weird, and surreal, as soon as you talk about it you sound mad. So they tiptoe around it, to preserve their careers
Anyway, now one of the most iconic photos of the whole place (and I have taken quite a few iconic photos of Gobekli Tepe, often used in TV documentaries) is now proudly hanging on my wall
Without going all the way with Graham Hancock, it does seem that pre-industrial civilisations can be very sophisticated, far more sophisticated than we would once have believed, but they can also vanish extremely rapidly, if they get hit by disease, adverse environmental changes, declining food supplies, or destroyed by enemies.
One example is Portuguese and Spanish explorers recording well-populated Indian cities in the Amazon basin in the late 1500’s, which largely disappeared without trace, and were covered by jungle. These were largely thought to be travellers’ tales, until modern archaeologists confirmed their existence. They likely collapsed due to diseases contacted from Europeans. The descendants of the survivors rapidly forgot their technical knowledge, as the economic basis for urban life disappeared.
Paradoxically, that much-reduced population can appear healthier than the former much bigger urban population, but that’s a survivorship bias.
And, I wonder if we see a reverse effect, with the coming of agriculture and the formation of the first towns. It may not be that the population grew weaker, it’s just that the weak now survived in greater numbers than before, as populations expanded.
Indeed. And @Sunil_Prasannan is on to something with his sea-level coastline thesis
I find it entirely conceivable that a truly advanced human civilisation rose declined and fell before the end of the ice age, and was essentially obliterated - with just fragments of folk memory and maybe some technology surviving in scattered places
Indeed the Tas Tepeler are essentially that. Utterly inexplicable in terms of regular archaeological timelines
And of course what we see in Turkey may be the END of their civilisation - not its peak flowering
Personally I reckon they had writing. 8000 years before Sumer. Privately I’ve had archaeologists out there agree with me. But they don’t go on record because it is risky to sound like “Graham Hancock”
Did these previous civilisations or what could have been observed of them 10,000 years ago create the pervasive legends of the flood that is found in so many places around the middle east in particular, I wonder.
I’ve wondered that. The idea of a great early civilisation being swept away is basically The Flood. Why it should not be aurally preserved and then eventually written down?
Ditto the garden of Eden myth. That is surely the decline from hunter gathering to farming turned into a biblical story. We used to wander a garden plucking fruit and eating game, then we were cast out of this paradise, and Adam had to “till the field with the sweat of his brow” - ie he had to farm
As we’ve discussed on pb, the shift to farming meant more food for more people, but actual daily life got worse for nearly everyone - more work, more zoonotic diseases, shorter lives, and smaller stature. Humans literally shrank
But to get that increase in population, rates of child mortality, and maternal mortality (which are the big barriers to pre-industrial population growth), must have fallen. More abundant food (even if less tasty), would have meant more children reaching adulthood, and fewer women dying from childbirth.
We might just be seeing lots of people surviving, post the coming of agriculture, who would have died previously.
@WSJ Breaking: Russian President Vladimir Putin told the U.S. he'll halt the war in exchange for Eastern Ukraine
Trump claims “President Putin I believe wants to see peace” and acknowledges Ukraine will have to make territorial concessions (unclear what Russia’s concessions will be, if any) https://x.com/atrupar/status/1953915459708842361
Why is it better to put this on a wall rather than some random art by someone else (*waves at @TOPPING*)?
What makes this special? Why have I put it on the wall in my revamping new living room?
Answers on an antique parchment
Are you the one on the left or the one on the right?
This is a tricky one. Here's the long answer (@Sunil_Prasannan was on the right road)
So I have a long association with Gobekli Tepe. I first went, on my own shilling, on the off chance, as a youngish hungry freelancer in 2006 to write one of the first major articles on the whole place, back when it was basically unknown. The article went viral and halfway made me as a writer
I went out again in 2023 and - because by then I was well known to them - the main archaeologists showed me all the incredible new sites. Especially Karahan Tepe. Etc. These collective sites are now known as the Tas Tepeler
But then on day 3 as we were driving around Necmul the head Turkish boffin of the whole Tas Tepeler said “sod it Leon I'm going to show you something new, we only found this three months ago”. So we abruply diverted to this tiny village in the desert which had obvious Tepe like pillars propping up farm walls, it was like driving to Stonehenge and en route finding a Wiltshire village using megaliths as door frames (only much much older). And then Necmul led me past some chickens to a small stone door and at the doorway he said “the villagers found this when they were emptying a barn a few weeks ago, and they called us in”
Inside that barn was that rock frieze, perhaps 12,000 years old. With the classic Gobekli animals in profile - the horned bull - a man dying maybe - a leopard - and then the fascinating figure of a small strange man holding his penis, with the iconic chevrons on his chest - all motifs used across the Tas Tepeler. In other words, what I was seeing was pretty much final, conclusive proof that Gobekli Tepe and the tas Tepeler actually represent an entire buried 13,000 year old civilisation, which we completely do not understand and might have had writing and was highly sophisticated. Possibly as advanced as the Egyptians but 8000 years earlier. We have no idea how and why and who and what
And Necmul told me, as we stood in that barn, "only a few people have ever seen this. A handful of us archaeologists, one or two academics, now you - this is the first time it’s been revealed since the Ice Age”
The boy was a son of a local farmer who wandered in. And stood by the frieze because he was having fun and we decided he was was good for scale as we took photos
That is why this unique photo, by me, hangs on my wall, instead of any "art" by someone else
To add to the poignancy, the flat I live in now was bought entirely from the earnings from my original thriller based on my first visit to Gobekli Tepe. If these alien-Nephilim with six fingers hadn't build a mad now-buried civilisation, I wouldn't have this flat. Funny how things turn out. I wonder if that was a motivation for them. "In 13,000 years time some English dude will be able to buy a flat, because we have six fingers and we're building underground cities during the Ice Age"
You should really get someone to pitch you to Joe Rogan as a podcast interview. He’s totally obsessed by stuff like Gobekli Tepe.
I'm thinking of writing a non-fiction book about it; I like Graham Hancock but he does go a bit mad with his relentless thesis
You don't need any of his comet-strike, global-civilisation-is-hidden stuff to make Gobekli and the Tas Tepeler completely mindblowing
Who built it? How? Without writing, or pottery, or agriculture? Really???? In 12,000BC (some latest datings put it back to 15,000 BC). Also they had kitchens, and running water, and advanced urban rituals - in theatres and shrines - and all this at a time when humanity was supposedly living in caves. But if they did not have agriculture how did they feed these towns? Becuase these are basically small but highly sophisticated towns being unearthed
What was their religion? What's with the six fingers and SCARY skull cults? Why do they have the same clothes? A uniform? Ritual scars? What's the obsession with penises? The blood chambers? The vulture worship? The exquisite stone work? Where did they learn all this? WERE THEY JUST FUCKING ALIENS????
I have a theory that mainstream archaeologists avoid the whole subject because it so so mad, aberrant and jarringly weird, and surreal, as soon as you talk about it you sound mad. So they tiptoe around it, to preserve their careers
Anyway, now one of the most iconic photos of the whole place (and I have taken quite a few iconic photos of Gobekli Tepe, often used in TV documentaries) is now proudly hanging on my wall
It's a great photo, imbued with meaning but just weird to have it on your wall by the equally weird "modern" lamp.
I suppose as you live on your own it's nice to have all these markers around the place that remind you of this, that, or the other, just that that's not how most people process memories.
Now of course everyone these days takes 50 photos of anything and then never looks at them (example is concerts - everyone stands there with their phones above their heads filming), just that for someone such as yourself it is a weird thing to do. Like poshos who put pictures of themselves playing polo or at School or college up in the loo. Sure it gives an ego buzz but other than that it shouldn't be front and centre of your interior design plan.
Anyway, I hope it gives you the right sensation when you look at it every day so each to their own.
And regarding Gobekli Tepe the SYSK (Stuff You Should Know) podcast did a good episode on it but/and managed to make it sound a lot less sensational than you hold it to be.
You’re just not the brightest. But you’re a good reliable unimaginative Englishman of a certain stolid upper middle class ilk, and you served your country in the military (more than I did), and you mean well even if you slip into wokeness. So I won’t sneer any more than needs be
Britain needs people like you. Also like me. Probably, indeed, it needs more people like you than me
@WSJ Breaking: Russian President Vladimir Putin told the U.S. he'll halt the war in exchange for Eastern Ukraine
Trump claims “President Putin I believe wants to see peace” and acknowledges Ukraine will have to make territorial concessions (unclear what Russia’s concessions will be, if any) https://x.com/atrupar/status/1953915459708842361
There's the problem, right there.
And to think the red carpet will be wheeled out in September for him . Utterly shameful .
I expect the two child benefit cap will go in November mostly funded by an increase in gambling taxes . This no 10 will hope will reduce the appeal of Your party .
An increase in gambling taxes is low hanging fruit and won’t be controversial for the vast majority of the public .
Good morning
Another unpopular measure according to the polls, and does nothing to address Reeves 'all my very own deep hole' in the public finances
Why doesn't she focus on all the popular ways to increase taxes and cut spending? It's exasperating.
Truth is that income tax has to rise, but she cannot do that because of her idiotic pre election promises
Also you do not raise taxes to address a huge hole in the public finances and use some of that tax raising to create another spending commitment
Do you think whoever is leading the tory party at the next GE will do into it promising to raise income tax because I don't.
Labour are a high tax high spend government and it is not in their DNA to cut spending
Conservatives are low tax low spending and I would expect a conservative government to reduce corporation tax, encourage wealth creation and abolish IHT on farmers. I would also expect a review of all net zero subsidies
Why on earth would you expect them to do that? Most of that is at odds with their time in office - particularly on renewables and farmers.
Any party that is focussed on a pensioner voting cohort like the Conservatives is going to high tax, high spend.
Cameron and Osborne certainly cut spending as a percentage of gdp and cut tax at all income levels, including a big inheritance tax cut.
Kemi has said she will take an axe to spending, especially welfare spending and net zero spending etc and at one stage even proposed means testing the triple lock
How much did the national debt increase during the last Conservative government?
Because of lockdown, Cameron and Osborne certainly cut it compared to what Brown left
You’d think someone interested in politics would understand the difference between the deficit and the debt but you’ve never been good with numbers.
You did not just say national debt, you said national debt increase, the national debt increase was lower under Cameron and Clegg and Osborne than Brown and Darling
Are you trying to argue that the national debt didn’t increase between 2010 and 2024? Because it did. Massively.
It increased at a lower rate than under Brown and Darling, certainly pre lockdown
And yet the national debt increased. Massively. Strong financial management by the Tories. Bravo.
Spending as a percentage of gdp was 47% when Brown left office in 2010, falling to 41% when Cameron left office in 2016
Maybe, but that isn’t the national debt. That’s a different statistic entirely.
It led to the decline in increase in the national debt
Maybe. But yet the national debt still increased over the 14 years you were in power. Massively.
What additional cuts would you have made to balance the budget and run a surplus?
I'd double council tax. That's the current deficit wiped out (nearly) in one go.
A freeze on hospital spending, abolish stamp duty, NICs/IT merger. Borrow as much for capital investment as the markets allow.
I honestly don't see the point in borrowing for capital investment when the cost of infrastructure is so high. We need to actually work to remove all of those barriers before we even think about that. Again, it just seems absolutely criminal to me that building a third runway at Heathrow will cost £49bn, even the short runway will come in at £21bn. This is just one example, there's suggestions that the next nuclear plant will be £70bn while Korea builds all of this similar infrastructure at a tenth of the cost. It's not as though their living standards are substantially different to ours.
It's not universally bad. We've had some good projects in Scotland. Queensferry Crossing came in under budget and on time. Small stuff, incremental stuff, tends to go ok.
I think you've fallen for the trap of thinking in terms of billions, not millions. The odd town bypass, new tram routes, a few million on cycle lanes, rail electrification, phone masts, a public health investment. That can add up to billions, but you've diversified across projects so that one disaster doesn't cause the whole investment to collapse.
Yes lots of small projects can add up to a decent gain, yet it's the big projects that will move the needle. The problem we have is the government treats it like something like HS2 as a 5x 55 point unrelated tickets instead of an epic with 150x 3 point tickets.
One of my best mates was previously on the project and he was sitting around being paid £650 per day to do nothing because there just wasn't anything for him to do but they'd contracted him from a set date to a set date but that work was so badly delayed that for the whole 3 months of the contract he got paid to be "on call" and then once work finally did commence they had to call him and his crew back at an even higher rate. That's about 25 electricians of varying skill level on day rates because they declined to do the fixed price deal he offered as it was "too restrictive" due to him setting a specific time to start and finish, requiring the site to be handed in a certain way and all materials etc... to be delivered to a tight schedule and completing the project over 4.5 months. In the end it took them 3 months of doing nothing, then another 6 months of actual work and the overall cost was 2.5x what he offered in the fixed price contract.
I have no doubt that this small example isn't the only one where inept public sector project managers and consultants who don't know what they're doing end up pissing public money into the wind because there's zero repercussions.
That’s nuts, and you know that exactly the same scenario would have played out for every single other trade on the project. Thousands of people people each paid hundreds of pounds a day to do nothing productive.
That - on a massive scale - is what I saw and experienced all day every day during my time in 'investment banking'. And not a government or public sector employee in sight.
The difference being that investment banking inefficiencies are a problem for the bank management and shareholders, as opposed to taxpayers being forcibly relieved of their money under penalty of imprisonment.
Except it is a drag on everyone else and in 08/09 led to an enormous direct call on public money.
That was Gordon Brown’s fault from the beginning to the end. Many banks should have been allowed to fail, with insured deposits and safe mortgages kept in some sort of a government bank that could have been floated later.
Oh for heaven's sake. Are you for real?
Yes. Brown privatised the profits but socialised the losses.
Much of today’s nightmare of government finances can be traced back to the fcuked-up response to the 2008 crisis.
It was a response to a fuck up not a fucked up response.
Comments
These tore up the pavement, when they got big. Because the pavements are narrow, in places, this makes it impossible to use prams, wheelchairs or walking frames. Literally you can’t get through the gap between the tree and people’s garden walls, except by scrambling over tree roots erupting from the pavement.
The sane thing to do is chop the trees down and replace. They have all the cultural value of a pine tree in one of those Swedish forest grown for wood pulp.
But no.
So the old people and mothers walk in the actual road, with the cars.
Google and Facebook, not so much.
So far it's just tinkered a bit. The system needs a fundamental rebuilding, without spending the rest of this parliament arguing over the details.
I'm not sure there are any ministers up to it, though ?
I don't subscribe to the 'Internet can't be messed with' pov.
As to how, you tech-literate guys will have to work it out.
This explains all their behaviour. They are now all about accruing personal wealth and future-career-prospecs. Or a pension
RIP.
Hah! Touching
But no
The problem with the second method I outline (the preferred idea of professional security experts, by the way), for the politicians, is two fold.
1) They don't understand it.
2) And they don't like the idea of anonymising access. They (or more accurately, the Police and the loonier civil servants in the Home Office) want ZE! LIST!
I hate Britain.
The roots of a tree grow twice as far as the height of the tree so can quickly undermine the nearby pavements and eventually the houses themselves. In addition, the canopy can obstruct not only buses but as I've seen in streets near me, it can actually reduce light going into people's houses.
The trees need to be properly looked after and routinely cut back but the roots remain a big problem until and unless the tree is removed. A number have in fact been taken down in Newham because of the subsidence issues they were causing.
You should be grateful. Tell me you are, otherwise I might stop bothering.
Tell me what Labour has done that's better than what we had previously?
But to use those requires thinking and long term planning.
@malcolmg only for the whole weekend.
https://x.com/jburnmurdoch/status/1641799742228144130
Beyond age 70, US mortality/survival rates are very similar to other rich countries. But between teenage years and early middle age there is a vast gulf...
...This has an outsized impact on life exp because deaths at early ages erase far more life than even a large number of older folks dying slightly early.
More years of American lives were erased by drugs, guns & road deaths in 2021 alone than from Covid during the whole pandemic.
...The result is that the US is the only developed country where even if you strip out all Covid deaths, life expectancy still dropped by a year since 2019
IMHO the single biggest policy failure of the last three decades has been on housing.
Problems start when residents think a particular area should be immune from all development and developers push for higher densities to maximise profits.
The issue is that when a traditional business goes into into insolvency, then essentially everything is frozen. So, if Joe's Widgets Ltd banks with Dodgy Bank PLC, and then Dodgy Bank PLC is put into insovency by the the Bank of England.
Well, now Joe's Widgets can't pay their employees. Which means in turn that Matt Smith who works for them can't pay his mortgage. Which means that suddenly Good Bank PLC now reports that they have new bad debt.
Remember, when you open an account with a bank, and put money in the account, then the bank owes you money. Just like it owes lots of other people money.
And the issue is cascading failures in the system.
Especially since young black men joining the US military tend to try to go into trades to get skills. So they work in helicopter maintenance etc, if they can.
Plus they get semi useful kind of healthcare (VA)
Much of today’s nightmare of government finances can be traced back to the fcuked-up response to the 2008 crisis.
I understand that there is a name widely spread on SM and that some are making the usual links. In this case not naming (which is customary?) may well lead to accusations of a cover up (Reform/Leon).
RBS was close to failure - imagine the ATMs not working and card payments being declined.
Every large organisation needs to have some kind of "Will" to make clear what should happen in the event of insolvency. I fear we've not learned that lesson from the GFC but banks now know the lender of last resort will bail them out whatever the cost.
Law firms would want £500 to set up the credential, and £50 more every time it’s used.
So I have a long association with Gobekli Tepe. I first went, on my own shilling, on the off chance, as a youngish hungry freelancer in 2006 to write one of the first major articles on the whole place, back when it was basically unknown. The article went viral and halfway made me as a writer
I went out again in 2023 and - because by then I was well known to them - the main archaeologists showed me all the incredible new sites. Especially Karahan Tepe. Etc. These collective sites are now known as the Tas Tepeler
But then on day 3 as we were driving around Necmul the head Turkish boffin of the whole Tas Tepeler said “sod it Leon I'm going to show you something new, we only found this three months ago”. So we abruply diverted to this tiny village in the desert which had obvious Tepe like pillars propping up farm walls, it was like driving to Stonehenge and en route finding a Wiltshire village using megaliths as door frames (only much much older). And then Necmul led me past some chickens to a small stone door and at the doorway he said “the villagers found this when they were emptying a barn a few weeks ago, and they called us in”
Inside that barn was that rock frieze, perhaps 12,000 years old. With the classic Gobekli animals in profile - the horned bull - a man dying maybe - a leopard - and then the fascinating figure of a small strange man holding his penis, with the iconic chevrons on his chest - all motifs used across the Tas Tepeler. In other words, what I was seeing was pretty much final, conclusive proof that Gobekli Tepe and the tas Tepeler actually represent an entire buried 13,000 year old civilisation, which we completely do not understand and might have had writing and was highly sophisticated. Possibly as advanced as the Egyptians but 8000 years earlier. We have no idea how and why and who and what
And Necmul told me, as we stood in that barn, "only a few people have ever seen this. A handful of us archaeologists, one or two academics, now you - this is the first time it’s been revealed since the Ice Age”
The boy was a son of a local farmer who wandered in. And stood by the frieze because he was having fun and we decided he was was good for scale as we took photos
That is why this unique photo, by me, hangs on my wall, instead of any "art" by someone else
To add to the poignancy, the flat I live in now was bought entirely from the earnings from my original thriller based on my first visit to Gobekli Tepe. If these alien-Nephilim with six fingers hadn't build a mad now-buried civilisation, I wouldn't have this flat. Funny how things turn out. I wonder if that was a motivation for them. "In 13,000 years time some English dude will be able to buy a flat, because we have six fingers and we're building underground cities during the Ice Age"
All the 'living wills' in the world doesn't solve the problem of interconnectness.
Which is why the concept of Living Wills for socially important organisations is a thing.
And why the Americans have Chapter 11
The Show Must Go On.
Just drop the Impresario(s)
From a Russian window.
Arborists tend to use 2-3x the spread of the crown, or 12x the diameter of the trunk at 1.5m height in each direction.
eg Rowans.
By 2010, the only organisations investing in investment property were pension funds and local councils and those among the latter who got in early got some really good rental returns for a while.
There are ways for web sites to determine your location even when using a VPN (browser fingerprinting is the main one, which is already used to track people for advertising) but they're all fairly easy to bypass. If people can use VPNs the OSA loses the bulk of its effectiveness. The only way to make the OSA anything but a huge waste of time is to restrict VPN use. That's it.
The real answer is to scrap the OSA and implement a technical solution, not a legal one. The Internet Engineering Task Force already has a standard designed for this type of scenario, called Privacy Pass.
Essentially you would use a government web site or app to prove you're over 18 and it gives you a bunch of cryptographic tokens. There's no database of tokens, they get generated on the fly.
These tokens are installed into your web browser and whenever you access a 'mature' site a token gets sent to prove you have the right to access the site, and then the browser deletes it. There's no personal information in the token, so sites don't know who you are. It's all transparent to the user, if you have the tokens mature sites will load just like any other with no extra steps.
The system isn't perfect, but it does not require giving personal information to possibly dodgy or hackable companies and it would make complying with the law easy for even small sites. I don't buy the 'protect the children' justification for the OSA to a large degree because systems like Privacy Pass exist - the only reason for ignoring them in favour of a much less effective ID based system like the OSA specifies is because you specifically want the ability to know who is accessing 'unsuitable' information.
Feedback: my elder daughter appreciated the lack of tiktok fiction and great idea to have a lovely chilled bookshop dog that allowed us to assess the scale!
The big old haul northwards is done and the cases are in now after a very enjoyable holiday, a new stretch of coast for us and all of the attractions we targetted lived up to expectation - my wife has had Fishbourne Palace in particular on her bucket list for many a year.
I'd worried, we'd booked late and our house was on the edge of Bognor (apparently Britain's most disappointing seaside town per Which). I could easily see why this might be, the central shopping area was particularly shonky, and each adjoining village with a beach, including where we stayed, makes it difficult to visit if you are not actually staying there in a manner that is perhaps slightly unbritish. They are very much local beaches for local people. But we enjoyed the beach we did have access to, and a half plan to bolt to West Wittering for a day trip turned out not to be necessary.
According to the Resort that Ghisalaine Maxwell is staying, she is allowed TO LEAVE the facility, visit the neighboring town during the day.
Basically, Trump has let her go -- and made it clear if she helps him, she will be free.
https://x.com/pesach_lattin/status/1953469905166061987
* And that's only the tip of the bonkersness of the Owens claims.
Pete Hegseth shares a clip saying women shouldn’t have the right to vote, the 19th Amendment should be “repealed,” and women should “submit” to their husbands: “All of Christ for All of Life”
https://x.com/peoplefor/status/1953838030495666259
My point is that Rogan is a really bright and interesting guy, who ends up being a net negative for the world, because he's happy to spread the kind of shit that is clearly completely bat shit crazy.
You don't need any of his comet-strike, global-civilisation-is-hidden stuff to make Gobekli and the Tas Tepeler completely mindblowing
Who built it? How? Without writing, or pottery, or agriculture? Really???? In 12,000BC (some latest datings put it back to 15,000 BC). Also they had kitchens, and running water, and advanced urban rituals - in theatres and shrines - and all this at a time when humanity was supposedly living in caves. But if they did not have agriculture how did they feed these towns? Becuase these are basically small but highly sophisticated towns being unearthed
What was their religion? What's with the six fingers and SCARY skull cults? Why do they have the same clothes? A uniform? Ritual scars? What's the obsession with penises? The blood chambers? The vulture worship? The exquisite stone work? Where did they learn all this? WERE THEY JUST FUCKING ALIENS????
I have a theory that mainstream archaeologists avoid the whole subject because it so so mad, aberrant and jarringly weird, and surreal, as soon as you talk about it you sound mad. So they tiptoe around it, to preserve their careers
Anyway, now one of the most iconic photos of the whole place (and I have taken quite a few iconic photos of Gobekli Tepe, often used in TV documentaries) is now proudly hanging on my wall
As I’ve said before, it’s way better to have the likes of Rogan and Jordon Peterson be role models to young men, than the likes of Andrew Tate and Nick Fuentes.
I recall the person in question arguing that it was just their slightly homebrew VPN…
I would say that if I were her lawyer, I would advise her not to leave the facility.
Between all the conspiracy loons, a country where firearms are ubiquitous and the current ferment, her life would be very much in danger.
Lots of “documents”, a narrative that hangs together etc.
It’s like con men. The original pitch is basic, basic stuff.
Watch Boiler Room.
Those who simply want the truth, plus criminal convictions of the guilty are at the back of the queue on this one.
The owner of “Trump Burger” in Houston is now facing deportation
https://x.com/patriottakes/status/1953795008227656028
“CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH
YOU MAY REGRET IT
CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH
YOU JUST MIGHT GET IT”
Trump? Saw him once, maybe twice in ten years. He came around to borrow some sugar once. That was it. I only knew him from the TV.
The Harris again delusion is over.
California - DEM Presidential Polling:
Newsom: 23%
Buttigieg: 17%
Harris: 11%
AOC: 9%
Beshear: 5%
Shapiro: 4%
Sanders: 4%
Booker: 3%
Walz: 2%
Pritzker: 2%
Whitmer: 2%
Emerson / Aug 5, 2025
https://x.com/USA_Polling/status/1953856552445661191
Ancient coastlines, dude. Ancient coastlines surely hold the key. The total amount of land lost at end of the Ice Age due to sea level rise (between 14,000 and 8,000 years ago) was roughly 25 MILLION sq.km. (10 MILLION sq. miles). How much archaeology has been undertaken on Doggerland, the floor of the Persian Gulf, the lost Sunda Shelf bounded by Malaysia and Indonesia, or the former land bridge between New Guinea and Oz?
One example is Portuguese and Spanish explorers recording well-populated Indian cities in the Amazon basin in the late 1500’s, which largely disappeared without trace, and were covered by jungle. These were largely thought to be travellers’ tales, until modern archaeologists confirmed their existence. They likely collapsed due to diseases contacted from Europeans. The descendants of the survivors rapidly forgot their technical knowledge, as the economic basis for urban life disappeared.
Paradoxically, that much-reduced population can appear healthier than the former much bigger urban population, but that’s a survivorship bias.
And, I wonder if we see a reverse effect, with the coming of agriculture and the formation of the first towns. It may not be that the population grew weaker, it’s just that the weak now survived in greater numbers than before, as populations expanded.
Possible role models for young men... different young men are into different things, but some obvious suggestions would be the Vlogbrothers (Hank and John Green), Marcus Rashford, Ali Abdaal, Joe Wicks, Russ Cook, Terry Crews.
Ron Smith
@Ronxyz00
MAGA pastor: "Women are the kind of people that people come out of. It doesn't take any talent to simply reproduce biologically."
CNN: The pastor says women as individuals shouldn't be able to vote and the 19th amendment should be repealed.
Pete Hegseth is also a big fan of the pastor.
https://x.com/Ronxyz00/status/1953859365678600412
The Duke of Wellington
Lord Nelson.
The Duke of Marlborough.
Better than some idiot who can kick a ball or throw a punch slightly better than some other idiot anyway.
I find it entirely conceivable that a truly advanced human civilisation rose declined and fell before the end of the ice age, and was essentially obliterated - with just fragments of folk memory and maybe some technology surviving in scattered places
Indeed the Tas Tepeler are essentially that. Utterly inexplicable in terms of regular archaeological timelines
And of course what we see in Turkey may be the END of their civilisation - not its peak flowering
Personally I reckon they had writing. 8000 years before Sumer. Privately I’ve had archaeologists out there agree with me. But they don’t go on record because it is risky to sound like “Graham Hancock”
https://grahamhancock.com/drsunilatlantis/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_flood_myths
I suppose as you live on your own it's nice to have all these markers around the place that remind you of this, that, or the other, just that that's not how most people process memories.
Now of course everyone these days takes 50 photos of anything and then never looks at them (example is concerts - everyone stands there with their phones above their heads filming), just that for someone such as yourself it is a weird thing to do. Like poshos who put pictures of themselves playing polo or at School or college up in the loo. Sure it gives an ego buzz but other than that it shouldn't be front and centre of your interior design plan.
Anyway, I hope it gives you the right sensation when you look at it every day so each to their own.
Ditto the garden of Eden myth. That is surely the decline from hunter gathering to farming turned into a biblical story. We used to wander a garden plucking fruit and eating game, then we were cast out of this paradise, and Adam had to “till the field with the sweat of his brow” - ie he had to farm
As we’ve discussed on pb, the shift to farming meant more food for more people, but actual daily life got worse for nearly everyone - more work, more zoonotic diseases, shorter lives, and smaller stature. Humans literally shrank
Breaking: Russian President Vladimir Putin told the U.S. he'll halt the war in exchange for Eastern Ukraine
Now let's get cracking on regulating the internet.
We might just be seeing lots of people surviving, post the coming of agriculture, who would have died previously.
https://x.com/atrupar/status/1953915459708842361
There's the problem, right there.
Britain needs people like you. Also like me. Probably, indeed, it needs more people like you than me