Powerful and much needed framing from Andy Burnham in the Guardian..should be repeated every day by ministers or they will find they are blamed for ‘broken Britain’: “If the question at the centre of British politics is “who broke Britain?”, let’s be clear and unequivocal. The four horsemen of Britain’s apocalypse are deindustrialisation, privatisation, austerity and Brexit. In my time in politics, there has been a tendency for too many in Labour to accept too much of the framing of the right, but we must firmly reject its narrative and call it out in no uncertain terms. Figures on the British right talk of taking back control, but people can see that they are the ones who gave it away.”
If Labour are to win the next election we MUST rejoin the EU. Starmer or Burnham must batter it through. No Referendums. Just a huge parlianentary majority. The full fat version including Schengen. We must put ourselves at the centre of Europe.
Labour have nothing to lose. They are sleepwalking to possible defeat at the hands of Farage. There is no form of REJOIN that would be a worse fate for this country than that.
Rejoin plus Euro means zero chance of Labour re election
Nobody is suggesting the Euro
Roger is (“…full fat version…”) in the comment HYUFD is replying to!
The reality of Rejoin is
1) We would be asked to follow the process that all applicants to the are do. The politics of Europe will not slow a special exemption - too many countries would get upset 2) So we would be signing up to “full fat” Europe 3) This means signing up for the Euro. Since this would remove a huge chunk of the mucking around with the economy the politicians love, this would be a matter of I) Signing up to the Euro joining process II) Never actually meeting he requirements and joining
The number of countries that want Britain to join the Euro is zero. They've got enough problems already without adding a country with a weird housing thing going on that's not really into it.
It's perfectly possible that the application would just get held up forever, and it's also possible that some countries would say they don't think it'll last and they're not going to play the hokey cokey but the Euro wouldn't be the blocker.
It would also be in the US and Russian interests to stop the UK from rejoining so Orban might put the blockers on it (and maybe Fico too) and then you get down to the usual EU shenanigans of wanting a pound of flesh from the UK for cooperation even when it’s in the EU’s benefit to cooperate so no doubt the French making silly fishing demands and Spain wanting to change Gibraltar’s status.
This is the greatest tragedy of Brexit: that rejoining will be much more difficult and painful than it would have been to remain. No taking it back to the shop if it didn't fit.
It won’t be difficult, it will be impossible
I’ve been through this before, but one more time
It needs a government to sell Rejoin in an election and then win the election with that mandate. Then they must call the referendum, and win that. All this time very awkward questions about the euro and Schengen and fisheries and the City and much else will crop up, making that referendum suddenly seem a lot more difficult to win than first appeared. An unpopular government will lose it. A popular government will think “why bother taking the risk, we’re popular, why spend all that time and capital, let’s forget the referendum, thing”
So we won’t even get as far as a referendum. And even if we did and it was won, we would then have 5-10 years of painful painful negotiation with the EU to establish terms, during which any of 28 countries could simply veto, just for the fuck of it. This would consume a decade of British politics, with no guarantee of success at the end. The Rejoiners who glibly say “oh they want us back” are as foolishly complacent as the Brexiteers who farcically claimed “it will be the easiest deal in the world”
No sane UK government will ever attempt Rejoin, an insane government would fuck it up. Ergo, it is never going to happen
Sorry
Let me introduce you to the Starmer government.....10 year police reorganisation, scrap jury trials, paying £10bn's to give away terroritory against the wishes of the people living there, paying terrorists for actions of other governments, ....
It is genuinely scary how rapidly the battlefield is changing. I look at the MOD still trying to get fighters updated after 20 years and I despair. Our armed forces are dangerously close to not being fit for purpose.
Scarier is that we haven't really defined what their future purpose will be. Last year's defence review is already half-obsolete, and nearly seven months on later barely started to do anything practical about it anyway, (The Typhoon upgrade actually makes sense, despite its hefty price tag.)
Building a European defence capability (inc us) that can operate effectively without the US is so challenging on every level that there must be a temptation to hold off and hope America pivots back to being an ally once the closing credits run on the Trump Show.
I don't think it's quite so difficult as that, particularly if we act in concert with Europe. The biggest problem is the sunk cost capabilities like F35, which depend entirely on US cooperation for their ongoing utility.
True but we know that we will already be looking at the next generation of aircraft and we shoudl take the opportunity to look towards non-US sources, whether that is Sweden, France or South Korea.
At any given point we will always be beholden to the US for some of our military hardware until we make the decision to source elsewhere so that, in a decade or more, we know longer have that reliance.
Hell, we could even start building our own weapons again.
Actually, a simple start would be building a solid fuel rocket with the mould line of Trident.
Winding a carbon fibre hulls is fairly straightforward and fuel itself is fairly straightforward. The tricks are in casting large motors without voids.
The probable end result would be a rocket with less range than Trident, but given the massive downloading, since the arms reduction treaties, it only needs to carry 1 or 2 warheads.
There are many other simple starts, but I don't get the impression that enough of them are being taken very seriously. TBF, some are being taken seriously.
One blatant example is how many of our £50-250m aircraft have the type of hardened shelters that means they can't be taken out by £500 drones. We know that any damaged aircraft would make a hole in our capability that would take many months, or several years to recover. This is a known issue for years and years.
One effective flight of drones from a container on a ship, and our air force is significantly crippled.
For example, I think this is a £1bn of Boeing P8 Poseidon's in a £1bn row of sitting ducks at RAF Lossiemouth, about 1km from the Scottish Coast at Elgin. If the identity is correct, it is 4 from the 9 we have. The piccie is from Google Satellite View, and I think is 2026.
It is genuinely scary how rapidly the battlefield is changing. I look at the MOD still trying to get fighters updated after 20 years and I despair. Our armed forces are dangerously close to not being fit for purpose.
Scarier is that we haven't really defined what their future purpose will be. Last year's defence review is already half-obsolete, and nearly seven months on later barely started to do anything practical about it anyway, (The Typhoon upgrade actually makes sense, despite its hefty price tag.)
Building a European defence capability (inc us) that can operate effectively without the US is so challenging on every level that there must be a temptation to hold off and hope America pivots back to being an ally once the closing credits run on the Trump Show.
I don't think it's quite so difficult as that, particularly if we act in concert with Europe. The biggest problem is the sunk cost capabilities like F35, which depend entirely on US cooperation for their ongoing utility.
True but we know that we will already be looking at the next generation of aircraft and we shoudl take the opportunity to look towards non-US sources, whether that is Sweden, France or South Korea.
At any given point we will always be beholden to the US for some of our military hardware until we make the decision to source elsewhere so that, in a decade or more, we know longer have that reliance.
Hell, we could even start building our own weapons again.
Actually, a simple start would be building a solid fuel rocket with the mould line of Trident.
Winding a carbon fibre hulls is fairly straightforward and fuel itself is fairly straightforward. The tricks are in casting large motors without voids.
The probable end result would be a rocket with less range than Trident, but given the massive downloading, since the arms reduction treaties, it only needs to carry 1 or 2 warheads.
There are many other simple starts, but I don't get the impression that enough of them are being taken very seriously. TBF, some are being taken seriously.
One blatant example is how many of our £50-250m aircraft have the type of hardened shelters that means they can't be taken out by £500 drones. We know that any damaged aircraft would make a hole in our capability that would take many months, or several years to recover. This is a known issue for years and years.
One effective flight of drones from a container on a ship, and our air force is significantly crippled.
For example, I think this is a £1bn of Boeing P8 Poseidon's in a £1bn row of sitting ducks at RAF Lossiemouth, about 1km from the Scottish Coast at Elgin. If the identity is correct, it is 4 from the 9 we have. The piccie is from Google Satellite View, and I think is 2026.
With the US president saying Nato/British troops stayed "off the front line" in Afghanistan, Nigel Farage won't want British voters being reminded that he called Donald Trump "the bravest man I have ever met."
It astonishes me that his opponents don't draw more attention to Trump's war record. He is now the Draft Dodger-in-Chief, isn't he?
Powerful and much needed framing from Andy Burnham in the Guardian..should be repeated every day by ministers or they will find they are blamed for ‘broken Britain’: “If the question at the centre of British politics is “who broke Britain?”, let’s be clear and unequivocal. The four horsemen of Britain’s apocalypse are deindustrialisation, privatisation, austerity and Brexit. In my time in politics, there has been a tendency for too many in Labour to accept too much of the framing of the right, but we must firmly reject its narrative and call it out in no uncertain terms. Figures on the British right talk of taking back control, but people can see that they are the ones who gave it away.”
If Labour are to win the next election we MUST rejoin the EU. Starmer or Burnham must batter it through. No Referendums. Just a huge parlianentary majority. The full fat version including Schengen. We must put ourselves at the centre of Europe.
Labour have nothing to lose. They are sleepwalking to possible defeat at the hands of Farage. There is no form of REJOIN that would be a worse fate for this country than that.
Rejoin plus Euro means zero chance of Labour re election
Nobody is suggesting the Euro
Roger is (“…full fat version…”) in the comment HYUFD is replying to!
The reality of Rejoin is
1) We would be asked to follow the process that all applicants to the are do. The politics of Europe will not slow a special exemption - too many countries would get upset 2) So we would be signing up to “full fat” Europe 3) This means signing up for the Euro. Since this would remove a huge chunk of the mucking around with the economy the politicians love, this would be a matter of I) Signing up to the Euro joining process II) Never actually meeting he requirements and joining
The number of countries that want Britain to join the Euro is zero. They've got enough problems already without adding a country with a weird housing thing going on that's not really into it.
It's perfectly possible that the application would just get held up forever, and it's also possible that some countries would say they don't think it'll last and they're not going to play the hokey cokey but the Euro wouldn't be the blocker.
It would also be in the US and Russian interests to stop the UK from rejoining so Orban might put the blockers on it (and maybe Fico too) and then you get down to the usual EU shenanigans of wanting a pound of flesh from the UK for cooperation even when it’s in the EU’s benefit to cooperate so no doubt the French making silly fishing demands and Spain wanting to change Gibraltar’s status.
This is the greatest tragedy of Brexit: that rejoining will be much more difficult and painful than it would have been to remain. No taking it back to the shop if it didn't fit.
It won’t be difficult, it will be impossible
I’ve been through this before, but one more time
It needs a government to sell Rejoin in an election and then win the election with that mandate. Then they must call the referendum, and win that. All this time very awkward questions about the euro and Schengen and fisheries and the City and much else will crop up, making that referendum suddenly seem a lot more difficult to win than first appeared. An unpopular government will lose it. A popular government will think “why bother taking the risk, we’re popular, why spend all that time and capital, let’s forget the referendum, thing”
So we won’t even get as far as a referendum. And even if we did and it was won, we would then have 5-10 years of painful painful negotiation with the EU to establish terms, during which any of 28 countries could simply veto, just for the fuck of it. This would consume a decade of British politics, with no guarantee of success at the end. The Rejoiners who glibly say “oh they want us back” are as foolishly complacent as the Brexiteers who farcically claimed “it will be the easiest deal in the world”
No sane UK government will ever attempt Rejoin, an insane government would fuck it up. Ergo, it is never going to happen
Sorry
You're bizarrely wrong about this due to a failure of imagination.
Back in the deep mists of time the Lib Dems were one of the first people to propose an in/out referendum on the EU because they couldn't conceive that out would win. They completely failed to imagine the way in which public opinion might be shifted and the part they might play in that.
So it is with Rejoin. You describe the politics of the status quo. But you fail to imagine how the politics would be different were public opinion also radically different, and the EU itself changed.
For sure, most advocates of Rejoin also lack the imagination to conceive of the work they will need to do to achieve it, so I certainly don't think that Rejoin is likely.
It is genuinely scary how rapidly the battlefield is changing. I look at the MOD still trying to get fighters updated after 20 years and I despair. Our armed forces are dangerously close to not being fit for purpose.
Scarier is that we haven't really defined what their future purpose will be. Last year's defence review is already half-obsolete, and nearly seven months on later barely started to do anything practical about it anyway, (The Typhoon upgrade actually makes sense, despite its hefty price tag.)
Building a European defence capability (inc us) that can operate effectively without the US is so challenging on every level that there must be a temptation to hold off and hope America pivots back to being an ally once the closing credits run on the Trump Show.
I don't think it's quite so difficult as that, particularly if we act in concert with Europe. The biggest problem is the sunk cost capabilities like F35, which depend entirely on US cooperation for their ongoing utility.
True but we know that we will already be looking at the next generation of aircraft and we shoudl take the opportunity to look towards non-US sources, whether that is Sweden, France or South Korea.
At any given point we will always be beholden to the US for some of our military hardware until we make the decision to source elsewhere so that, in a decade or more, we know longer have that reliance.
Hell, we could even start building our own weapons again.
Actually, a simple start would be building a solid fuel rocket with the mould line of Trident.
Winding a carbon fibre hulls is fairly straightforward and fuel itself is fairly straightforward. The tricks are in casting large motors without voids.
The probable end result would be a rocket with less range than Trident, but given the massive downloading, since the arms reduction treaties, it only needs to carry 1 or 2 warheads.
There are many other simple starts, but I don't get the impression that enough of them are being taken very seriously. TBF, some are being taken seriously.
One blatant example is how many of our £50-250m aircraft have the type of hardened shelters that means they can't be taken out by £500 drones. We know that any damaged aircraft would make a hole in our capability that would take many months, or several years to recover. This is a known issue for years and years.
One effective flight of drones from a container on a ship, and our air force is significantly crippled.
The problem is too big - see Herman Kahn on Big Problems. The classic is that if you raise a Big enough Problem, you (the person raising it) become the problem.
For aircraft, the problem is that, to build a shelter, you need a specification, a project code etc etc. Multiple zillions per shelter. And then they are vulnerable to full fat smart bombs.
The Ukrainians have demonstrated that the following is simple - you build a concrete box - pour a slab, build walls of slabs. You stabilise the walls by interlocking slabs. Bury it by piling earth round it. The roof is a bit harder. The doors are the only bit that are really tricky. Costs peanuts. And raises the required weapon to destroy to a direct hit with a full fat smart bomb.
Hell, sandbags with a roof of timber is a start.
"But, during the Gulf War, the Americans destroyed nuke proof shelters with smart bombs. So shelters are obsolete"
So no-one does anything.
The Ukrainians seem to have reinvented the Anderson shelter, installed in people's gardens during the second world war. Vulnerable to a direct hit (as were many shelters) but the corrugated iron and earth protected from sideways blast forces.
During both Iraq and Afghanistan, American and other forces repeatedly reinvented the Buried Shipping Container shelter. Despite the best efforts of Mangelment.
It's just what it sounds like - take a shipping container. Bulldoze sand/and/or earth around and over it.
Bit of a tight fit for a P8.
True, but reduced the problems for the troops of it Raining Steel.
Aircraft shelters are a bit harder - but versus drones, only require basic construction methods.
Young will suffer most when AI ‘tsunami’ hits jobs, says head of IMF
Kristalina Georgieva says research suggests 60% of jobs in advanced economies will be affected, with many entry-level roles wiped out
Artificial intelligence will be a “tsunami hitting the labour market”, with young people worst affected, the head of the International Monetary Fund warned the World Economic Forum on Friday.
Kristalina Georgieva told delegates in Davos that the IMF’s own research suggested there would be a big transformation of demand for skills, as the technology becomes increasingly widespread.
“We expect over the next years, in advanced economies, 60% of jobs to be affected by AI, either enhanced or eliminated or transformed – 40% globally,” she said. “This is like a tsunami hitting the labour market.”
It is genuinely scary how rapidly the battlefield is changing. I look at the MOD still trying to get fighters updated after 20 years and I despair. Our armed forces are dangerously close to not being fit for purpose.
Scarier is that we haven't really defined what their future purpose will be. Last year's defence review is already half-obsolete, and nearly seven months on later barely started to do anything practical about it anyway, (The Typhoon upgrade actually makes sense, despite its hefty price tag.)
Building a European defence capability (inc us) that can operate effectively without the US is so challenging on every level that there must be a temptation to hold off and hope America pivots back to being an ally once the closing credits run on the Trump Show.
I don't think it's quite so difficult as that, particularly if we act in concert with Europe. The biggest problem is the sunk cost capabilities like F35, which depend entirely on US cooperation for their ongoing utility.
True but we know that we will already be looking at the next generation of aircraft and we shoudl take the opportunity to look towards non-US sources, whether that is Sweden, France or South Korea.
At any given point we will always be beholden to the US for some of our military hardware until we make the decision to source elsewhere so that, in a decade or more, we know longer have that reliance.
Hell, we could even start building our own weapons again.
Actually, a simple start would be building a solid fuel rocket with the mould line of Trident.
Winding a carbon fibre hulls is fairly straightforward and fuel itself is fairly straightforward. The tricks are in casting large motors without voids.
The probable end result would be a rocket with less range than Trident, but given the massive downloading, since the arms reduction treaties, it only needs to carry 1 or 2 warheads.
There are many other simple starts, but I don't get the impression that enough of them are being taken very seriously. TBF, some are being taken seriously.
One blatant example is how many of our £50-250m aircraft have the type of hardened shelters that means they can't be taken out by £500 drones. We know that any damaged aircraft would make a hole in our capability that would take many months, or several years to recover. This is a known issue for years and years.
One effective flight of drones from a container on a ship, and our air force is significantly crippled.
For example, I think this is a £1bn of Boeing P8 Poseidon's in a £1bn row of sitting ducks at RAF Lossiemouth, about 1km from the Scottish Coast at Elgin. If the identity is correct, it is 4 from the 9 we have. The piccie is from Google Satellite View, and I think is 2026.
So many of the issues discussed on here are about to be rendered spectacularly irrelevant by advances in technology - eg robotics
We are 1-3 years from advanced humanoid robots entering the market at scale. Think what that does to, say, defence
Eg look at the latest Unitree robot (from China). Imagine taking on that, on the battlefield. It will be tireless and relentless and be equipped with 100% accurate weapons
It will also go into factories and the like. Vast wealth will be created
And that is just one example
WRT war and defence, it is possible to make more of this than is credible. Although what is credible is bad enough. We already have the collective capacity via nuclear, chemical and biological means to render the planet uninhabitable. Thus far we don't. All of those means can also be used with the intention of having a more limited purpose of local victory in battle. On the whole thus far we don't.
AI adds one more means by which we could render the planet uninhabitable. I suggest we won't. And it adds one more means by which local victory in battle could be achieved. I suggest that on the whole we will agree that we don't - we will find a place within the laws of war for AI but it will be finite. The reason being exactly the same: there is so far little willingness to use means which are likely to end in rendering planet uninhabitable. There is mutual self interest in war. This is (sadly) best served by the major players keeping up to date and balancing the powers and risks.
Defence happens so that I can tickle the baby's toes in front of the fire in peace. Chinese, Russians, Trumpians are just the same as us in this respect.
Powerful and much needed framing from Andy Burnham in the Guardian..should be repeated every day by ministers or they will find they are blamed for ‘broken Britain’: “If the question at the centre of British politics is “who broke Britain?”, let’s be clear and unequivocal. The four horsemen of Britain’s apocalypse are deindustrialisation, privatisation, austerity and Brexit. In my time in politics, there has been a tendency for too many in Labour to accept too much of the framing of the right, but we must firmly reject its narrative and call it out in no uncertain terms. Figures on the British right talk of taking back control, but people can see that they are the ones who gave it away.”
If Labour are to win the next election we MUST rejoin the EU. Starmer or Burnham must batter it through. No Referendums. Just a huge parlianentary majority. The full fat version including Schengen. We must put ourselves at the centre of Europe.
Labour have nothing to lose. They are sleepwalking to possible defeat at the hands of Farage. There is no form of REJOIN that would be a worse fate for this country than that.
Rejoin plus Euro means zero chance of Labour re election
Nobody is suggesting the Euro
Roger is (“…full fat version…”) in the comment HYUFD is replying to!
The reality of Rejoin is
1) We would be asked to follow the process that all applicants to the are do. The politics of Europe will not slow a special exemption - too many countries would get upset 2) So we would be signing up to “full fat” Europe 3) This means signing up for the Euro. Since this would remove a huge chunk of the mucking around with the economy the politicians love, this would be a matter of I) Signing up to the Euro joining process II) Never actually meeting he requirements and joining
The number of countries that want Britain to join the Euro is zero. They've got enough problems already without adding a country with a weird housing thing going on that's not really into it.
It's perfectly possible that the application would just get held up forever, and it's also possible that some countries would say they don't think it'll last and they're not going to play the hokey cokey but the Euro wouldn't be the blocker.
It would also be in the US and Russian interests to stop the UK from rejoining so Orban might put the blockers on it (and maybe Fico too) and then you get down to the usual EU shenanigans of wanting a pound of flesh from the UK for cooperation even when it’s in the EU’s benefit to cooperate so no doubt the French making silly fishing demands and Spain wanting to change Gibraltar’s status.
This is the greatest tragedy of Brexit: that rejoining will be much more difficult and painful than it would have been to remain. No taking it back to the shop if it didn't fit.
It won’t be difficult, it will be impossible
I’ve been through this before, but one more time
It needs a government to sell Rejoin in an election and then win the election with that mandate. Then they must call the referendum, and win that. All this time very awkward questions about the euro and Schengen and fisheries and the City and much else will crop up, making that referendum suddenly seem a lot more difficult to win than first appeared. An unpopular government will lose it. A popular government will think “why bother taking the risk, we’re popular, why spend all that time and capital, let’s forget the referendum, thing”
So we won’t even get as far as a referendum. And even if we did and it was won, we would then have 5-10 years of painful painful negotiation with the EU to establish terms, during which any of 28 countries could simply veto, just for the fuck of it. This would consume a decade of British politics, with no guarantee of success at the end. The Rejoiners who glibly say “oh they want us back” are as foolishly complacent as the Brexiteers who farcically claimed “it will be the easiest deal in the world”
No sane UK government will ever attempt Rejoin, an insane government would fuck it up. Ergo, it is never going to happen
Sorry
You're bizarrely wrong about this due to a failure of imagination.
Back in the deep mists of time the Lib Dems were one of the first people to propose an in/out referendum on the EU because they couldn't conceive that out would win. They completely failed to imagine the way in which public opinion might be shifted and the part they might play in that.
So it is with Rejoin. You describe the politics of the status quo. But you fail to imagine how the politics would be different were public opinion also radically different, and the EU itself changed.
For sure, most advocates of Rejoin also lack the imagination to conceive of the work they will need to do to achieve it, so I certainly don't think that Rejoin is likely.
But it's not hard to imagine it happening.
Leon is only ever able to imagine things proceeding along whatever trajectory he’s currently fixated upon, but is stunningly inept at standing back and looking at the bigger picture from every angle; something that comes more naturally to folks with a broader perspective and higher IQ.
I have not posted for about 2 weeks and more relevant I have not been lurking either during this time. I decided I needed a break. I'm not flouncing and I may well be back in time, but even with my modest level of posting I do spend a lot of time lurking and I do have a busy life.
Mostly I will miss the superb humour and the news. I was going to list out those that I will miss most, but realised I would miss too many out.
The deciding factor was again being sucked into one of those pointless debates, which is such a waste of time, but which sadly I fall into the trap of rather than dealing with, with wit and humour, like most of you do so well.
It was the debate on driving (U turns, 70mph across roundabouts, bends, stopping at roundabouts, etc). As some of you will be aware from my past posts I have quite a few friends who are existing, or ex-cops, including a retired Chief Superintendent, a Royal Protection Officer and a number of blue light drivers, all with the highest driving qualifications. I showed some of them the posts being made by 'we all know who', and typical comments were 'What a load of bollocks' and 'Shouldn't be allowed behind a steering wheel'.
But more relevant was why did I feel the need to do that? So before I do the same again and waste more of my time I am taking a break for a bit.
I have just popped in to see if my post of the other day had any comments.
Thank you @Big_G_NorthWales for your very kind reply. Appreciated. Also thank you everyone who liked my post. Again very much appreciated.
I see hyufd felt the need to reply with more nonsense by linking to a case where a driver was prosecuted for hitting a speeding motorbike. I mean really are you on drugs or something? Of course the van driver was prosecuted. He was over twice the legal drink drive limit and driving at over twice the speed limit. Is there any brain in there at all?
A driver involved in an accident who is driving with care and attention doing everything correctly but unfortunately collides with a reckless driver due entirely to the fault of the reckless driver should not be prosecuted (this really shouldn't need saying). He wasn't a careful driver was he? A recent example was shown on a TV documentary. Two HGVs collided head on, on a bend. The onboard cameras showed one driver (from Europe) was on the wrong side of the road. The skid marks and cab records showed the other driver reacted accordingly and was driving appropriately for the conditions. No action was taken against him (obviously). The stuff hyufd posts is idiotic.
I didn't post all the comments made by the blue light police drivers about hyufd's posts, but here is another. hyufd repeatedly said you should stop at a roundabout give way line even if your exit is clear. The response by two of the police officers I showed this to was that if they saw you doing this (and you didn't have L/P plates) they would stop you and breathalyse you, as this is typical behaviour of a drunk driver overcompensating.
There is a driving acronym (TUG) that is repeatedly referenced in the police driving manual. It stands for Take, Use, Give and refers to information you obtain about other drivers while driving and the information you give them. Not just signals, but your actions, car position etc. You would be giving very confusing and dangerous messages by randomly stopping at a roundabout when you have a clear exit.
On a driving test this very specific manoeuvre is classified as a minor fault (not an instant fail), but if you do the same fault (stop unnecessarily at a Give Way) 3 times it is a test failure. But as we all know hyufd knows best.
By-elections are a barometer of public opinion in which governments always operate at a handicap in that the opposition is more motivated. Given how unpopular Starmer is any by-election will be a disaster for him, but it's striking just how many different ways in which this by-election could be a disaster and hilarious that one of those ways involves the election of a Labour MP (which in normal unpopular government circumstances would be regarded as a triumph).
It is most entertaining, and made all the more so by the fact that Starmer's putative nemesis is himself a flawed two-time leadership election loser well capable of falling flat on his face.
It's hard to know what would be the funniest outcome.
Burnham stands and loses.
A Burnham, Gallaway, Reform, Gaza Independent, Polanski by election would be one of the greatest (for anoraks) shows on earth.
With the US president saying Nato/British troops stayed "off the front line" in Afghanistan, Nigel Farage won't want British voters being reminded that he called Donald Trump "the bravest man I have ever met."
It astonishes me that his opponents don't draw more attention to Trump's war record. He is now the Draft Dodger-in-Chief, isn't he?
You think that Americans didn’t know this when they elected him? Twice? You think that they didn’t know about his disgraceful behaviour on January 6th? You think that they didn’t know he had been convicted of crimes of dishonesty and found guilty of sexual assault?
I honestly despair how much time and effort the Democrats put into “proving” all this and more as if it were some revelation. Americans know and they elected him anyway. Twice.
Just maybe, if they thought about why and how utterly irrelevant their own obsessions are to most people’s lives we wouldn’t be in this mess.
It is genuinely scary how rapidly the battlefield is changing. I look at the MOD still trying to get fighters updated after 20 years and I despair. Our armed forces are dangerously close to not being fit for purpose.
Scarier is that we haven't really defined what their future purpose will be. Last year's defence review is already half-obsolete, and nearly seven months on later barely started to do anything practical about it anyway, (The Typhoon upgrade actually makes sense, despite its hefty price tag.)
Building a European defence capability (inc us) that can operate effectively without the US is so challenging on every level that there must be a temptation to hold off and hope America pivots back to being an ally once the closing credits run on the Trump Show.
I don't think it's quite so difficult as that, particularly if we act in concert with Europe. The biggest problem is the sunk cost capabilities like F35, which depend entirely on US cooperation for their ongoing utility.
True but we know that we will already be looking at the next generation of aircraft and we shoudl take the opportunity to look towards non-US sources, whether that is Sweden, France or South Korea.
At any given point we will always be beholden to the US for some of our military hardware until we make the decision to source elsewhere so that, in a decade or more, we know longer have that reliance.
Hell, we could even start building our own weapons again.
Actually, a simple start would be building a solid fuel rocket with the mould line of Trident.
Winding a carbon fibre hulls is fairly straightforward and fuel itself is fairly straightforward. The tricks are in casting large motors without voids.
The probable end result would be a rocket with less range than Trident, but given the massive downloading, since the arms reduction treaties, it only needs to carry 1 or 2 warheads.
There are many other simple starts, but I don't get the impression that enough of them are being taken very seriously. TBF, some are being taken seriously.
One blatant example is how many of our £50-250m aircraft have the type of hardened shelters that means they can't be taken out by £500 drones. We know that any damaged aircraft would make a hole in our capability that would take many months, or several years to recover. This is a known issue for years and years.
One effective flight of drones from a container on a ship, and our air force is significantly crippled.
For example, I think this is a £1bn of Boeing P8 Poseidon's in a £1bn row of sitting ducks at RAF Lossiemouth, about 1km from the Scottish Coast at Elgin. If the identity is correct, it is 4 from the 9 we have. The piccie is from Google Satellite View, and I think is 2026.
Young will suffer most when AI ‘tsunami’ hits jobs, says head of IMF
Kristalina Georgieva says research suggests 60% of jobs in advanced economies will be affected, with many entry-level roles wiped out
Artificial intelligence will be a “tsunami hitting the labour market”, with young people worst affected, the head of the International Monetary Fund warned the World Economic Forum on Friday.
Kristalina Georgieva told delegates in Davos that the IMF’s own research suggested there would be a big transformation of demand for skills, as the technology becomes increasingly widespread.
“We expect over the next years, in advanced economies, 60% of jobs to be affected by AI, either enhanced or eliminated or transformed – 40% globally,” she said. “This is like a tsunami hitting the labour market.”
I certainly wouldn't want to be coming out of uni now looking to be a software developer, data scientist, consultancy.
white-collar workers say that AI saves them little or no time, but executives think it's a massive timesaver. This divide between employees and management is going to influence the future of the workforce.
Young will suffer most when AI ‘tsunami’ hits jobs, says head of IMF
Kristalina Georgieva says research suggests 60% of jobs in advanced economies will be affected, with many entry-level roles wiped out
Artificial intelligence will be a “tsunami hitting the labour market”, with young people worst affected, the head of the International Monetary Fund warned the World Economic Forum on Friday.
Kristalina Georgieva told delegates in Davos that the IMF’s own research suggested there would be a big transformation of demand for skills, as the technology becomes increasingly widespread.
“We expect over the next years, in advanced economies, 60% of jobs to be affected by AI, either enhanced or eliminated or transformed – 40% globally,” she said. “This is like a tsunami hitting the labour market.”
I certainly wouldn't want to be coming out of uni now looking to be a software developer, data scientist, consultancy.
white-collar workers say that AI saves them little or no time, but executives think it's a massive timesaver. This divide between employees and management is going to influence the future of the workforce.
If you aren't being more productive / saving time, you are doing it wrong.
I have just had a code sprint over the past week to solve a rather complex problem and with the aid of LLMs written code that would have previously taken me couple of months at least to figure out and some junior researcher with only under grad dev skills probably 6 months.
With the US president saying Nato/British troops stayed "off the front line" in Afghanistan, Nigel Farage won't want British voters being reminded that he called Donald Trump "the bravest man I have ever met."
So many of the issues discussed on here are about to be rendered spectacularly irrelevant by advances in technology - eg robotics
We are 1-3 years from advanced humanoid robots entering the market at scale. Think what that does to, say, defence
Eg look at the latest Unitree robot (from China). Imagine taking on that, on the battlefield. It will be tireless and relentless and be equipped with 100% accurate weapons
It will also go into factories and the like. Vast wealth will be created
And that is just one example
Defence is why we are 100% NOT about to get advanced humanoid robots entering the market. Musk even described the Tesla Robototron as his "robot army". No way are autonomous robots making it out into the general pubic. Factory use? Far better to use a specific robot for a specific task as we already do.
Humanoid droids on the battlefield? Maybe. Your own persona robototron that could be remote programmed to kill us all? No chance
It is genuinely scary how rapidly the battlefield is changing. I look at the MOD still trying to get fighters updated after 20 years and I despair. Our armed forces are dangerously close to not being fit for purpose.
Scarier is that we haven't really defined what their future purpose will be. Last year's defence review is already half-obsolete, and nearly seven months on later barely started to do anything practical about it anyway, (The Typhoon upgrade actually makes sense, despite its hefty price tag.)
Building a European defence capability (inc us) that can operate effectively without the US is so challenging on every level that there must be a temptation to hold off and hope America pivots back to being an ally once the closing credits run on the Trump Show.
I don't think it's quite so difficult as that, particularly if we act in concert with Europe. The biggest problem is the sunk cost capabilities like F35, which depend entirely on US cooperation for their ongoing utility.
True but we know that we will already be looking at the next generation of aircraft and we shoudl take the opportunity to look towards non-US sources, whether that is Sweden, France or South Korea.
At any given point we will always be beholden to the US for some of our military hardware until we make the decision to source elsewhere so that, in a decade or more, we know longer have that reliance.
Hell, we could even start building our own weapons again.
Actually, a simple start would be building a solid fuel rocket with the mould line of Trident.
Winding a carbon fibre hulls is fairly straightforward and fuel itself is fairly straightforward. The tricks are in casting large motors without voids.
The probable end result would be a rocket with less range than Trident, but given the massive downloading, since the arms reduction treaties, it only needs to carry 1 or 2 warheads.
There are many other simple starts, but I don't get the impression that enough of them are being taken very seriously. TBF, some are being taken seriously.
One blatant example is how many of our £50-250m aircraft have the type of hardened shelters that means they can't be taken out by £500 drones. We know that any damaged aircraft would make a hole in our capability that would take many months, or several years to recover. This is a known issue for years and years.
One effective flight of drones from a container on a ship, and our air force is significantly crippled.
For example, I think this is a £1bn of Boeing P8 Poseidon's in a £1bn row of sitting ducks at RAF Lossiemouth, about 1km from the Scottish Coast at Elgin. If the identity is correct, it is 4 from the 9 we have. The piccie is from Google Satellite View, and I think is 2026.
I was once playing golf with an uncle and on the green of a par 3 I was addressing a putt when out of nowhere the deafening noise of a Vulcan taking off immediately overhead was like something you simply could not imagine
It was an experience I have never forgotten
The .map is excellent showing the airfield and Lossiemouth
I have not posted for about 2 weeks and more relevant I have not been lurking either during this time. I decided I needed a break. I'm not flouncing and I may well be back in time, but even with my modest level of posting I do spend a lot of time lurking and I do have a busy life.
Mostly I will miss the superb humour and the news. I was going to list out those that I will miss most, but realised I would miss too many out.
The deciding factor was again being sucked into one of those pointless debates, which is such a waste of time, but which sadly I fall into the trap of rather than dealing with, with wit and humour, like most of you do so well.
It was the debate on driving (U turns, 70mph across roundabouts, bends, stopping at roundabouts, etc). As some of you will be aware from my past posts I have quite a few friends who are existing, or ex-cops, including a retired Chief Superintendent, a Royal Protection Officer and a number of blue light drivers, all with the highest driving qualifications. I showed some of them the posts being made by 'we all know who', and typical comments were 'What a load of bollocks' and 'Shouldn't be allowed behind a steering wheel'.
But more relevant was why did I feel the need to do that? So before I do the same again and waste more of my time I am taking a break for a bit.
I have just popped in to see if my post of the other day had any comments.
Thank you @Big_G_NorthWales for your very kind reply. Appreciated. Also thank you everyone who liked my post. Again very much appreciated.
I see hyufd felt the need to reply with more nonsense by linking to a case where a driver was prosecuted for hitting a speeding motorbike. I mean really are you on drugs or something? Of course the van driver was prosecuted. He was over twice the legal drink drive limit and driving at over twice the speed limit. Is there any brain in there at all?
A driver involved in an accident who is driving with care and attention doing everything correctly but unfortunately collides with a reckless driver due entirely to the fault of the reckless driver should not be prosecuted (this really shouldn't need saying). He wasn't a careful driver was he? A recent example was shown on a TV documentary. Two HGVs collided head on, on a bend. The onboard cameras showed one driver (from Europe) was on the wrong side of the road. The skid marks and cab records showed the other driver reacted accordingly and was driving appropriately for the conditions. No action was taken against him (obviously). The stuff hyufd posts is idiotic.
I didn't post all the comments made by the blue light police drivers about hyufd's posts, but here is another. hyufd repeatedly said you should stop at a roundabout give way line even if your exit is clear. The response by two of the police officers I showed this to was that if they saw you doing this (and you didn't have L/P plates) they would stop you and breathalyse you, as this is typical behaviour of a drunk driver overcompensating.
There is a driving acronym (TUG) that is repeatedly referenced in the police driving manual. It stands for Take, Use, Give and refers to information you obtain about other drivers while driving and the information you give them. Not just signals, but your actions, car position etc. You would be giving very confusing and dangerous messages by randomly stopping at a roundabout when you have a clear exit.
On a driving test this very specific manoeuvre is classified as a minor fault (not an instant fail), but if you do the same fault (stop unnecessarily at a Give Way) 3 times it is a test failure. But as we all know hyufd knows best.
Honestly @kjh , your best bet is just to leave this one. He's never going to change his mind (an aspect of him I find quite enjoyable) but I think every other poster agrees with you. Consider it a win.
So many of the issues discussed on here are about to be rendered spectacularly irrelevant by advances in technology - eg robotics
We are 1-3 years from advanced humanoid robots entering the market at scale. Think what that does to, say, defence
Eg look at the latest Unitree robot (from China). Imagine taking on that, on the battlefield. It will be tireless and relentless and be equipped with 100% accurate weapons
It will also go into factories and the like. Vast wealth will be created
And that is just one example
Defence is why we are 100% NOT about to get advanced humanoid robots entering the market. Musk even described the Tesla Robototron as his "robot army". No way are autonomous robots making it out into the general pubic. Factory use? Far better to use a specific robot for a specific task as we already do.
Humanoid droids on the battlefield? Maybe. Your own persona robototron that could be remote programmed to kill us all? No chance
Are you serious?
If governments have a choice between seeing a young man of 25 die on a battlefield, or a robot costing 25k getting temporarily disabled, what will they choose? What will voters prefer? Which makes more sense morally, financially, emotionally, politically?
Of course armies will become robot armies, and this is a GOOD thing. Humans will stop dying young in absurd battles
By-elections are a barometer of public opinion in which governments always operate at a handicap in that the opposition is more motivated. Given how unpopular Starmer is any by-election will be a disaster for him, but it's striking just how many different ways in which this by-election could be a disaster and hilarious that one of those ways involves the election of a Labour MP (which in normal unpopular government circumstances would be regarded as a triumph).
It is most entertaining, and made all the more so by the fact that Starmer's putative nemesis is himself a flawed two-time leadership election loser well capable of falling flat on his face.
It's hard to know what would be the funniest outcome.
Burnham stands and loses.
A Burnham, Gallaway, Reform, Gaza Independent, Polanski by election would be one of the greatest (for anoraks) shows on earth.
Surely Lozza Fox has to be on the ballot too?
Shame that Lord Sutch and Commander Boakes aren't around anymore to enliven things.
I have not posted for about 2 weeks and more relevant I have not been lurking either during this time. I decided I needed a break. I'm not flouncing and I may well be back in time, but even with my modest level of posting I do spend a lot of time lurking and I do have a busy life.
Mostly I will miss the superb humour and the news. I was going to list out those that I will miss most, but realised I would miss too many out.
The deciding factor was again being sucked into one of those pointless debates, which is such a waste of time, but which sadly I fall into the trap of rather than dealing with, with wit and humour, like most of you do so well.
It was the debate on driving (U turns, 70mph across roundabouts, bends, stopping at roundabouts, etc). As some of you will be aware from my past posts I have quite a few friends who are existing, or ex-cops, including a retired Chief Superintendent, a Royal Protection Officer and a number of blue light drivers, all with the highest driving qualifications. I showed some of them the posts being made by 'we all know who', and typical comments were 'What a load of bollocks' and 'Shouldn't be allowed behind a steering wheel'.
But more relevant was why did I feel the need to do that? So before I do the same again and waste more of my time I am taking a break for a bit.
I have just popped in to see if my post of the other day had any comments.
Thank you @Big_G_NorthWales for your very kind reply. Appreciated. Also thank you everyone who liked my post. Again very much appreciated.
I see hyufd felt the need to reply with more nonsense by linking to a case where a driver was prosecuted for hitting a speeding motorbike. I mean really are you on drugs or something? Of course the van driver was prosecuted. He was over twice the legal drink drive limit and driving at over twice the speed limit. Is there any brain in there at all?
A driver involved in an accident who is driving with care and attention doing everything correctly but unfortunately collides with a reckless driver due entirely to the fault of the reckless driver should not be prosecuted (this really shouldn't need saying). He wasn't a careful driver was he? A recent example was shown on a TV documentary. Two HGVs collided head on, on a bend. The onboard cameras showed one driver (from Europe) was on the wrong side of the road. The skid marks and cab records showed the other driver reacted accordingly and was driving appropriately for the conditions. No action was taken against him (obviously). The stuff hyufd posts is idiotic.
I didn't post all the comments made by the blue light police drivers about hyufd's posts, but here is another. hyufd repeatedly said you should stop at a roundabout give way line even if your exit is clear. The response by two of the police officers I showed this to was that if they saw you doing this (and you didn't have L/P plates) they would stop you and breathalyse you, as this is typical behaviour of a drunk driver overcompensating.
There is a driving acronym (TUG) that is repeatedly referenced in the police driving manual. It stands for Take, Use, Give and refers to information you obtain about other drivers while driving and the information you give them. Not just signals, but your actions, car position etc. You would be giving very confusing and dangerous messages by randomly stopping at a roundabout when you have a clear exit.
On a driving test this very specific manoeuvre is classified as a minor fault (not an instant fail), but if you do the same fault (stop unnecessarily at a Give Way) 3 times it is a test failure. But as we all know hyufd knows best.
{it’s 2030 and the Russians have invaded Lithuania}
Russian General : What’s holding up the advance? Why are we stuck at Raseiniai? Officer : There’s one man in a British WWII tank, parked on a roundabout. Anyone comes up to the stop line, he engages. General : 16 days!!! Officer : There’s no shifting him. He keeps shouting stuff about traffic laws.
It is genuinely scary how rapidly the battlefield is changing. I look at the MOD still trying to get fighters updated after 20 years and I despair. Our armed forces are dangerously close to not being fit for purpose.
Scarier is that we haven't really defined what their future purpose will be. Last year's defence review is already half-obsolete, and nearly seven months on later barely started to do anything practical about it anyway, (The Typhoon upgrade actually makes sense, despite its hefty price tag.)
Building a European defence capability (inc us) that can operate effectively without the US is so challenging on every level that there must be a temptation to hold off and hope America pivots back to being an ally once the closing credits run on the Trump Show.
I don't think it's quite so difficult as that, particularly if we act in concert with Europe. The biggest problem is the sunk cost capabilities like F35, which depend entirely on US cooperation for their ongoing utility.
True but we know that we will already be looking at the next generation of aircraft and we shoudl take the opportunity to look towards non-US sources, whether that is Sweden, France or South Korea.
At any given point we will always be beholden to the US for some of our military hardware until we make the decision to source elsewhere so that, in a decade or more, we know longer have that reliance.
Hell, we could even start building our own weapons again.
Actually, a simple start would be building a solid fuel rocket with the mould line of Trident.
Winding a carbon fibre hulls is fairly straightforward and fuel itself is fairly straightforward. The tricks are in casting large motors without voids.
The probable end result would be a rocket with less range than Trident, but given the massive downloading, since the arms reduction treaties, it only needs to carry 1 or 2 warheads.
There are many other simple starts, but I don't get the impression that enough of them are being taken very seriously. TBF, some are being taken seriously.
One blatant example is how many of our £50-250m aircraft have the type of hardened shelters that means they can't be taken out by £500 drones. We know that any damaged aircraft would make a hole in our capability that would take many months, or several years to recover. This is a known issue for years and years.
One effective flight of drones from a container on a ship, and our air force is significantly crippled.
For example, I think this is a £1bn of Boeing P8 Poseidon's in a £1bn row of sitting ducks at RAF Lossiemouth, about 1km from the Scottish Coast at Elgin. If the identity is correct, it is 4 from the 9 we have. The piccie is from Google Satellite View, and I think is 2026.
It is genuinely scary how rapidly the battlefield is changing. I look at the MOD still trying to get fighters updated after 20 years and I despair. Our armed forces are dangerously close to not being fit for purpose.
Scarier is that we haven't really defined what their future purpose will be. Last year's defence review is already half-obsolete, and nearly seven months on later barely started to do anything practical about it anyway, (The Typhoon upgrade actually makes sense, despite its hefty price tag.)
Building a European defence capability (inc us) that can operate effectively without the US is so challenging on every level that there must be a temptation to hold off and hope America pivots back to being an ally once the closing credits run on the Trump Show.
I don't think it's quite so difficult as that, particularly if we act in concert with Europe. The biggest problem is the sunk cost capabilities like F35, which depend entirely on US cooperation for their ongoing utility.
True but we know that we will already be looking at the next generation of aircraft and we shoudl take the opportunity to look towards non-US sources, whether that is Sweden, France or South Korea.
At any given point we will always be beholden to the US for some of our military hardware until we make the decision to source elsewhere so that, in a decade or more, we know longer have that reliance.
Hell, we could even start building our own weapons again.
Actually, a simple start would be building a solid fuel rocket with the mould line of Trident.
Winding a carbon fibre hulls is fairly straightforward and fuel itself is fairly straightforward. The tricks are in casting large motors without voids.
The probable end result would be a rocket with less range than Trident, but given the massive downloading, since the arms reduction treaties, it only needs to carry 1 or 2 warheads.
There are many other simple starts, but I don't get the impression that enough of them are being taken very seriously. TBF, some are being taken seriously.
One blatant example is how many of our £50-250m aircraft have the type of hardened shelters that means they can't be taken out by £500 drones. We know that any damaged aircraft would make a hole in our capability that would take many months, or several years to recover. This is a known issue for years and years.
One effective flight of drones from a container on a ship, and our air force is significantly crippled.
The problem is too big - see Herman Kahn on Big Problems. The classic is that if you raise a Big enough Problem, you (the person raising it) become the problem.
For aircraft, the problem is that, to build a shelter, you need a specification, a project code etc etc. Multiple zillions per shelter. And then they are vulnerable to full fat smart bombs.
The Ukrainians have demonstrated that the following is simple - you build a concrete box - pour a slab, build walls of slabs. You stabilise the walls by interlocking slabs. Bury it by piling earth round it. The roof is a bit harder. The doors are the only bit that are really tricky. Costs peanuts. And raises the required weapon to destroy to a direct hit with a full fat smart bomb.
Hell, sandbags with a roof of timber is a start.
"But, during the Gulf War, the Americans destroyed nuke proof shelters with smart bombs. So shelters are obsolete"
So no-one does anything.
The Ukrainians seem to have reinvented the Anderson shelter, installed in people's gardens during the second world war. Vulnerable to a direct hit (as were many shelters) but the corrugated iron and earth protected from sideways blast forces.
During both Iraq and Afghanistan, American and other forces repeatedly reinvented the Buried Shipping Container shelter. Despite the best efforts of Mangelment.
It's just what it sounds like - take a shipping container. Bulldoze sand/and/or earth around and over it.
Bit of a tight fit for a P8.
True, but reduced the problems for the troops of it Raining Steel.
Aircraft shelters are a bit harder - but versus drones, only require basic construction methods.
Oh, I agree. Don't take my addiction to snark as anything else.
So many of the issues discussed on here are about to be rendered spectacularly irrelevant by advances in technology - eg robotics
We are 1-3 years from advanced humanoid robots entering the market at scale. Think what that does to, say, defence
Eg look at the latest Unitree robot (from China). Imagine taking on that, on the battlefield. It will be tireless and relentless and be equipped with 100% accurate weapons
It will also go into factories and the like. Vast wealth will be created
And that is just one example
Defence is why we are 100% NOT about to get advanced humanoid robots entering the market. Musk even described the Tesla Robototron as his "robot army". No way are autonomous robots making it out into the general pubic. Factory use? Far better to use a specific robot for a specific task as we already do.
Humanoid droids on the battlefield? Maybe. Your own persona robototron that could be remote programmed to kill us all? No chance
Are you serious?
If governments have a choice between seeing a young man of 25 die on a battlefield, or a robot costing 25k getting temporarily disabled, what will they choose? What will voters prefer? Which makes more sense morally, financially, emotionally, politically?
Of course armies will become robot armies, and this is a GOOD thing. Humans will stop dying young in absurd battles
Well, it will be a good thing until the robots start massacring everyone.
It is genuinely scary how rapidly the battlefield is changing. I look at the MOD still trying to get fighters updated after 20 years and I despair. Our armed forces are dangerously close to not being fit for purpose.
Scarier is that we haven't really defined what their future purpose will be. Last year's defence review is already half-obsolete, and nearly seven months on later barely started to do anything practical about it anyway, (The Typhoon upgrade actually makes sense, despite its hefty price tag.)
Building a European defence capability (inc us) that can operate effectively without the US is so challenging on every level that there must be a temptation to hold off and hope America pivots back to being an ally once the closing credits run on the Trump Show.
I don't think it's quite so difficult as that, particularly if we act in concert with Europe. The biggest problem is the sunk cost capabilities like F35, which depend entirely on US cooperation for their ongoing utility.
True but we know that we will already be looking at the next generation of aircraft and we shoudl take the opportunity to look towards non-US sources, whether that is Sweden, France or South Korea.
At any given point we will always be beholden to the US for some of our military hardware until we make the decision to source elsewhere so that, in a decade or more, we know longer have that reliance.
Hell, we could even start building our own weapons again.
Actually, a simple start would be building a solid fuel rocket with the mould line of Trident.
Winding a carbon fibre hulls is fairly straightforward and fuel itself is fairly straightforward. The tricks are in casting large motors without voids.
The probable end result would be a rocket with less range than Trident, but given the massive downloading, since the arms reduction treaties, it only needs to carry 1 or 2 warheads.
There are many other simple starts, but I don't get the impression that enough of them are being taken very seriously. TBF, some are being taken seriously.
One blatant example is how many of our £50-250m aircraft have the type of hardened shelters that means they can't be taken out by £500 drones. We know that any damaged aircraft would make a hole in our capability that would take many months, or several years to recover. This is a known issue for years and years.
One effective flight of drones from a container on a ship, and our air force is significantly crippled.
For example, I think this is a £1bn of Boeing P8 Poseidon's in a £1bn row of sitting ducks at RAF Lossiemouth, about 1km from the Scottish Coast at Elgin. If the identity is correct, it is 4 from the 9 we have. The piccie is from Google Satellite View, and I think is 2026.
I was once playing golf with an uncle and on the green of a par 3 I was addressing a putt when out of nowhere the deafening noise of a Vulcan taking off immediately overhead was like something you simply could not imagine
It was an experience I have never forgotten
The .map is excellent showing the airfield and Lossiemouth
As a child, we were walking along the side of a valley in the Lake District (I think it was). The entire hill started rattling. 3 Vulcans flew past, one after another. Below us.
Powerful and much needed framing from Andy Burnham in the Guardian..should be repeated every day by ministers or they will find they are blamed for ‘broken Britain’: “If the question at the centre of British politics is “who broke Britain?”, let’s be clear and unequivocal. The four horsemen of Britain’s apocalypse are deindustrialisation, privatisation, austerity and Brexit. In my time in politics, there has been a tendency for too many in Labour to accept too much of the framing of the right, but we must firmly reject its narrative and call it out in no uncertain terms. Figures on the British right talk of taking back control, but people can see that they are the ones who gave it away.”
She suggests that the privatisation program just doesn't work. In order to make the services attractive to the private sector requires long contracts (greater than the electoral cycle) and once privatised, the companies are free to be late/inadequate/corrupt, and there is no workable command-and-control system any more. At this point Governments are reduced to begging (she calls this "bargaining games") the companies to just work pleeeeze.
She illustrates this by comparing the deteriorating of Government in the UK to the deterioration under the Soviet Union. This is provocative (and makes the book much longer than it needs to be) but it is a commanding analogy and illustrates one of the many problems of Thatcherism.
The right has not yet internalised that Thatcherism (privatisation, globalisation, deindustrialisation) really did fuck up the country and now the chickens are coming home to roost. It may have had its advantages at the time (let's concede that to show good faith) but the inheritance has broken the country.
Maybe it was your recommendation that led to my putting it on my Amazon wish list?
My wife bought the entire wishlist so I would have some actual Christmas presents - so “Late Soviet Britain” is now physically present in my “to read” pile! I will report back...
O/T - my kids have accounts with Nationwide from when they were little. I've just popped in to the branch for the firat time in 8 years to do some admin. It was brilliant. I'd forgotten how good in-person banking was. So much more straightforward and less stressful. Why don't other banks offer this? (Well I know they still sort of do but actual branches are few and far between.)
After Trump's disgusting comments on Afghanistan it is time to drop the fawning and realise he is a real threat and bully and time to call him out
No more appeasement, just take immediate action to massively increase our defence spending and form new alliances with the EU, Canada, Australia, Japan and the sane parts of the world
It seems astonishing that Trump declares a deal with Rutte over Greenland that did not include the Danes or Greenlanders agreement
I do not think Greenland or Ukraine is anywhere near settled and Trump's plans for Gaza are obscene
So many of the issues discussed on here are about to be rendered spectacularly irrelevant by advances in technology - eg robotics
We are 1-3 years from advanced humanoid robots entering the market at scale. Think what that does to, say, defence
Eg look at the latest Unitree robot (from China). Imagine taking on that, on the battlefield. It will be tireless and relentless and be equipped with 100% accurate weapons
So many of the issues discussed on here are about to be rendered spectacularly irrelevant by advances in technology - eg robotics
We are 1-3 years from advanced humanoid robots entering the market at scale. Think what that does to, say, defence
Eg look at the latest Unitree robot (from China). Imagine taking on that, on the battlefield. It will be tireless and relentless and be equipped with 100% accurate weapons
It will also go into factories and the like. Vast wealth will be created
And that is just one example
Defence is why we are 100% NOT about to get advanced humanoid robots entering the market. Musk even described the Tesla Robototron as his "robot army". No way are autonomous robots making it out into the general pubic. Factory use? Far better to use a specific robot for a specific task as we already do.
Humanoid droids on the battlefield? Maybe. Your own persona robototron that could be remote programmed to kill us all? No chance
Are you serious?
If governments have a choice between seeing a young man of 25 die on a battlefield, or a robot costing 25k getting temporarily disabled, what will they choose? What will voters prefer? Which makes more sense morally, financially, emotionally, politically?
Of course armies will become robot armies, and this is a GOOD thing. Humans will stop dying young in absurd battles
Well, it will be a good thing until the robots start massacring everyone.
Until you realise the simple solution. Robots that don't kill people.
Imagine a robot that goes out, and simply holds onto a human prisoner. Send 10 million of those. If you smash them or shoot them, they won't care. Just another one will try and grab you.
Powerful and much needed framing from Andy Burnham in the Guardian..should be repeated every day by ministers or they will find they are blamed for ‘broken Britain’: “If the question at the centre of British politics is “who broke Britain?”, let’s be clear and unequivocal. The four horsemen of Britain’s apocalypse are deindustrialisation, privatisation, austerity and Brexit. In my time in politics, there has been a tendency for too many in Labour to accept too much of the framing of the right, but we must firmly reject its narrative and call it out in no uncertain terms. Figures on the British right talk of taking back control, but people can see that they are the ones who gave it away.”
If Labour are to win the next election we MUST rejoin the EU. Starmer or Burnham must batter it through. No Referendums. Just a huge parlianentary majority. The full fat version including Schengen. We must put ourselves at the centre of Europe.
Labour have nothing to lose. They are sleepwalking to possible defeat at the hands of Farage. There is no form of REJOIN that would be a worse fate for this country than that.
Rejoin plus Euro means zero chance of Labour re election
Nobody is suggesting the Euro
Roger is (“…full fat version…”) in the comment HYUFD is replying to!
The reality of Rejoin is
1) We would be asked to follow the process that all applicants to the are do. The politics of Europe will not slow a special exemption - too many countries would get upset 2) So we would be signing up to “full fat” Europe 3) This means signing up for the Euro. Since this would remove a huge chunk of the mucking around with the economy the politicians love, this would be a matter of I) Signing up to the Euro joining process II) Never actually meeting he requirements and joining
The number of countries that want Britain to join the Euro is zero. They've got enough problems already without adding a country with a weird housing thing going on that's not really into it.
It's perfectly possible that the application would just get held up forever, and it's also possible that some countries would say they don't think it'll last and they're not going to play the hokey cokey but the Euro wouldn't be the blocker.
It would also be in the US and Russian interests to stop the UK from rejoining so Orban might put the blockers on it (and maybe Fico too) and then you get down to the usual EU shenanigans of wanting a pound of flesh from the UK for cooperation even when it’s in the EU’s benefit to cooperate so no doubt the French making silly fishing demands and Spain wanting to change Gibraltar’s status.
This is the greatest tragedy of Brexit: that rejoining will be much more difficult and painful than it would have been to remain. No taking it back to the shop if it didn't fit.
It won’t be difficult, it will be impossible
I’ve been through this before, but one more time
It needs a government to sell Rejoin in an election and then win the election with that mandate. Then they must call the referendum, and win that. All this time very awkward questions about the euro and Schengen and fisheries and the City and much else will crop up, making that referendum suddenly seem a lot more difficult to win than first appeared. An unpopular government will lose it. A popular government will think “why bother taking the risk, we’re popular, why spend all that time and capital, let’s forget the referendum, thing”
So we won’t even get as far as a referendum. And even if we did and it was won, we would then have 5-10 years of painful painful negotiation with the EU to establish terms, during which any of 28 countries could simply veto, just for the fuck of it. This would consume a decade of British politics, with no guarantee of success at the end. The Rejoiners who glibly say “oh they want us back” are as foolishly complacent as the Brexiteers who farcically claimed “it will be the easiest deal in the world”
No sane UK government will ever attempt Rejoin, an insane government would fuck it up. Ergo, it is never going to happen
Sorry
You're bizarrely wrong about this due to a failure of imagination.
Back in the deep mists of time the Lib Dems were one of the first people to propose an in/out referendum on the EU because they couldn't conceive that out would win. They completely failed to imagine the way in which public opinion might be shifted and the part they might play in that.
So it is with Rejoin. You describe the politics of the status quo. But you fail to imagine how the politics would be different were public opinion also radically different, and the EU itself changed.
For sure, most advocates of Rejoin also lack the imagination to conceive of the work they will need to do to achieve it, so I certainly don't think that Rejoin is likely.
But it's not hard to imagine it happening.
I’ve sketched out the huge and many obstacles. You have not shown how these will be overcome, you’ve just said “”nah, it is easily done”
By-elections are a barometer of public opinion in which governments always operate at a handicap in that the opposition is more motivated. Given how unpopular Starmer is any by-election will be a disaster for him, but it's striking just how many different ways in which this by-election could be a disaster and hilarious that one of those ways involves the election of a Labour MP (which in normal unpopular government circumstances would be regarded as a triumph).
It is most entertaining, and made all the more so by the fact that Starmer's putative nemesis is himself a flawed two-time leadership election loser well capable of falling flat on his face.
It's hard to know what would be the funniest outcome.
Burnham stands and loses.
A Burnham, Gallaway, Reform, Gaza Independent, Polanski by election would be one of the greatest (for anoraks) shows on earth.
Surely Lozza Fox has to be on the ballot too?
Shame that Lord Sutch and Commander Boakes aren't around anymore to enliven things.
Hopefully Count Binface will stand in their place.
Young will suffer most when AI ‘tsunami’ hits jobs, says head of IMF
Kristalina Georgieva says research suggests 60% of jobs in advanced economies will be affected, with many entry-level roles wiped out
Artificial intelligence will be a “tsunami hitting the labour market”, with young people worst affected, the head of the International Monetary Fund warned the World Economic Forum on Friday.
Kristalina Georgieva told delegates in Davos that the IMF’s own research suggested there would be a big transformation of demand for skills, as the technology becomes increasingly widespread.
“We expect over the next years, in advanced economies, 60% of jobs to be affected by AI, either enhanced or eliminated or transformed – 40% globally,” she said. “This is like a tsunami hitting the labour market.”
I certainly wouldn't want to be coming out of uni now looking to be a software developer, data scientist, consultancy.
There is going to have to be a massive effort to prevent this dislocation from radicalising the electorate and the resultant disasters that could cause. And that means, among other things, addressing wealth inequalities and the egregious influence of the oligarchs and their ghosting of the voters with pet populists. Otherwise it could be WB Yeats's second coming all over again.
Powerful and much needed framing from Andy Burnham in the Guardian..should be repeated every day by ministers or they will find they are blamed for ‘broken Britain’: “If the question at the centre of British politics is “who broke Britain?”, let’s be clear and unequivocal. The four horsemen of Britain’s apocalypse are deindustrialisation, privatisation, austerity and Brexit. In my time in politics, there has been a tendency for too many in Labour to accept too much of the framing of the right, but we must firmly reject its narrative and call it out in no uncertain terms. Figures on the British right talk of taking back control, but people can see that they are the ones who gave it away.”
If Labour are to win the next election we MUST rejoin the EU. Starmer or Burnham must batter it through. No Referendums. Just a huge parlianentary majority. The full fat version including Schengen. We must put ourselves at the centre of Europe.
Labour have nothing to lose. They are sleepwalking to possible defeat at the hands of Farage. There is no form of REJOIN that would be a worse fate for this country than that.
Rejoin plus Euro means zero chance of Labour re election
Nobody is suggesting the Euro
Roger is (“…full fat version…”) in the comment HYUFD is replying to!
The reality of Rejoin is
1) We would be asked to follow the process that all applicants to the are do. The politics of Europe will not slow a special exemption - too many countries would get upset 2) So we would be signing up to “full fat” Europe 3) This means signing up for the Euro. Since this would remove a huge chunk of the mucking around with the economy the politicians love, this would be a matter of I) Signing up to the Euro joining process II) Never actually meeting he requirements and joining
The number of countries that want Britain to join the Euro is zero. They've got enough problems already without adding a country with a weird housing thing going on that's not really into it.
It's perfectly possible that the application would just get held up forever, and it's also possible that some countries would say they don't think it'll last and they're not going to play the hokey cokey but the Euro wouldn't be the blocker.
It would also be in the US and Russian interests to stop the UK from rejoining so Orban might put the blockers on it (and maybe Fico too) and then you get down to the usual EU shenanigans of wanting a pound of flesh from the UK for cooperation even when it’s in the EU’s benefit to cooperate so no doubt the French making silly fishing demands and Spain wanting to change Gibraltar’s status.
This is the greatest tragedy of Brexit: that rejoining will be much more difficult and painful than it would have been to remain. No taking it back to the shop if it didn't fit.
It won’t be difficult, it will be impossible
I’ve been through this before, but one more time
It needs a government to sell Rejoin in an election and then win the election with that mandate. Then they must call the referendum, and win that. All this time very awkward questions about the euro and Schengen and fisheries and the City and much else will crop up, making that referendum suddenly seem a lot more difficult to win than first appeared. An unpopular government will lose it. A popular government will think “why bother taking the risk, we’re popular, why spend all that time and capital, let’s forget the referendum, thing”
So we won’t even get as far as a referendum. And even if we did and it was won, we would then have 5-10 years of painful painful negotiation with the EU to establish terms, during which any of 28 countries could simply veto, just for the fuck of it. This would consume a decade of British politics, with no guarantee of success at the end. The Rejoiners who glibly say “oh they want us back” are as foolishly complacent as the Brexiteers who farcically claimed “it will be the easiest deal in the world”
No sane UK government will ever attempt Rejoin, an insane government would fuck it up. Ergo, it is never going to happen
Sorry
You're bizarrely wrong about this due to a failure of imagination.
Back in the deep mists of time the Lib Dems were one of the first people to propose an in/out referendum on the EU because they couldn't conceive that out would win. They completely failed to imagine the way in which public opinion might be shifted and the part they might play in that.
So it is with Rejoin. You describe the politics of the status quo. But you fail to imagine how the politics would be different were public opinion also radically different, and the EU itself changed.
For sure, most advocates of Rejoin also lack the imagination to conceive of the work they will need to do to achieve it, so I certainly don't think that Rejoin is likely.
But it's not hard to imagine it happening.
It is very, very hard to imagine how you sell the cost of membership fees for rejoining.
We will get the "but the economy will grow by umpty percent" line trotted out. That doesn't pass the smell test. We are not that far behind Germany and France after Brexit. The idea that we would race ahead because of rejoining is nonsense. (It is also a reason why it wouldn't be on offer from France and Germany.)
Young will suffer most when AI ‘tsunami’ hits jobs, says head of IMF
Kristalina Georgieva says research suggests 60% of jobs in advanced economies will be affected, with many entry-level roles wiped out
Artificial intelligence will be a “tsunami hitting the labour market”, with young people worst affected, the head of the International Monetary Fund warned the World Economic Forum on Friday.
Kristalina Georgieva told delegates in Davos that the IMF’s own research suggested there would be a big transformation of demand for skills, as the technology becomes increasingly widespread.
“We expect over the next years, in advanced economies, 60% of jobs to be affected by AI, either enhanced or eliminated or transformed – 40% globally,” she said. “This is like a tsunami hitting the labour market.”
I certainly wouldn't want to be coming out of uni now looking to be a software developer, data scientist, consultancy.
white-collar workers say that AI saves them little or no time, but executives think it's a massive timesaver. This divide between employees and management is going to influence the future of the workforce.
If you aren't being more productive / saving time, you are doing it wrong.
I have just had a code sprint over the past week to solve a rather complex problem and with the aid of LLMs written code that would have previously taken me couple of months at least to figure out and some junior researcher with only under grad dev skills probably 6 months.
everyone's shipping faster. but someone has to review that code. someone has to maintain it. someone has to debug it at 3am. and those people are burning out. i spent two weeks talking to open source maintainers, digging through github discussions, and reading security research. here's what's actually happening. the 12x problem
this is Brandolini's Law weaponized: "The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it."
..“European countries are in conflict with the U.S. over the Greenland issue, so they are in a position to push back. In contrast, Korea is on good terms with Washington and would not want to create unnecessary friction,” said Park Won-gon, a professor of North Korean studies at Ewha Womans University.
Park added that rejecting the invitation could carry risks, saying, “Given Trump’s personality, there is a strong possibility that some form of retaliation could follow if Seoul turns down the invitation.”..
..Sean King, an expert on Asia and vice president at New York-based Park Strategies, was skeptical about the board’s long-term relevance, but still saw practical value for Seoul, given the extensive business interests of Korean conglomerates across the Middle East.
“Korea can take or leave the Board of Peace, but gains more than it loses by joining,” King said.
“I’m thinking especially of the valuable face time it would provide Korean officials with counterparts from Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the UAE,” he said. “It would afford the Lee government even more chances to closely interact with high-ranking U.S. officials, which can only further the country’s strategic interests.”
Accepting the invitation would test Seoul’s commitment to multilateral diplomacy, as the board’s long-term purpose and members remain unclear.
Declining it, however, carries its own risks. Turning down the offer could irritate an unpredictable U.S. president, potentially sending ripple effects through the bilateral alliance..
So many of the issues discussed on here are about to be rendered spectacularly irrelevant by advances in technology - eg robotics
We are 1-3 years from advanced humanoid robots entering the market at scale. Think what that does to, say, defence
Eg look at the latest Unitree robot (from China). Imagine taking on that, on the battlefield. It will be tireless and relentless and be equipped with 100% accurate weapons
It will also go into factories and the like. Vast wealth will be created
And that is just one example
Defence is why we are 100% NOT about to get advanced humanoid robots entering the market. Musk even described the Tesla Robototron as his "robot army". No way are autonomous robots making it out into the general pubic. Factory use? Far better to use a specific robot for a specific task as we already do.
Humanoid droids on the battlefield? Maybe. Your own persona robototron that could be remote programmed to kill us all? No chance
Are you serious?
If governments have a choice between seeing a young man of 25 die on a battlefield, or a robot costing 25k getting temporarily disabled, what will they choose? What will voters prefer? Which makes more sense morally, financially, emotionally, politically?
Of course armies will become robot armies, and this is a GOOD thing. Humans will stop dying young in absurd battles
They will be used, but if we look at how the Russians are using drones to attack civilians in Kherson and elsewhere - the drone safari - I am not sure that they will reduce the extent to which people of all ages die in war.
Powerful and much needed framing from Andy Burnham in the Guardian..should be repeated every day by ministers or they will find they are blamed for ‘broken Britain’: “If the question at the centre of British politics is “who broke Britain?”, let’s be clear and unequivocal. The four horsemen of Britain’s apocalypse are deindustrialisation, privatisation, austerity and Brexit. In my time in politics, there has been a tendency for too many in Labour to accept too much of the framing of the right, but we must firmly reject its narrative and call it out in no uncertain terms. Figures on the British right talk of taking back control, but people can see that they are the ones who gave it away.”
If Labour are to win the next election we MUST rejoin the EU. Starmer or Burnham must batter it through. No Referendums. Just a huge parlianentary majority. The full fat version including Schengen. We must put ourselves at the centre of Europe.
Labour have nothing to lose. They are sleepwalking to possible defeat at the hands of Farage. There is no form of REJOIN that would be a worse fate for this country than that.
Rejoin plus Euro means zero chance of Labour re election
Nobody is suggesting the Euro
Roger is (“…full fat version…”) in the comment HYUFD is replying to!
The reality of Rejoin is
1) We would be asked to follow the process that all applicants to the are do. The politics of Europe will not slow a special exemption - too many countries would get upset 2) So we would be signing up to “full fat” Europe 3) This means signing up for the Euro. Since this would remove a huge chunk of the mucking around with the economy the politicians love, this would be a matter of I) Signing up to the Euro joining process II) Never actually meeting he requirements and joining
The number of countries that want Britain to join the Euro is zero. They've got enough problems already without adding a country with a weird housing thing going on that's not really into it.
It's perfectly possible that the application would just get held up forever, and it's also possible that some countries would say they don't think it'll last and they're not going to play the hokey cokey but the Euro wouldn't be the blocker.
It would also be in the US and Russian interests to stop the UK from rejoining so Orban might put the blockers on it (and maybe Fico too) and then you get down to the usual EU shenanigans of wanting a pound of flesh from the UK for cooperation even when it’s in the EU’s benefit to cooperate so no doubt the French making silly fishing demands and Spain wanting to change Gibraltar’s status.
This is the greatest tragedy of Brexit: that rejoining will be much more difficult and painful than it would have been to remain. No taking it back to the shop if it didn't fit.
It won’t be difficult, it will be impossible
I’ve been through this before, but one more time
It needs a government to sell Rejoin in an election and then win the election with that mandate. Then they must call the referendum, and win that. All this time very awkward questions about the euro and Schengen and fisheries and the City and much else will crop up, making that referendum suddenly seem a lot more difficult to win than first appeared. An unpopular government will lose it. A popular government will think “why bother taking the risk, we’re popular, why spend all that time and capital, let’s forget the referendum, thing”
So we won’t even get as far as a referendum. And even if we did and it was won, we would then have 5-10 years of painful painful negotiation with the EU to establish terms, during which any of 28 countries could simply veto, just for the fuck of it. This would consume a decade of British politics, with no guarantee of success at the end. The Rejoiners who glibly say “oh they want us back” are as foolishly complacent as the Brexiteers who farcically claimed “it will be the easiest deal in the world”
No sane UK government will ever attempt Rejoin, an insane government would fuck it up. Ergo, it is never going to happen
Sorry
Let me introduce you to the Starmer government.....10 year police reorganisation, scrap jury trials, paying £10bn's to give away terroritory against the wishes of the people living there, paying terrorists for actions of other governments, ....
Well, yes. This is the worst, most insane government in British history. Yet even this shower of twats aren’t going for Rejoin
It is genuinely scary how rapidly the battlefield is changing. I look at the MOD still trying to get fighters updated after 20 years and I despair. Our armed forces are dangerously close to not being fit for purpose.
Scarier is that we haven't really defined what their future purpose will be. Last year's defence review is already half-obsolete, and nearly seven months on later barely started to do anything practical about it anyway, (The Typhoon upgrade actually makes sense, despite its hefty price tag.)
Building a European defence capability (inc us) that can operate effectively without the US is so challenging on every level that there must be a temptation to hold off and hope America pivots back to being an ally once the closing credits run on the Trump Show.
I don't think it's quite so difficult as that, particularly if we act in concert with Europe. The biggest problem is the sunk cost capabilities like F35, which depend entirely on US cooperation for their ongoing utility.
True but we know that we will already be looking at the next generation of aircraft and we shoudl take the opportunity to look towards non-US sources, whether that is Sweden, France or South Korea.
At any given point we will always be beholden to the US for some of our military hardware until we make the decision to source elsewhere so that, in a decade or more, we know longer have that reliance.
Hell, we could even start building our own weapons again.
Actually, a simple start would be building a solid fuel rocket with the mould line of Trident.
Winding a carbon fibre hulls is fairly straightforward and fuel itself is fairly straightforward. The tricks are in casting large motors without voids.
The probable end result would be a rocket with less range than Trident, but given the massive downloading, since the arms reduction treaties, it only needs to carry 1 or 2 warheads.
There are many other simple starts, but I don't get the impression that enough of them are being taken very seriously. TBF, some are being taken seriously.
One blatant example is how many of our £50-250m aircraft have the type of hardened shelters that means they can't be taken out by £500 drones. We know that any damaged aircraft would make a hole in our capability that would take many months, or several years to recover. This is a known issue for years and years.
One effective flight of drones from a container on a ship, and our air force is significantly crippled.
For example, I think this is a £1bn of Boeing P8 Poseidon's in a £1bn row of sitting ducks at RAF Lossiemouth, about 1km from the Scottish Coast at Elgin. If the identity is correct, it is 4 from the 9 we have. The piccie is from Google Satellite View, and I think is 2026.
I was once playing golf with an uncle and on the green of a par 3 I was addressing a putt when out of nowhere the deafening noise of a Vulcan taking off immediately overhead was like something you simply could not imagine
It was an experience I have never forgotten
The .map is excellent showing the airfield and Lossiemouth
As a child, we were walking along the side of a valley in the Lake District (I think it was). The entire hill started rattling. 3 Vulcans flew past, one after another. Below us.
When they did that short-take-off thing they were memorably noisy. As I recall, English Electric Lightnings and F104 Starfighters weren't exactly quiet either. Them were the days. The sheer variety of aircraft types in the 70s compared to today is quite remarkable. At one point we had three different V-bombers in service!
So many of the issues discussed on here are about to be rendered spectacularly irrelevant by advances in technology - eg robotics
We are 1-3 years from advanced humanoid robots entering the market at scale. Think what that does to, say, defence
Eg look at the latest Unitree robot (from China). Imagine taking on that, on the battlefield. It will be tireless and relentless and be equipped with 100% accurate weapons
It will also go into factories and the like. Vast wealth will be created
And that is just one example
Defence is why we are 100% NOT about to get advanced humanoid robots entering the market. Musk even described the Tesla Robototron as his "robot army". No way are autonomous robots making it out into the general pubic. Factory use? Far better to use a specific robot for a specific task as we already do.
Humanoid droids on the battlefield? Maybe. Your own persona robototron that could be remote programmed to kill us all? No chance
Are you serious?
If governments have a choice between seeing a young man of 25 die on a battlefield, or a robot costing 25k getting temporarily disabled, what will they choose? What will voters prefer? Which makes more sense morally, financially, emotionally, politically?
Of course armies will become robot armies, and this is a GOOD thing. Humans will stop dying young in absurd battles
I'm confused. I just agreed with you that we will get droids on the battlefield. Where I disagree is that they are going on general sale - nobody is going to be allowed to buy a superhuman strength robot to ask as their household cleaner, no matter how much that tosser Musk foams on about it.
Powerful and much needed framing from Andy Burnham in the Guardian..should be repeated every day by ministers or they will find they are blamed for ‘broken Britain’: “If the question at the centre of British politics is “who broke Britain?”, let’s be clear and unequivocal. The four horsemen of Britain’s apocalypse are deindustrialisation, privatisation, austerity and Brexit. In my time in politics, there has been a tendency for too many in Labour to accept too much of the framing of the right, but we must firmly reject its narrative and call it out in no uncertain terms. Figures on the British right talk of taking back control, but people can see that they are the ones who gave it away.”
If Labour are to win the next election we MUST rejoin the EU. Starmer or Burnham must batter it through. No Referendums. Just a huge parlianentary majority. The full fat version including Schengen. We must put ourselves at the centre of Europe.
Labour have nothing to lose. They are sleepwalking to possible defeat at the hands of Farage. There is no form of REJOIN that would be a worse fate for this country than that.
Rejoin plus Euro means zero chance of Labour re election
Nobody is suggesting the Euro
Roger is (“…full fat version…”) in the comment HYUFD is replying to!
The reality of Rejoin is
1) We would be asked to follow the process that all applicants to the are do. The politics of Europe will not slow a special exemption - too many countries would get upset 2) So we would be signing up to “full fat” Europe 3) This means signing up for the Euro. Since this would remove a huge chunk of the mucking around with the economy the politicians love, this would be a matter of I) Signing up to the Euro joining process II) Never actually meeting he requirements and joining
The number of countries that want Britain to join the Euro is zero. They've got enough problems already without adding a country with a weird housing thing going on that's not really into it.
It's perfectly possible that the application would just get held up forever, and it's also possible that some countries would say they don't think it'll last and they're not going to play the hokey cokey but the Euro wouldn't be the blocker.
It would also be in the US and Russian interests to stop the UK from rejoining so Orban might put the blockers on it (and maybe Fico too) and then you get down to the usual EU shenanigans of wanting a pound of flesh from the UK for cooperation even when it’s in the EU’s benefit to cooperate so no doubt the French making silly fishing demands and Spain wanting to change Gibraltar’s status.
This is the greatest tragedy of Brexit: that rejoining will be much more difficult and painful than it would have been to remain. No taking it back to the shop if it didn't fit.
It won’t be difficult, it will be impossible
I’ve been through this before, but one more time
It needs a government to sell Rejoin in an election and then win the election with that mandate. Then they must call the referendum, and win that. All this time very awkward questions about the euro and Schengen and fisheries and the City and much else will crop up, making that referendum suddenly seem a lot more difficult to win than first appeared. An unpopular government will lose it. A popular government will think “why bother taking the risk, we’re popular, why spend all that time and capital, let’s forget the referendum, thing”
So we won’t even get as far as a referendum. And even if we did and it was won, we would then have 5-10 years of painful painful negotiation with the EU to establish terms, during which any of 28 countries could simply veto, just for the fuck of it. This would consume a decade of British politics, with no guarantee of success at the end. The Rejoiners who glibly say “oh they want us back” are as foolishly complacent as the Brexiteers who farcically claimed “it will be the easiest deal in the world”
No sane UK government will ever attempt Rejoin, an insane government would fuck it up. Ergo, it is never going to happen
Sorry
The referendum 2016 question was about one thing only: membership of the EU. It is consistent with the Brexit vote to be in a similar relationship with the EU, descending Barnier's ladder bit by bit, as Norway, Switzerland, Ukraine, Turkey or Canada. We are closest to the Canadian model. We don't have to be. It is conceivable that we could forge a relation even closer than Norway without being in the EU. None of this goes back an inch on the 2016 question. Much of it is what a minority of us specifically voted for.
I agree that for now Rejoin is not credible. But serious renegotiation on the basis of staying out of the EU is entirely possible, could feature in a manifesto, and probably should promise a ratifying referendum.
Until it isn't our important political alliance remains NATO. Perhaps to be renamed EUROCANATO or something. NATO does include Canada and excludes pacifist Ireland. Even without the USA it matters more than the political carthorse and camel that is the EU. ,
Powerful and much needed framing from Andy Burnham in the Guardian..should be repeated every day by ministers or they will find they are blamed for ‘broken Britain’: “If the question at the centre of British politics is “who broke Britain?”, let’s be clear and unequivocal. The four horsemen of Britain’s apocalypse are deindustrialisation, privatisation, austerity and Brexit. In my time in politics, there has been a tendency for too many in Labour to accept too much of the framing of the right, but we must firmly reject its narrative and call it out in no uncertain terms. Figures on the British right talk of taking back control, but people can see that they are the ones who gave it away.”
If Labour are to win the next election we MUST rejoin the EU. Starmer or Burnham must batter it through. No Referendums. Just a huge parlianentary majority. The full fat version including Schengen. We must put ourselves at the centre of Europe.
Labour have nothing to lose. They are sleepwalking to possible defeat at the hands of Farage. There is no form of REJOIN that would be a worse fate for this country than that.
Rejoin plus Euro means zero chance of Labour re election
Nobody is suggesting the Euro
Roger is (“…full fat version…”) in the comment HYUFD is replying to!
The reality of Rejoin is
1) We would be asked to follow the process that all applicants to the are do. The politics of Europe will not slow a special exemption - too many countries would get upset 2) So we would be signing up to “full fat” Europe 3) This means signing up for the Euro. Since this would remove a huge chunk of the mucking around with the economy the politicians love, this would be a matter of I) Signing up to the Euro joining process II) Never actually meeting he requirements and joining
The number of countries that want Britain to join the Euro is zero. They've got enough problems already without adding a country with a weird housing thing going on that's not really into it.
It's perfectly possible that the application would just get held up forever, and it's also possible that some countries would say they don't think it'll last and they're not going to play the hokey cokey but the Euro wouldn't be the blocker.
It would also be in the US and Russian interests to stop the UK from rejoining so Orban might put the blockers on it (and maybe Fico too) and then you get down to the usual EU shenanigans of wanting a pound of flesh from the UK for cooperation even when it’s in the EU’s benefit to cooperate so no doubt the French making silly fishing demands and Spain wanting to change Gibraltar’s status.
This is the greatest tragedy of Brexit: that rejoining will be much more difficult and painful than it would have been to remain. No taking it back to the shop if it didn't fit.
It won’t be difficult, it will be impossible
I’ve been through this before, but one more time
It needs a government to sell Rejoin in an election and then win the election with that mandate. Then they must call the referendum, and win that. All this time very awkward questions about the euro and Schengen and fisheries and the City and much else will crop up, making that referendum suddenly seem a lot more difficult to win than first appeared. An unpopular government will lose it. A popular government will think “why bother taking the risk, we’re popular, why spend all that time and capital, let’s forget the referendum, thing”
So we won’t even get as far as a referendum. And even if we did and it was won, we would then have 5-10 years of painful painful negotiation with the EU to establish terms, during which any of 28 countries could simply veto, just for the fuck of it. This would consume a decade of British politics, with no guarantee of success at the end. The Rejoiners who glibly say “oh they want us back” are as foolishly complacent as the Brexiteers who farcically claimed “it will be the easiest deal in the world”
No sane UK government will ever attempt Rejoin, an insane government would fuck it up. Ergo, it is never going to happen
Sorry
You're bizarrely wrong about this due to a failure of imagination.
Back in the deep mists of time the Lib Dems were one of the first people to propose an in/out referendum on the EU because they couldn't conceive that out would win. They completely failed to imagine the way in which public opinion might be shifted and the part they might play in that.
So it is with Rejoin. You describe the politics of the status quo. But you fail to imagine how the politics would be different were public opinion also radically different, and the EU itself changed.
For sure, most advocates of Rejoin also lack the imagination to conceive of the work they will need to do to achieve it, so I certainly don't think that Rejoin is likely.
But it's not hard to imagine it happening.
I’ve sketched out the huge and many obstacles. You have not shown how these will be overcome, you’ve just said “”nah, it is easily done”
How?
I didn't say it was easy. I said you had to change people's minds. That's hard, but the right-wing have done it a fair bit over the last four or five decades. It happens.
Young will suffer most when AI ‘tsunami’ hits jobs, says head of IMF
Kristalina Georgieva says research suggests 60% of jobs in advanced economies will be affected, with many entry-level roles wiped out
Artificial intelligence will be a “tsunami hitting the labour market”, with young people worst affected, the head of the International Monetary Fund warned the World Economic Forum on Friday.
Kristalina Georgieva told delegates in Davos that the IMF’s own research suggested there would be a big transformation of demand for skills, as the technology becomes increasingly widespread.
“We expect over the next years, in advanced economies, 60% of jobs to be affected by AI, either enhanced or eliminated or transformed – 40% globally,” she said. “This is like a tsunami hitting the labour market.”
I certainly wouldn't want to be coming out of uni now looking to be a software developer, data scientist, consultancy.
white-collar workers say that AI saves them little or no time, but executives think it's a massive timesaver. This divide between employees and management is going to influence the future of the workforce.
If you aren't being more productive / saving time, you are doing it wrong.
I have just had a code sprint over the past week to solve a rather complex problem and with the aid of LLMs written code that would have previously taken me couple of months at least to figure out and some junior researcher with only under grad dev skills probably 6 months.
So many of the issues discussed on here are about to be rendered spectacularly irrelevant by advances in technology - eg robotics
We are 1-3 years from advanced humanoid robots entering the market at scale. Think what that does to, say, defence
Eg look at the latest Unitree robot (from China). Imagine taking on that, on the battlefield. It will be tireless and relentless and be equipped with 100% accurate weapons
It will also go into factories and the like. Vast wealth will be created
And that is just one example
Defence is why we are 100% NOT about to get advanced humanoid robots entering the market. Musk even described the Tesla Robototron as his "robot army". No way are autonomous robots making it out into the general pubic. Factory use? Far better to use a specific robot for a specific task as we already do.
Humanoid droids on the battlefield? Maybe. Your own persona robototron that could be remote programmed to kill us all? No chance
Are you serious?
If governments have a choice between seeing a young man of 25 die on a battlefield, or a robot costing 25k getting temporarily disabled, what will they choose? What will voters prefer? Which makes more sense morally, financially, emotionally, politically?
Of course armies will become robot armies, and this is a GOOD thing. Humans will stop dying young in absurd battles
I'm confused. I just agreed with you that we will get droids on the battlefield. Where I disagree is that they are going on general sale - nobody is going to be allowed to buy a superhuman strength robot to ask as their household cleaner, no matter how much that tosser Musk foams on about it.
On the contrary, NS-5s are going to be in the home first.
Powerful and much needed framing from Andy Burnham in the Guardian..should be repeated every day by ministers or they will find they are blamed for ‘broken Britain’: “If the question at the centre of British politics is “who broke Britain?”, let’s be clear and unequivocal. The four horsemen of Britain’s apocalypse are deindustrialisation, privatisation, austerity and Brexit. In my time in politics, there has been a tendency for too many in Labour to accept too much of the framing of the right, but we must firmly reject its narrative and call it out in no uncertain terms. Figures on the British right talk of taking back control, but people can see that they are the ones who gave it away.”
If Labour are to win the next election we MUST rejoin the EU. Starmer or Burnham must batter it through. No Referendums. Just a huge parlianentary majority. The full fat version including Schengen. We must put ourselves at the centre of Europe.
Labour have nothing to lose. They are sleepwalking to possible defeat at the hands of Farage. There is no form of REJOIN that would be a worse fate for this country than that.
Rejoin plus Euro means zero chance of Labour re election
Nobody is suggesting the Euro
Roger is (“…full fat version…”) in the comment HYUFD is replying to!
The reality of Rejoin is
1) We would be asked to follow the process that all applicants to the are do. The politics of Europe will not slow a special exemption - too many countries would get upset 2) So we would be signing up to “full fat” Europe 3) This means signing up for the Euro. Since this would remove a huge chunk of the mucking around with the economy the politicians love, this would be a matter of I) Signing up to the Euro joining process II) Never actually meeting he requirements and joining
The number of countries that want Britain to join the Euro is zero. They've got enough problems already without adding a country with a weird housing thing going on that's not really into it.
It's perfectly possible that the application would just get held up forever, and it's also possible that some countries would say they don't think it'll last and they're not going to play the hokey cokey but the Euro wouldn't be the blocker.
It would also be in the US and Russian interests to stop the UK from rejoining so Orban might put the blockers on it (and maybe Fico too) and then you get down to the usual EU shenanigans of wanting a pound of flesh from the UK for cooperation even when it’s in the EU’s benefit to cooperate so no doubt the French making silly fishing demands and Spain wanting to change Gibraltar’s status.
This is the greatest tragedy of Brexit: that rejoining will be much more difficult and painful than it would have been to remain. No taking it back to the shop if it didn't fit.
It won’t be difficult, it will be impossible
I’ve been through this before, but one more time
It needs a government to sell Rejoin in an election and then win the election with that mandate. Then they must call the referendum, and win that. All this time very awkward questions about the euro and Schengen and fisheries and the City and much else will crop up, making that referendum suddenly seem a lot more difficult to win than first appeared. An unpopular government will lose it. A popular government will think “why bother taking the risk, we’re popular, why spend all that time and capital, let’s forget the referendum, thing”
So we won’t even get as far as a referendum. And even if we did and it was won, we would then have 5-10 years of painful painful negotiation with the EU to establish terms, during which any of 28 countries could simply veto, just for the fuck of it. This would consume a decade of British politics, with no guarantee of success at the end. The Rejoiners who glibly say “oh they want us back” are as foolishly complacent as the Brexiteers who farcically claimed “it will be the easiest deal in the world”
No sane UK government will ever attempt Rejoin, an insane government would fuck it up. Ergo, it is never going to happen
Sorry
You're bizarrely wrong about this due to a failure of imagination.
Back in the deep mists of time the Lib Dems were one of the first people to propose an in/out referendum on the EU because they couldn't conceive that out would win. They completely failed to imagine the way in which public opinion might be shifted and the part they might play in that.
So it is with Rejoin. You describe the politics of the status quo. But you fail to imagine how the politics would be different were public opinion also radically different, and the EU itself changed.
For sure, most advocates of Rejoin also lack the imagination to conceive of the work they will need to do to achieve it, so I certainly don't think that Rejoin is likely.
But it's not hard to imagine it happening.
I’ve sketched out the huge and many obstacles. You have not shown how these will be overcome, you’ve just said “”nah, it is easily done”
How?
I didn't say it was easy. I said you had to change people's minds. That's hard, but the right-wing have done it a fair bit over the last four or five decades. It happens.
A Reform government would probably sort that one for you.
Powerful and much needed framing from Andy Burnham in the Guardian..should be repeated every day by ministers or they will find they are blamed for ‘broken Britain’: “If the question at the centre of British politics is “who broke Britain?”, let’s be clear and unequivocal. The four horsemen of Britain’s apocalypse are deindustrialisation, privatisation, austerity and Brexit. In my time in politics, there has been a tendency for too many in Labour to accept too much of the framing of the right, but we must firmly reject its narrative and call it out in no uncertain terms. Figures on the British right talk of taking back control, but people can see that they are the ones who gave it away.”
If Labour are to win the next election we MUST rejoin the EU. Starmer or Burnham must batter it through. No Referendums. Just a huge parlianentary majority. The full fat version including Schengen. We must put ourselves at the centre of Europe.
Labour have nothing to lose. They are sleepwalking to possible defeat at the hands of Farage. There is no form of REJOIN that would be a worse fate for this country than that.
Rejoin plus Euro means zero chance of Labour re election
Nobody is suggesting the Euro
Roger is (“…full fat version…”) in the comment HYUFD is replying to!
The reality of Rejoin is
1) We would be asked to follow the process that all applicants to the are do. The politics of Europe will not slow a special exemption - too many countries would get upset 2) So we would be signing up to “full fat” Europe 3) This means signing up for the Euro. Since this would remove a huge chunk of the mucking around with the economy the politicians love, this would be a matter of I) Signing up to the Euro joining process II) Never actually meeting he requirements and joining
The number of countries that want Britain to join the Euro is zero. They've got enough problems already without adding a country with a weird housing thing going on that's not really into it.
It's perfectly possible that the application would just get held up forever, and it's also possible that some countries would say they don't think it'll last and they're not going to play the hokey cokey but the Euro wouldn't be the blocker.
It would also be in the US and Russian interests to stop the UK from rejoining so Orban might put the blockers on it (and maybe Fico too) and then you get down to the usual EU shenanigans of wanting a pound of flesh from the UK for cooperation even when it’s in the EU’s benefit to cooperate so no doubt the French making silly fishing demands and Spain wanting to change Gibraltar’s status.
This is the greatest tragedy of Brexit: that rejoining will be much more difficult and painful than it would have been to remain. No taking it back to the shop if it didn't fit.
It won’t be difficult, it will be impossible
I’ve been through this before, but one more time
It needs a government to sell Rejoin in an election and then win the election with that mandate. Then they must call the referendum, and win that. All this time very awkward questions about the euro and Schengen and fisheries and the City and much else will crop up, making that referendum suddenly seem a lot more difficult to win than first appeared. An unpopular government will lose it. A popular government will think “why bother taking the risk, we’re popular, why spend all that time and capital, let’s forget the referendum, thing”
So we won’t even get as far as a referendum. And even if we did and it was won, we would then have 5-10 years of painful painful negotiation with the EU to establish terms, during which any of 28 countries could simply veto, just for the fuck of it. This would consume a decade of British politics, with no guarantee of success at the end. The Rejoiners who glibly say “oh they want us back” are as foolishly complacent as the Brexiteers who farcically claimed “it will be the easiest deal in the world”
No sane UK government will ever attempt Rejoin, an insane government would fuck it up. Ergo, it is never going to happen
Sorry
You're bizarrely wrong about this due to a failure of imagination.
Back in the deep mists of time the Lib Dems were one of the first people to propose an in/out referendum on the EU because they couldn't conceive that out would win. They completely failed to imagine the way in which public opinion might be shifted and the part they might play in that.
So it is with Rejoin. You describe the politics of the status quo. But you fail to imagine how the politics would be different were public opinion also radically different, and the EU itself changed.
For sure, most advocates of Rejoin also lack the imagination to conceive of the work they will need to do to achieve it, so I certainly don't think that Rejoin is likely.
But it's not hard to imagine it happening.
It is very, very hard to imagine how you sell the cost of membership fees for rejoining.
We will get the "but the economy will grow by umpty percent" line trotted out. That doesn't pass the smell test. We are not that far behind Germany and France after Brexit. The idea that we would race ahead because of rejoining is nonsense. (It is also a reason why it wouldn't be on offer from France and Germany.)
Membership fees are not an insurmountable problem. 48% voted to Remain despite them. They're not kryptonite in the debate.
And the best way to win the debate is to change the terms of debate, so that the membership fees are viewed as incidental.
So many of the issues discussed on here are about to be rendered spectacularly irrelevant by advances in technology - eg robotics
We are 1-3 years from advanced humanoid robots entering the market at scale. Think what that does to, say, defence
Eg look at the latest Unitree robot (from China). Imagine taking on that, on the battlefield. It will be tireless and relentless and be equipped with 100% accurate weapons
It will also go into factories and the like. Vast wealth will be created
And that is just one example
Defence is why we are 100% NOT about to get advanced humanoid robots entering the market. Musk even described the Tesla Robototron as his "robot army". No way are autonomous robots making it out into the general pubic. Factory use? Far better to use a specific robot for a specific task as we already do.
Humanoid droids on the battlefield? Maybe. Your own persona robototron that could be remote programmed to kill us all? No chance
Are you serious?
If governments have a choice between seeing a young man of 25 die on a battlefield, or a robot costing 25k getting temporarily disabled, what will they choose? What will voters prefer? Which makes more sense morally, financially, emotionally, politically?
Of course armies will become robot armies, and this is a GOOD thing. Humans will stop dying young in absurd battles
I'm confused. I just agreed with you that we will get droids on the battlefield. Where I disagree is that they are going on general sale - nobody is going to be allowed to buy a superhuman strength robot to ask as their household cleaner, no matter how much that tosser Musk foams on about it.
They will in Alabama.
They can put their ex-military 0.5" machine gun on it.
Young will suffer most when AI ‘tsunami’ hits jobs, says head of IMF
Kristalina Georgieva says research suggests 60% of jobs in advanced economies will be affected, with many entry-level roles wiped out
Artificial intelligence will be a “tsunami hitting the labour market”, with young people worst affected, the head of the International Monetary Fund warned the World Economic Forum on Friday.
Kristalina Georgieva told delegates in Davos that the IMF’s own research suggested there would be a big transformation of demand for skills, as the technology becomes increasingly widespread.
“We expect over the next years, in advanced economies, 60% of jobs to be affected by AI, either enhanced or eliminated or transformed – 40% globally,” she said. “This is like a tsunami hitting the labour market.”
I certainly wouldn't want to be coming out of uni now looking to be a software developer, data scientist, consultancy.
white-collar workers say that AI saves them little or no time, but executives think it's a massive timesaver. This divide between employees and management is going to influence the future of the workforce.
If you aren't being more productive / saving time, you are doing it wrong.
I have just had a code sprint over the past week to solve a rather complex problem and with the aid of LLMs written code that would have previously taken me couple of months at least to figure out and some junior researcher with only under grad dev skills probably 6 months.
everyone's shipping faster. but someone has to review that code. someone has to maintain it. someone has to debug it at 3am. and those people are burning out. i spent two weeks talking to open source maintainers, digging through github discussions, and reading security research. here's what's actually happening. the 12x problem
this is Brandolini's Law weaponized: "The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it."
It takes so much longer to debug even your own stuff as you don’t really understand how its put together. Not much different to package wrangling but incredibly annoying if its mostly 'your' code.
After Trump's disgusting comments on Afghanistan it is time to drop the fawning and realise he is a real threat and bully and time to call him out
No more appeasement, just take immediate action to massively increase our defence spending and form new alliances with the EU, Canada, Australia, Japan and the sane parts of the world
It seems astonishing that Trump declares a deal with Rutte over Greenland that did not include the Danes or Greenlanders agreement
I do not think Greenland or Ukraine is anywhere near settled and Trump's plans for Gaza are obscene
Trump will be gone in three years anyway, if not less (as I see his bruised/unbruised hand reappeared at Davos).
By-elections are a barometer of public opinion in which governments always operate at a handicap in that the opposition is more motivated. Given how unpopular Starmer is any by-election will be a disaster for him, but it's striking just how many different ways in which this by-election could be a disaster and hilarious that one of those ways involves the election of a Labour MP (which in normal unpopular government circumstances would be regarded as a triumph).
It is most entertaining, and made all the more so by the fact that Starmer's putative nemesis is himself a flawed two-time leadership election loser well capable of falling flat on his face.
It's hard to know what would be the funniest outcome.
Burnham stands and loses.
A Burnham, Gallaway, Reform, Gaza Independent, Polanski by election would be one of the greatest (for anoraks) shows on earth.
Surely Lozza Fox has to be on the ballot too?
Shame that Lord Sutch and Commander Boakes aren't around anymore to enliven things.
Hopefully Count Binface will stand in their place.
After WWII a bloke called Brownrigg stood in Penrith and Border twice on a manifesto to abolish margarine. In 1955 he received 368 votes, over double his vote in 1951. A chap called William Whitelaw (pboh) received 22791. The rest, as they say, is history. Happy days.
Young will suffer most when AI ‘tsunami’ hits jobs, says head of IMF
Kristalina Georgieva says research suggests 60% of jobs in advanced economies will be affected, with many entry-level roles wiped out
Artificial intelligence will be a “tsunami hitting the labour market”, with young people worst affected, the head of the International Monetary Fund warned the World Economic Forum on Friday.
Kristalina Georgieva told delegates in Davos that the IMF’s own research suggested there would be a big transformation of demand for skills, as the technology becomes increasingly widespread.
“We expect over the next years, in advanced economies, 60% of jobs to be affected by AI, either enhanced or eliminated or transformed – 40% globally,” she said. “This is like a tsunami hitting the labour market.”
I certainly wouldn't want to be coming out of uni now looking to be a software developer, data scientist, consultancy.
white-collar workers say that AI saves them little or no time, but executives think it's a massive timesaver. This divide between employees and management is going to influence the future of the workforce.
If you aren't being more productive / saving time, you are doing it wrong.
I have just had a code sprint over the past week to solve a rather complex problem and with the aid of LLMs written code that would have previously taken me couple of months at least to figure out and some junior researcher with only under grad dev skills probably 6 months.
everyone's shipping faster. but someone has to review that code. someone has to maintain it. someone has to debug it at 3am. and those people are burning out. i spent two weeks talking to open source maintainers, digging through github discussions, and reading security research. here's what's actually happening. the 12x problem
this is Brandolini's Law weaponized: "The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it."
Surely that's BrandoLEONis's Law? I hadn't seen that before but it is a neat summary of politics, particularly US politics since Bannon / MAGA and of course Johnson. A lie can just be spouted, it needs no research or analysis
Just as Trump delivered the election to Carney, it seems he could do the same in Denmark's election this year. (Though a lot can happen between now and October.)
Today's Danish opinion poll from Megafon is beyond crazy. The red bloc regains a majority and the blue bloc loses 9% of the vote since last month: 🟥 Red Bloc 51.7%, 90 seats 🟦 Blue Bloc 41.9%, 73 seats 🟪 M 6.4%, 12 seats Danish politics has completely changed in just a month. https://x.com/Gust_2319/status/2014570635582652557
So many of the issues discussed on here are about to be rendered spectacularly irrelevant by advances in technology - eg robotics
We are 1-3 years from advanced humanoid robots entering the market at scale. Think what that does to, say, defence
Eg look at the latest Unitree robot (from China). Imagine taking on that, on the battlefield. It will be tireless and relentless and be equipped with 100% accurate weapons
It will also go into factories and the like. Vast wealth will be created
And that is just one example
Defence is why we are 100% NOT about to get advanced humanoid robots entering the market. Musk even described the Tesla Robototron as his "robot army". No way are autonomous robots making it out into the general pubic. Factory use? Far better to use a specific robot for a specific task as we already do.
Humanoid droids on the battlefield? Maybe. Your own persona robototron that could be remote programmed to kill us all? No chance
Are you serious?
If governments have a choice between seeing a young man of 25 die on a battlefield, or a robot costing 25k getting temporarily disabled, what will they choose? What will voters prefer? Which makes more sense morally, financially, emotionally, politically?
Of course armies will become robot armies, and this is a GOOD thing. Humans will stop dying young in absurd battles
I'm confused. I just agreed with you that we will get droids on the battlefield. Where I disagree is that they are going on general sale - nobody is going to be allowed to buy a superhuman strength robot to ask as their household cleaner, no matter how much that tosser Musk foams on about it.
Apologies, I misread you - I’m multitasking in Bangkok. Always distracting
But I’m not sure why you’ve erected a strawman. I’ve not said anything about domestic robots. Tho I do remember predicting on here about 3 years ago that they will be humanoid in shape but maybe 30% of human size, for ease of storage and less menace. This seems to be happening
Powerful and much needed framing from Andy Burnham in the Guardian..should be repeated every day by ministers or they will find they are blamed for ‘broken Britain’: “If the question at the centre of British politics is “who broke Britain?”, let’s be clear and unequivocal. The four horsemen of Britain’s apocalypse are deindustrialisation, privatisation, austerity and Brexit. In my time in politics, there has been a tendency for too many in Labour to accept too much of the framing of the right, but we must firmly reject its narrative and call it out in no uncertain terms. Figures on the British right talk of taking back control, but people can see that they are the ones who gave it away.”
If Labour are to win the next election we MUST rejoin the EU. Starmer or Burnham must batter it through. No Referendums. Just a huge parlianentary majority. The full fat version including Schengen. We must put ourselves at the centre of Europe.
Labour have nothing to lose. They are sleepwalking to possible defeat at the hands of Farage. There is no form of REJOIN that would be a worse fate for this country than that.
Rejoin plus Euro means zero chance of Labour re election
Nobody is suggesting the Euro
Roger is (“…full fat version…”) in the comment HYUFD is replying to!
The reality of Rejoin is
1) We would be asked to follow the process that all applicants to the are do. The politics of Europe will not slow a special exemption - too many countries would get upset 2) So we would be signing up to “full fat” Europe 3) This means signing up for the Euro. Since this would remove a huge chunk of the mucking around with the economy the politicians love, this would be a matter of I) Signing up to the Euro joining process II) Never actually meeting he requirements and joining
The number of countries that want Britain to join the Euro is zero. They've got enough problems already without adding a country with a weird housing thing going on that's not really into it.
It's perfectly possible that the application would just get held up forever, and it's also possible that some countries would say they don't think it'll last and they're not going to play the hokey cokey but the Euro wouldn't be the blocker.
It would also be in the US and Russian interests to stop the UK from rejoining so Orban might put the blockers on it (and maybe Fico too) and then you get down to the usual EU shenanigans of wanting a pound of flesh from the UK for cooperation even when it’s in the EU’s benefit to cooperate so no doubt the French making silly fishing demands and Spain wanting to change Gibraltar’s status.
This is the greatest tragedy of Brexit: that rejoining will be much more difficult and painful than it would have been to remain. No taking it back to the shop if it didn't fit.
It won’t be difficult, it will be impossible
I’ve been through this before, but one more time
It needs a government to sell Rejoin in an election and then win the election with that mandate. Then they must call the referendum, and win that. All this time very awkward questions about the euro and Schengen and fisheries and the City and much else will crop up, making that referendum suddenly seem a lot more difficult to win than first appeared. An unpopular government will lose it. A popular government will think “why bother taking the risk, we’re popular, why spend all that time and capital, let’s forget the referendum, thing”
So we won’t even get as far as a referendum. And even if we did and it was won, we would then have 5-10 years of painful painful negotiation with the EU to establish terms, during which any of 28 countries could simply veto, just for the fuck of it. This would consume a decade of British politics, with no guarantee of success at the end. The Rejoiners who glibly say “oh they want us back” are as foolishly complacent as the Brexiteers who farcically claimed “it will be the easiest deal in the world”
No sane UK government will ever attempt Rejoin, an insane government would fuck it up. Ergo, it is never going to happen
Sorry
You're bizarrely wrong about this due to a failure of imagination.
Back in the deep mists of time the Lib Dems were one of the first people to propose an in/out referendum on the EU because they couldn't conceive that out would win. They completely failed to imagine the way in which public opinion might be shifted and the part they might play in that.
So it is with Rejoin. You describe the politics of the status quo. But you fail to imagine how the politics would be different were public opinion also radically different, and the EU itself changed.
For sure, most advocates of Rejoin also lack the imagination to conceive of the work they will need to do to achieve it, so I certainly don't think that Rejoin is likely.
But it's not hard to imagine it happening.
I’ve sketched out the huge and many obstacles. You have not shown how these will be overcome, you’ve just said “”nah, it is easily done”
How?
I didn't say it was easy. I said you had to change people's minds. That's hard, but the right-wing have done it a fair bit over the last four or five decades. It happens.
The polling is that peoples' minds have changed, you just need to rebut the right's attempts to reverse that with dog-whistle prejudice and £shop calls to nationalism.
Powerful and much needed framing from Andy Burnham in the Guardian..should be repeated every day by ministers or they will find they are blamed for ‘broken Britain’: “If the question at the centre of British politics is “who broke Britain?”, let’s be clear and unequivocal. The four horsemen of Britain’s apocalypse are deindustrialisation, privatisation, austerity and Brexit. In my time in politics, there has been a tendency for too many in Labour to accept too much of the framing of the right, but we must firmly reject its narrative and call it out in no uncertain terms. Figures on the British right talk of taking back control, but people can see that they are the ones who gave it away.”
If Labour are to win the next election we MUST rejoin the EU. Starmer or Burnham must batter it through. No Referendums. Just a huge parlianentary majority. The full fat version including Schengen. We must put ourselves at the centre of Europe.
Labour have nothing to lose. They are sleepwalking to possible defeat at the hands of Farage. There is no form of REJOIN that would be a worse fate for this country than that.
Rejoin plus Euro means zero chance of Labour re election
Nobody is suggesting the Euro
Roger is (“…full fat version…”) in the comment HYUFD is replying to!
The reality of Rejoin is
1) We would be asked to follow the process that all applicants to the are do. The politics of Europe will not slow a special exemption - too many countries would get upset 2) So we would be signing up to “full fat” Europe 3) This means signing up for the Euro. Since this would remove a huge chunk of the mucking around with the economy the politicians love, this would be a matter of I) Signing up to the Euro joining process II) Never actually meeting he requirements and joining
The number of countries that want Britain to join the Euro is zero. They've got enough problems already without adding a country with a weird housing thing going on that's not really into it.
It's perfectly possible that the application would just get held up forever, and it's also possible that some countries would say they don't think it'll last and they're not going to play the hokey cokey but the Euro wouldn't be the blocker.
It would also be in the US and Russian interests to stop the UK from rejoining so Orban might put the blockers on it (and maybe Fico too) and then you get down to the usual EU shenanigans of wanting a pound of flesh from the UK for cooperation even when it’s in the EU’s benefit to cooperate so no doubt the French making silly fishing demands and Spain wanting to change Gibraltar’s status.
This is the greatest tragedy of Brexit: that rejoining will be much more difficult and painful than it would have been to remain. No taking it back to the shop if it didn't fit.
It won’t be difficult, it will be impossible
I’ve been through this before, but one more time
It needs a government to sell Rejoin in an election and then win the election with that mandate. Then they must call the referendum, and win that. All this time very awkward questions about the euro and Schengen and fisheries and the City and much else will crop up, making that referendum suddenly seem a lot more difficult to win than first appeared. An unpopular government will lose it. A popular government will think “why bother taking the risk, we’re popular, why spend all that time and capital, let’s forget the referendum, thing”
So we won’t even get as far as a referendum. And even if we did and it was won, we would then have 5-10 years of painful painful negotiation with the EU to establish terms, during which any of 28 countries could simply veto, just for the fuck of it. This would consume a decade of British politics, with no guarantee of success at the end. The Rejoiners who glibly say “oh they want us back” are as foolishly complacent as the Brexiteers who farcically claimed “it will be the easiest deal in the world”
No sane UK government will ever attempt Rejoin, an insane government would fuck it up. Ergo, it is never going to happen
Sorry
You're bizarrely wrong about this due to a failure of imagination.
Back in the deep mists of time the Lib Dems were one of the first people to propose an in/out referendum on the EU because they couldn't conceive that out would win. They completely failed to imagine the way in which public opinion might be shifted and the part they might play in that.
So it is with Rejoin. You describe the politics of the status quo. But you fail to imagine how the politics would be different were public opinion also radically different, and the EU itself changed.
For sure, most advocates of Rejoin also lack the imagination to conceive of the work they will need to do to achieve it, so I certainly don't think that Rejoin is likely.
But it's not hard to imagine it happening.
I’ve sketched out the huge and many obstacles. You have not shown how these will be overcome, you’ve just said “”nah, it is easily done”
How?
I didn't say it was easy. I said you had to change people's minds. That's hard, but the right-wing have done it a fair bit over the last four or five decades. It happens.
So your detailed explanation of how we get past all the political obstacles to Rejoin is: “it happens”
And posters wonder why PB often seems eerily quiet, these days
Young will suffer most when AI ‘tsunami’ hits jobs, says head of IMF
Kristalina Georgieva says research suggests 60% of jobs in advanced economies will be affected, with many entry-level roles wiped out
Artificial intelligence will be a “tsunami hitting the labour market”, with young people worst affected, the head of the International Monetary Fund warned the World Economic Forum on Friday.
Kristalina Georgieva told delegates in Davos that the IMF’s own research suggested there would be a big transformation of demand for skills, as the technology becomes increasingly widespread.
“We expect over the next years, in advanced economies, 60% of jobs to be affected by AI, either enhanced or eliminated or transformed – 40% globally,” she said. “This is like a tsunami hitting the labour market.”
I certainly wouldn't want to be coming out of uni now looking to be a software developer, data scientist, consultancy.
white-collar workers say that AI saves them little or no time, but executives think it's a massive timesaver. This divide between employees and management is going to influence the future of the workforce.
If you aren't being more productive / saving time, you are doing it wrong.
I have just had a code sprint over the past week to solve a rather complex problem and with the aid of LLMs written code that would have previously taken me couple of months at least to figure out and some junior researcher with only under grad dev skills probably 6 months.
everyone's shipping faster. but someone has to review that code. someone has to maintain it. someone has to debug it at 3am. and those people are burning out. i spent two weeks talking to open source maintainers, digging through github discussions, and reading security research. here's what's actually happening. the 12x problem
this is Brandolini's Law weaponized: "The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it."
Often the same in law. Used to dread it when some mediocre firm on the other side was drafting documents, it would take longer to correct their drafting than to start from something clean and competent we'd drafted.
Young will suffer most when AI ‘tsunami’ hits jobs, says head of IMF
Kristalina Georgieva says research suggests 60% of jobs in advanced economies will be affected, with many entry-level roles wiped out
Artificial intelligence will be a “tsunami hitting the labour market”, with young people worst affected, the head of the International Monetary Fund warned the World Economic Forum on Friday.
Kristalina Georgieva told delegates in Davos that the IMF’s own research suggested there would be a big transformation of demand for skills, as the technology becomes increasingly widespread.
“We expect over the next years, in advanced economies, 60% of jobs to be affected by AI, either enhanced or eliminated or transformed – 40% globally,” she said. “This is like a tsunami hitting the labour market.”
I certainly wouldn't want to be coming out of uni now looking to be a software developer, data scientist, consultancy.
white-collar workers say that AI saves them little or no time, but executives think it's a massive timesaver. This divide between employees and management is going to influence the future of the workforce.
If you aren't being more productive / saving time, you are doing it wrong.
I have just had a code sprint over the past week to solve a rather complex problem and with the aid of LLMs written code that would have previously taken me couple of months at least to figure out and some junior researcher with only under grad dev skills probably 6 months.
everyone's shipping faster. but someone has to review that code. someone has to maintain it. someone has to debug it at 3am. and those people are burning out. i spent two weeks talking to open source maintainers, digging through github discussions, and reading security research. here's what's actually happening. the 12x problem
this is Brandolini's Law weaponized: "The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it."
It takes so much longer to debug even your own stuff as you don’t really understand how its put together. Not much different to package wrangling but incredibly annoying if its mostly 'your' code.
before AI: you had to know enough to write bad code after AI: you don't even have to know enough to recognize bad code
the contributors submitting these PRs genuinely believe they're helping. they can't tell the difference between "code that compiles" and "code that belongs in this project."
Powerful and much needed framing from Andy Burnham in the Guardian..should be repeated every day by ministers or they will find they are blamed for ‘broken Britain’: “If the question at the centre of British politics is “who broke Britain?”, let’s be clear and unequivocal. The four horsemen of Britain’s apocalypse are deindustrialisation, privatisation, austerity and Brexit. In my time in politics, there has been a tendency for too many in Labour to accept too much of the framing of the right, but we must firmly reject its narrative and call it out in no uncertain terms. Figures on the British right talk of taking back control, but people can see that they are the ones who gave it away.”
If Labour are to win the next election we MUST rejoin the EU. Starmer or Burnham must batter it through. No Referendums. Just a huge parlianentary majority. The full fat version including Schengen. We must put ourselves at the centre of Europe.
Labour have nothing to lose. They are sleepwalking to possible defeat at the hands of Farage. There is no form of REJOIN that would be a worse fate for this country than that.
Rejoin plus Euro means zero chance of Labour re election
Nobody is suggesting the Euro
Roger is (“…full fat version…”) in the comment HYUFD is replying to!
The reality of Rejoin is
1) We would be asked to follow the process that all applicants to the are do. The politics of Europe will not slow a special exemption - too many countries would get upset 2) So we would be signing up to “full fat” Europe 3) This means signing up for the Euro. Since this would remove a huge chunk of the mucking around with the economy the politicians love, this would be a matter of I) Signing up to the Euro joining process II) Never actually meeting he requirements and joining
The number of countries that want Britain to join the Euro is zero. They've got enough problems already without adding a country with a weird housing thing going on that's not really into it.
It's perfectly possible that the application would just get held up forever, and it's also possible that some countries would say they don't think it'll last and they're not going to play the hokey cokey but the Euro wouldn't be the blocker.
It would also be in the US and Russian interests to stop the UK from rejoining so Orban might put the blockers on it (and maybe Fico too) and then you get down to the usual EU shenanigans of wanting a pound of flesh from the UK for cooperation even when it’s in the EU’s benefit to cooperate so no doubt the French making silly fishing demands and Spain wanting to change Gibraltar’s status.
This is the greatest tragedy of Brexit: that rejoining will be much more difficult and painful than it would have been to remain. No taking it back to the shop if it didn't fit.
It won’t be difficult, it will be impossible
I’ve been through this before, but one more time
It needs a government to sell Rejoin in an election and then win the election with that mandate. Then they must call the referendum, and win that. All this time very awkward questions about the euro and Schengen and fisheries and the City and much else will crop up, making that referendum suddenly seem a lot more difficult to win than first appeared. An unpopular government will lose it. A popular government will think “why bother taking the risk, we’re popular, why spend all that time and capital, let’s forget the referendum, thing”
So we won’t even get as far as a referendum. And even if we did and it was won, we would then have 5-10 years of painful painful negotiation with the EU to establish terms, during which any of 28 countries could simply veto, just for the fuck of it. This would consume a decade of British politics, with no guarantee of success at the end. The Rejoiners who glibly say “oh they want us back” are as foolishly complacent as the Brexiteers who farcically claimed “it will be the easiest deal in the world”
No sane UK government will ever attempt Rejoin, an insane government would fuck it up. Ergo, it is never going to happen
Sorry
Let me introduce you to the Starmer government.....10 year police reorganisation, scrap jury trials, paying £10bn's to give away terroritory against the wishes of the people living there, paying terrorists for actions of other governments, ....
Well, yes. This is the worst, most insane government in British history. Yet even this shower of twats aren’t going for Rejoin
It’s never going to happen
All the same, Brexit-regret is a thing. But it would need a politician of rare imagination to take advantage of the opportunity. And then there's the wilful obtuseness of the EU (French). So, hum, you're probably right.
Just as Trump delivered the election to Carney, it seems he could do the same in Denmark's election this year. (Though a lot can happen between now and October.)
Today's Danish opinion poll from Megafon is beyond crazy. The red bloc regains a majority and the blue bloc loses 9% of the vote since last month: 🟥 Red Bloc 51.7%, 90 seats 🟦 Blue Bloc 41.9%, 73 seats 🟪 M 6.4%, 12 seats Danish politics has completely changed in just a month. https://x.com/Gust_2319/status/2014570635582652557
This is the same Red Bloc which has supported dismantling neighbourhoods if the percentage of ethnic minorities gets too high?
So many of the issues discussed on here are about to be rendered spectacularly irrelevant by advances in technology - eg robotics
We are 1-3 years from advanced humanoid robots entering the market at scale. Think what that does to, say, defence
Eg look at the latest Unitree robot (from China). Imagine taking on that, on the battlefield. It will be tireless and relentless and be equipped with 100% accurate weapons
It will also go into factories and the like. Vast wealth will be created
And that is just one example
Defence is why we are 100% NOT about to get advanced humanoid robots entering the market. Musk even described the Tesla Robototron as his "robot army". No way are autonomous robots making it out into the general pubic. Factory use? Far better to use a specific robot for a specific task as we already do.
Humanoid droids on the battlefield? Maybe. Your own persona robototron that could be remote programmed to kill us all? No chance
Are you serious?
If governments have a choice between seeing a young man of 25 die on a battlefield, or a robot costing 25k getting temporarily disabled, what will they choose? What will voters prefer? Which makes more sense morally, financially, emotionally, politically?
Of course armies will become robot armies, and this is a GOOD thing. Humans will stop dying young in absurd battles
I'm confused. I just agreed with you that we will get droids on the battlefield. Where I disagree is that they are going on general sale - nobody is going to be allowed to buy a superhuman strength robot to ask as their household cleaner, no matter how much that tosser Musk foams on about it.
Apologies, I misread you - I’m multitasking in Bangkok. Always distracting
But I’m not sure why you’ve erected a strawman. I’ve not said anything about domestic robots. Tho I do remember predicting on here about 3 years ago that they will be humanoid in shape but maybe 30% of human size, for ease of storage and less menace. This seems to be happening
Cruse ships will like them - they'll be able to use what would have been crew space for more interior cabins.
O/T - my kids have accounts with Nationwide from when they were little. I've just popped in to the branch for the firat time in 8 years to do some admin. It was brilliant. I'd forgotten how good in-person banking was. So much more straightforward and less stressful. Why don't other banks offer this? (Well I know they still sort of do but actual branches are few and far between.)
They are very good. My sister banks with them and last year had apply for a change to her account that Nationwide head office simply rejected out of hand. But the branch staff went above and beyond to get it sorted next day.
After Trump's disgusting comments on Afghanistan it is time to drop the fawning and realise he is a real threat and bully and time to call him out
No more appeasement, just take immediate action to massively increase our defence spending and form new alliances with the EU, Canada, Australia, Japan and the sane parts of the world
It seems astonishing that Trump declares a deal with Rutte over Greenland that did not include the Danes or Greenlanders agreement
I do not think Greenland or Ukraine is anywhere near settled and Trump's plans for Gaza are obscene
Jeremy Hunt was on one of the most appalling episodes of WATO I have heard. It was a real hatchet job on Starmer re: Trump/ NATO. Dimond came in with his boots on to kick Starmer expecting Hunt would jump at the opportunity. But Hunt was very measured. He outlined the dilemma in Downing Street. Hunt explained that the sitting Government have to limit or at least control their personal criticism of Trump over Afghanistan because whether we like it or not we have to keep Trump sweet over Ukraine. If he takes his bat and ball home Ukraine falls.
Hunt did say even if Downing Street has to bite collective tongues anyone else can criticise to their heart's content. Which brings me back to Farage, he's been awfully quiet.
So many of the issues discussed on here are about to be rendered spectacularly irrelevant by advances in technology - eg robotics
We are 1-3 years from advanced humanoid robots entering the market at scale. Think what that does to, say, defence
Eg look at the latest Unitree robot (from China). Imagine taking on that, on the battlefield. It will be tireless and relentless and be equipped with 100% accurate weapons
It will also go into factories and the like. Vast wealth will be created
And that is just one example
It's not going to change the issues we talk about.
There will still be arguments over how to distribute wealth - particularly land. There will still be arguments over who gets to be in the club (neighborhood, country, whatever), and who doesn't.
Defence is still going to take a willingness to fight, to invest, to innovate.
Everything will be different (I mean - robots! - how could it not be), but everything will be the same, regardless (I mean - humans! - how could it not be).
No, it won't change what we talk about. We'll still talk about how Leon was wrong about LLMs becoming conscious, about how Leon was wrong about Trump being great, about how Leon was wrong about what3words, about how Leon was wrong about UFOs being revealed to be aliens, about how Leon was wrong about Starmer being great...
@kvanbrempt This is not a moment for business as usual. There are still several hurdles to clear, both regarding the agreement itself and the broader challenges posed by Trump II, before we can move forward on #Turnberry.
So many of the issues discussed on here are about to be rendered spectacularly irrelevant by advances in technology - eg robotics
We are 1-3 years from advanced humanoid robots entering the market at scale. Think what that does to, say, defence
Eg look at the latest Unitree robot (from China). Imagine taking on that, on the battlefield. It will be tireless and relentless and be equipped with 100% accurate weapons
It will also go into factories and the like. Vast wealth will be created
And that is just one example
It's not going to change the issues we talk about.
There will still be arguments over how to distribute wealth - particularly land. There will still be arguments over who gets to be in the club (neighborhood, country, whatever), and who doesn't.
Defence is still going to take a willingness to fight, to invest, to innovate.
Everything will be different (I mean - robots! - how could it not be), but everything will be the same, regardless (I mean - humans! - how could it not be).
No, it won't change what we talk about. We'll still talk about how Leon was wrong about LLMs becoming conscious, about how Leon was wrong about Trump being great, about how Leon was wrong about what3words, about how Leon was wrong about UFOs being revealed to be aliens, about how Leon was wrong about Starmer being great...
...how Leon was wrong about Truss surprising on the upside...
So many of the issues discussed on here are about to be rendered spectacularly irrelevant by advances in technology - eg robotics
We are 1-3 years from advanced humanoid robots entering the market at scale. Think what that does to, say, defence
Eg look at the latest Unitree robot (from China). Imagine taking on that, on the battlefield. It will be tireless and relentless and be equipped with 100% accurate weapons
It will also go into factories and the like. Vast wealth will be created
And that is just one example
Defence is why we are 100% NOT about to get advanced humanoid robots entering the market. Musk even described the Tesla Robototron as his "robot army". No way are autonomous robots making it out into the general pubic. Factory use? Far better to use a specific robot for a specific task as we already do.
Humanoid droids on the battlefield? Maybe. Your own persona robototron that could be remote programmed to kill us all? No chance
Are you serious?
If governments have a choice between seeing a young man of 25 die on a battlefield, or a robot costing 25k getting temporarily disabled, what will they choose? What will voters prefer? Which makes more sense morally, financially, emotionally, politically?
Of course armies will become robot armies, and this is a GOOD thing. Humans will stop dying young in absurd battles
I'm confused. I just agreed with you that we will get droids on the battlefield. Where I disagree is that they are going on general sale - nobody is going to be allowed to buy a superhuman strength robot to ask as their household cleaner, no matter how much that tosser Musk foams on about it.
Apologies, I misread you - I’m multitasking in Bangkok. Always distracting
But I’m not sure why you’ve erected a strawman. I’ve not said anything about domestic robots. Tho I do remember predicting on here about 3 years ago that they will be humanoid in shape but maybe 30% of human size, for ease of storage and less menace. This seems to be happening
You said "entering the market at scale" - closed sales to governments is not the market, nor are any of the bots being developed explicitly for military use.
All the Elon stans think Optimus will be on general sale in a few years, will quickly replace most jobs and create a utopia as "the robots will make anything you want practically cost-free"
No fucking way are any of these robots entering the market. They will be banned and diverted to military uses.
Powerful and much needed framing from Andy Burnham in the Guardian..should be repeated every day by ministers or they will find they are blamed for ‘broken Britain’: “If the question at the centre of British politics is “who broke Britain?”, let’s be clear and unequivocal. The four horsemen of Britain’s apocalypse are deindustrialisation, privatisation, austerity and Brexit. In my time in politics, there has been a tendency for too many in Labour to accept too much of the framing of the right, but we must firmly reject its narrative and call it out in no uncertain terms. Figures on the British right talk of taking back control, but people can see that they are the ones who gave it away.”
If Labour are to win the next election we MUST rejoin the EU. Starmer or Burnham must batter it through. No Referendums. Just a huge parlianentary majority. The full fat version including Schengen. We must put ourselves at the centre of Europe.
Labour have nothing to lose. They are sleepwalking to possible defeat at the hands of Farage. There is no form of REJOIN that would be a worse fate for this country than that.
Rejoin plus Euro means zero chance of Labour re election
Nobody is suggesting the Euro
Roger is (“…full fat version…”) in the comment HYUFD is replying to!
The reality of Rejoin is
1) We would be asked to follow the process that all applicants to the are do. The politics of Europe will not slow a special exemption - too many countries would get upset 2) So we would be signing up to “full fat” Europe 3) This means signing up for the Euro. Since this would remove a huge chunk of the mucking around with the economy the politicians love, this would be a matter of I) Signing up to the Euro joining process II) Never actually meeting he requirements and joining
The number of countries that want Britain to join the Euro is zero. They've got enough problems already without adding a country with a weird housing thing going on that's not really into it.
It's perfectly possible that the application would just get held up forever, and it's also possible that some countries would say they don't think it'll last and they're not going to play the hokey cokey but the Euro wouldn't be the blocker.
It would also be in the US and Russian interests to stop the UK from rejoining so Orban might put the blockers on it (and maybe Fico too) and then you get down to the usual EU shenanigans of wanting a pound of flesh from the UK for cooperation even when it’s in the EU’s benefit to cooperate so no doubt the French making silly fishing demands and Spain wanting to change Gibraltar’s status.
This is the greatest tragedy of Brexit: that rejoining will be much more difficult and painful than it would have been to remain. No taking it back to the shop if it didn't fit.
It won’t be difficult, it will be impossible
I’ve been through this before, but one more time
It needs a government to sell Rejoin in an election and then win the election with that mandate. Then they must call the referendum, and win that. All this time very awkward questions about the euro and Schengen and fisheries and the City and much else will crop up, making that referendum suddenly seem a lot more difficult to win than first appeared. An unpopular government will lose it. A popular government will think “why bother taking the risk, we’re popular, why spend all that time and capital, let’s forget the referendum, thing”
So we won’t even get as far as a referendum. And even if we did and it was won, we would then have 5-10 years of painful painful negotiation with the EU to establish terms, during which any of 28 countries could simply veto, just for the fuck of it. This would consume a decade of British politics, with no guarantee of success at the end. The Rejoiners who glibly say “oh they want us back” are as foolishly complacent as the Brexiteers who farcically claimed “it will be the easiest deal in the world”
No sane UK government will ever attempt Rejoin, an insane government would fuck it up. Ergo, it is never going to happen
Sorry
You're bizarrely wrong about this due to a failure of imagination.
Back in the deep mists of time the Lib Dems were one of the first people to propose an in/out referendum on the EU because they couldn't conceive that out would win. They completely failed to imagine the way in which public opinion might be shifted and the part they might play in that.
So it is with Rejoin. You describe the politics of the status quo. But you fail to imagine how the politics would be different were public opinion also radically different, and the EU itself changed.
For sure, most advocates of Rejoin also lack the imagination to conceive of the work they will need to do to achieve it, so I certainly don't think that Rejoin is likely.
But it's not hard to imagine it happening.
I’ve sketched out the huge and many obstacles. You have not shown how these will be overcome, you’ve just said “”nah, it is easily done”
How?
I didn't say it was easy. I said you had to change people's minds. That's hard, but the right-wing have done it a fair bit over the last four or five decades. It happens.
The polling is that peoples' minds have changed, you just need to rebut the right's attempts to reverse that with dog-whistle prejudice and £shop calls to nationalism.
It is genuinely scary how rapidly the battlefield is changing. I look at the MOD still trying to get fighters updated after 20 years and I despair. Our armed forces are dangerously close to not being fit for purpose.
Scarier is that we haven't really defined what their future purpose will be. Last year's defence review is already half-obsolete, and nearly seven months on later barely started to do anything practical about it anyway, (The Typhoon upgrade actually makes sense, despite its hefty price tag.)
Building a European defence capability (inc us) that can operate effectively without the US is so challenging on every level that there must be a temptation to hold off and hope America pivots back to being an ally once the closing credits run on the Trump Show.
I don't think it's quite so difficult as that, particularly if we act in concert with Europe. The biggest problem is the sunk cost capabilities like F35, which depend entirely on US cooperation for their ongoing utility.
True but we know that we will already be looking at the next generation of aircraft and we shoudl take the opportunity to look towards non-US sources, whether that is Sweden, France or South Korea.
At any given point we will always be beholden to the US for some of our military hardware until we make the decision to source elsewhere so that, in a decade or more, we know longer have that reliance.
Hell, we could even start building our own weapons again.
Actually, a simple start would be building a solid fuel rocket with the mould line of Trident.
Winding a carbon fibre hulls is fairly straightforward and fuel itself is fairly straightforward. The tricks are in casting large motors without voids.
The probable end result would be a rocket with less range than Trident, but given the massive downloading, since the arms reduction treaties, it only needs to carry 1 or 2 warheads.
There are many other simple starts, but I don't get the impression that enough of them are being taken very seriously. TBF, some are being taken seriously.
One blatant example is how many of our £50-250m aircraft have the type of hardened shelters that means they can't be taken out by £500 drones. We know that any damaged aircraft would make a hole in our capability that would take many months, or several years to recover. This is a known issue for years and years.
One effective flight of drones from a container on a ship, and our air force is significantly crippled.
For example, I think this is a £1bn of Boeing P8 Poseidon's in a £1bn row of sitting ducks at RAF Lossiemouth, about 1km from the Scottish Coast at Elgin. If the identity is correct, it is 4 from the 9 we have. The piccie is from Google Satellite View, and I think is 2026.
So many of the issues discussed on here are about to be rendered spectacularly irrelevant by advances in technology - eg robotics
We are 1-3 years from advanced humanoid robots entering the market at scale. Think what that does to, say, defence
Eg look at the latest Unitree robot (from China). Imagine taking on that, on the battlefield. It will be tireless and relentless and be equipped with 100% accurate weapons
It will also go into factories and the like. Vast wealth will be created
And that is just one example
Defence is why we are 100% NOT about to get advanced humanoid robots entering the market. Musk even described the Tesla Robototron as his "robot army". No way are autonomous robots making it out into the general pubic. Factory use? Far better to use a specific robot for a specific task as we already do.
Humanoid droids on the battlefield? Maybe. Your own persona robototron that could be remote programmed to kill us all? No chance
Are you serious?
If governments have a choice between seeing a young man of 25 die on a battlefield, or a robot costing 25k getting temporarily disabled, what will they choose? What will voters prefer? Which makes more sense morally, financially, emotionally, politically?
Of course armies will become robot armies, and this is a GOOD thing. Humans will stop dying young in absurd battles
I'm confused. I just agreed with you that we will get droids on the battlefield. Where I disagree is that they are going on general sale - nobody is going to be allowed to buy a superhuman strength robot to ask as their household cleaner, no matter how much that tosser Musk foams on about it.
A pedant notes that this sentence is consistent with Galloway standing even if Burnham does not. 'If' does not mean the same as 'if and only if'. Extreme pedants will note that logicians shorthand for 'if and only if' is 'iff'.
Just as Trump delivered the election to Carney, it seems he could do the same in Denmark's election this year. (Though a lot can happen between now and October.)
Today's Danish opinion poll from Megafon is beyond crazy. The red bloc regains a majority and the blue bloc loses 9% of the vote since last month: 🟥 Red Bloc 51.7%, 90 seats 🟦 Blue Bloc 41.9%, 73 seats 🟪 M 6.4%, 12 seats Danish politics has completely changed in just a month. https://x.com/Gust_2319/status/2014570635582652557
This is the same Red Bloc which has supported dismantling neighbourhoods if the percentage of ethnic minorities gets too high?
So many of the issues discussed on here are about to be rendered spectacularly irrelevant by advances in technology - eg robotics
We are 1-3 years from advanced humanoid robots entering the market at scale. Think what that does to, say, defence
Eg look at the latest Unitree robot (from China). Imagine taking on that, on the battlefield. It will be tireless and relentless and be equipped with 100% accurate weapons
It will also go into factories and the like. Vast wealth will be created
And that is just one example
It's not going to change the issues we talk about.
There will still be arguments over how to distribute wealth - particularly land. There will still be arguments over who gets to be in the club (neighborhood, country, whatever), and who doesn't.
Defence is still going to take a willingness to fight, to invest, to innovate.
Everything will be different (I mean - robots! - how could it not be), but everything will be the same, regardless (I mean - humans! - how could it not be).
No, it won't change what we talk about. We'll still talk about how Leon was wrong about LLMs becoming conscious, about how Leon was wrong about Trump being great, about how Leon was wrong about what3words, about how Leon was wrong about UFOs being revealed to be aliens, about how Leon was wrong about Starmer being great...
...how Leon was wrong about Truss surprising on the upside...
See how this site improves when I’m back?
When I’m away you all talk about heat pumps and roundabouts, and sometimes about me, and what I might be doing, and sometimes this commentary dies away completely as it is so dull, because you are all so dull
Then when I’m back you all forget about heat pumps and roundabouts and you all talk excitedly about me, because I’m here, and everything livens up
Frankly, I should get paid for this. But I do it pro bono
So many of the issues discussed on here are about to be rendered spectacularly irrelevant by advances in technology - eg robotics
We are 1-3 years from advanced humanoid robots entering the market at scale. Think what that does to, say, defence
Eg look at the latest Unitree robot (from China). Imagine taking on that, on the battlefield. It will be tireless and relentless and be equipped with 100% accurate weapons
It will also go into factories and the like. Vast wealth will be created
And that is just one example
It's not going to change the issues we talk about.
There will still be arguments over how to distribute wealth - particularly land. There will still be arguments over who gets to be in the club (neighborhood, country, whatever), and who doesn't.
Defence is still going to take a willingness to fight, to invest, to innovate.
Everything will be different (I mean - robots! - how could it not be), but everything will be the same, regardless (I mean - humans! - how could it not be).
No, it won't change what we talk about. We'll still talk about how Leon was wrong about LLMs becoming conscious, about how Leon was wrong about Trump being great, about how Leon was wrong about what3words, about how Leon was wrong about UFOs being revealed to be aliens, about how Leon was wrong about Starmer being great...
...how Leon was wrong about Truss surprising on the upside...
See how this site improves when I’m back?
When I’m away you all talk about heat pumps and roundabouts, and sometimes about me, and what I might be doing, and sometimes this commentary dies away completely as it is so dull, because you are all so dull
Then when I’m back you all forget about heat pumps and roundabouts and you all talk excitedly about me, because I’m here, and everything livens up
Frankly, I should get paid for this. But I do it pro bono
You really do have the self -awareness of Donald Trump. Are you in fact Donald Trump?
O/T - my kids have accounts with Nationwide from when they were little. I've just popped in to the branch for the firat time in 8 years to do some admin. It was brilliant. I'd forgotten how good in-person banking was. So much more straightforward and less stressful. Why don't other banks offer this? (Well I know they still sort of do but actual branches are few and far between.)
They are very good. My sister banks with them and last year had apply for a change to her account that Nationwide head office simply rejected out of hand. But the branch staff went above and beyond to get it sorted next day.
Cumberland Building Society (which in its patch has branches everywhere, including places of under 2500 population, I am not making this up) and Newcastle Building Society are also outstanding.
Just as Trump delivered the election to Carney, it seems he could do the same in Denmark's election this year. (Though a lot can happen between now and October.)
Today's Danish opinion poll from Megafon is beyond crazy. The red bloc regains a majority and the blue bloc loses 9% of the vote since last month: 🟥 Red Bloc 51.7%, 90 seats 🟦 Blue Bloc 41.9%, 73 seats 🟪 M 6.4%, 12 seats Danish politics has completely changed in just a month. https://x.com/Gust_2319/status/2014570635582652557
This is the same Red Bloc which has supported dismantling neighbourhoods if the percentage of ethnic minorities gets too high?
Good attempt at ignoring the effect.
You’re quite the Rejoiner, I imagine
How would you vote in a new referendum if, say, Le Pen was running France, Meloni Italy, and a Merz-Afd Coalition in Germany? Plus Orban and all the rest
Because this is really quite likely. The EU is poised to shift decisively to the hard right in the coming years, perhaps even the far right in some cases. I wonder how Roger will feel about it then
The newfound anti-Americanism in Europe risks leaving Ukraine in a very difficult position because it puts a different gloss on Putin's 25 year-long effort to resist US encroachment will make the option of nomalising trade with Russia start to look attractive, especially to Germany.
So many of the issues discussed on here are about to be rendered spectacularly irrelevant by advances in technology - eg robotics
We are 1-3 years from advanced humanoid robots entering the market at scale. Think what that does to, say, defence
Eg look at the latest Unitree robot (from China). Imagine taking on that, on the battlefield. It will be tireless and relentless and be equipped with 100% accurate weapons
It will also go into factories and the like. Vast wealth will be created
And that is just one example
It's not going to change the issues we talk about.
There will still be arguments over how to distribute wealth - particularly land. There will still be arguments over who gets to be in the club (neighborhood, country, whatever), and who doesn't.
Defence is still going to take a willingness to fight, to invest, to innovate.
Everything will be different (I mean - robots! - how could it not be), but everything will be the same, regardless (I mean - humans! - how could it not be).
No, it won't change what we talk about. We'll still talk about how Leon was wrong about LLMs becoming conscious, about how Leon was wrong about Trump being great, about how Leon was wrong about what3words, about how Leon was wrong about UFOs being revealed to be aliens, about how Leon was wrong about Starmer being great...
And about Covid would be, to quote, "contagious but essentially benign"
The newfound anti-Americanism in Europe risks leaving Ukraine in a very difficult position because it puts a different gloss on Putin's 25 year-long effort to resist US encroachment will make the option of nomalising trade with Russia start to look attractive, especially to Germany.
It is almost as if Putin is manipulating US foreign policy......
So many of the issues discussed on here are about to be rendered spectacularly irrelevant by advances in technology - eg robotics
We are 1-3 years from advanced humanoid robots entering the market at scale. Think what that does to, say, defence
Eg look at the latest Unitree robot (from China). Imagine taking on that, on the battlefield. It will be tireless and relentless and be equipped with 100% accurate weapons
It will also go into factories and the like. Vast wealth will be created
And that is just one example
Defence is why we are 100% NOT about to get advanced humanoid robots entering the market. Musk even described the Tesla Robototron as his "robot army". No way are autonomous robots making it out into the general pubic. Factory use? Far better to use a specific robot for a specific task as we already do.
Humanoid droids on the battlefield? Maybe. Your own persona robototron that could be remote programmed to kill us all? No chance
Are you serious?
If governments have a choice between seeing a young man of 25 die on a battlefield, or a robot costing 25k getting temporarily disabled, what will they choose? What will voters prefer? Which makes more sense morally, financially, emotionally, politically?
Of course armies will become robot armies, and this is a GOOD thing. Humans will stop dying young in absurd battles
I'm confused. I just agreed with you that we will get droids on the battlefield. Where I disagree is that they are going on general sale - nobody is going to be allowed to buy a superhuman strength robot to ask as their household cleaner, no matter how much that tosser Musk foams on about it.
Did I pick up you are not standing for Holyrood in May ?
To be honest, you seem to have so many commitments I think it is a wise decision
Indeed I wonder why anyone wants to go into public office in this climate
Correct. I was selected but have now withdrawn. 2026 is the year I get my new food distribution business running. Whilst still spinning the plates of my (currently primary) consulting business, growing my YouTube channel and doing social media for our retail business.
Something had to give and pulling my political activities was the easiest to cull.
Young will suffer most when AI ‘tsunami’ hits jobs, says head of IMF
Kristalina Georgieva says research suggests 60% of jobs in advanced economies will be affected, with many entry-level roles wiped out
Artificial intelligence will be a “tsunami hitting the labour market”, with young people worst affected, the head of the International Monetary Fund warned the World Economic Forum on Friday.
Kristalina Georgieva told delegates in Davos that the IMF’s own research suggested there would be a big transformation of demand for skills, as the technology becomes increasingly widespread.
“We expect over the next years, in advanced economies, 60% of jobs to be affected by AI, either enhanced or eliminated or transformed – 40% globally,” she said. “This is like a tsunami hitting the labour market.”
I certainly wouldn't want to be coming out of uni now looking to be a software developer, data scientist, consultancy.
Probably needs a radical rethink of the jobs market.
Also driving jobs are likely to go too. Taxi drivers, lorry drivers, van drivers. For a lorry load up at departure, unload at arrival. Self drive.
We need a forward thinking, proactive, govt to look at the numbers going to Uni and where the jobs of the future are. That’s a lot of income tax and NI to lose.
So many of the issues discussed on here are about to be rendered spectacularly irrelevant by advances in technology - eg robotics
We are 1-3 years from advanced humanoid robots entering the market at scale. Think what that does to, say, defence
Eg look at the latest Unitree robot (from China). Imagine taking on that, on the battlefield. It will be tireless and relentless and be equipped with 100% accurate weapons
It will also go into factories and the like. Vast wealth will be created
And that is just one example
Defence is why we are 100% NOT about to get advanced humanoid robots entering the market. Musk even described the Tesla Robototron as his "robot army". No way are autonomous robots making it out into the general pubic. Factory use? Far better to use a specific robot for a specific task as we already do.
Humanoid droids on the battlefield? Maybe. Your own persona robototron that could be remote programmed to kill us all? No chance
Are you serious?
If governments have a choice between seeing a young man of 25 die on a battlefield, or a robot costing 25k getting temporarily disabled, what will they choose? What will voters prefer? Which makes more sense morally, financially, emotionally, politically?
Of course armies will become robot armies, and this is a GOOD thing. Humans will stop dying young in absurd battles
I'm confused. I just agreed with you that we will get droids on the battlefield. Where I disagree is that they are going on general sale - nobody is going to be allowed to buy a superhuman strength robot to ask as their household cleaner, no matter how much that tosser Musk foams on about it.
Did I pick up you are not standing for Holyrood in May ?
To be honest, you seem to have so many commitments I think it is a wise decision
Indeed I wonder why anyone wants to go into public office in this climate
Correct. I was selected but have now withdrawn. 2026 is the year I get my new food distribution business running. Whilst still spinning the plates of my (currently primary) consulting business, growing my YouTube channel and doing social media for our retail business.
Something had to give and pulling my political activities was the easiest to cull.
So many of the issues discussed on here are about to be rendered spectacularly irrelevant by advances in technology - eg robotics
We are 1-3 years from advanced humanoid robots entering the market at scale. Think what that does to, say, defence
Eg look at the latest Unitree robot (from China). Imagine taking on that, on the battlefield. It will be tireless and relentless and be equipped with 100% accurate weapons
It will also go into factories and the like. Vast wealth will be created
And that is just one example
Defence is why we are 100% NOT about to get advanced humanoid robots entering the market. Musk even described the Tesla Robototron as his "robot army". No way are autonomous robots making it out into the general pubic. Factory use? Far better to use a specific robot for a specific task as we already do.
Humanoid droids on the battlefield? Maybe. Your own persona robototron that could be remote programmed to kill us all? No chance
Are you serious?
If governments have a choice between seeing a young man of 25 die on a battlefield, or a robot costing 25k getting temporarily disabled, what will they choose? What will voters prefer? Which makes more sense morally, financially, emotionally, politically?
Of course armies will become robot armies, and this is a GOOD thing. Humans will stop dying young in absurd battles
I'm confused. I just agreed with you that we will get droids on the battlefield. Where I disagree is that they are going on general sale - nobody is going to be allowed to buy a superhuman strength robot to ask as their household cleaner, no matter how much that tosser Musk foams on about it.
Did I pick up you are not standing for Holyrood in May ?
To be honest, you seem to have so many commitments I think it is a wise decision
Indeed I wonder why anyone wants to go into public office in this climate
Correct. I was selected but have now withdrawn. 2026 is the year I get my new food distribution business running. Whilst still spinning the plates of my (currently primary) consulting business, growing my YouTube channel and doing social media for our retail business.
Something had to give and pulling my political activities was the easiest to cull.
From what i have gleaned of your personal life, and mental health issues - and you share quite openly - this sounds like a wise choice. You were - I think - trying to do too much, maybe, Be kind to yourself. Smell the roses, they don’t last long
Also, come to Bangkok in the winter. It is so blissfully stress free. The sun shines every day, the food is great and cheap, the people are friendly, life is languid and lazy yet exciting if you want it
I realised today that my main stress at the moment - and I am not joking - is this: “am I drinking too much fresh pomegranate juice”
It’s delicious and beautifully tart and relatively healthy, but also packed with sugar. So that’s my big worry of the moment
Young will suffer most when AI ‘tsunami’ hits jobs, says head of IMF
Kristalina Georgieva says research suggests 60% of jobs in advanced economies will be affected, with many entry-level roles wiped out
Artificial intelligence will be a “tsunami hitting the labour market”, with young people worst affected, the head of the International Monetary Fund warned the World Economic Forum on Friday.
Kristalina Georgieva told delegates in Davos that the IMF’s own research suggested there would be a big transformation of demand for skills, as the technology becomes increasingly widespread.
“We expect over the next years, in advanced economies, 60% of jobs to be affected by AI, either enhanced or eliminated or transformed – 40% globally,” she said. “This is like a tsunami hitting the labour market.”
I certainly wouldn't want to be coming out of uni now looking to be a software developer, data scientist, consultancy.
white-collar workers say that AI saves them little or no time, but executives think it's a massive timesaver. This divide between employees and management is going to influence the future of the workforce.
If you aren't being more productive / saving time, you are doing it wrong.
I have just had a code sprint over the past week to solve a rather complex problem and with the aid of LLMs written code that would have previously taken me couple of months at least to figure out and some junior researcher with only under grad dev skills probably 6 months.
everyone's shipping faster. but someone has to review that code. someone has to maintain it. someone has to debug it at 3am. and those people are burning out. i spent two weeks talking to open source maintainers, digging through github discussions, and reading security research. here's what's actually happening. the 12x problem
this is Brandolini's Law weaponized: "The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it."
It takes so much longer to debug even your own stuff as you don’t really understand how its put together. Not much different to package wrangling but incredibly annoying if its mostly 'your' code.
before AI: you had to know enough to write bad code after AI: you don't even have to know enough to recognize bad code
the contributors submitting these PRs genuinely believe they're helping. they can't tell the difference between "code that compiles" and "code that belongs in this project."
I'd suspect a lot of it is uni requirements to contribute to open source. Of course most will take the easy way out.
The newfound anti-Americanism in Europe risks leaving Ukraine in a very difficult position because it puts a different gloss on Putin's 25 year-long effort to resist US encroachment will make the option of nomalising trade with Russia start to look attractive, especially to Germany.
I am not sure what total 2 plus 2 has made there but it sure isn't 4.
After Trump's disgusting comments on Afghanistan it is time to drop the fawning and realise he is a real threat and bully and time to call him out
No more appeasement, just take immediate action to massively increase our defence spending and form new alliances with the EU, Canada, Australia, Japan and the sane parts of the world
It seems astonishing that Trump declares a deal with Rutte over Greenland that did not include the Danes or Greenlanders agreement
I do not think Greenland or Ukraine is anywhere near settled and Trump's plans for Gaza are obscene
Jeremy Hunt was on one of the most appalling episodes of WATO I have heard. It was a real hatchet job on Starmer re: Trump/ NATO. Dimond came in with his boots on to kick Starmer expecting Hunt would jump at the opportunity. But Hunt was very measured. He outlined the dilemma in Downing Street. Hunt explained that the sitting Government have to limit or at least control their personal criticism of Trump over Afghanistan because whether we like it or not we have to keep Trump sweet over Ukraine. If he takes his bat and ball home Ukraine falls.
Hunt did say even if Downing Street has to bite collective tongues anyone else can criticise to their heart's content. Which brings me back to Farage, he's been awfully quiet.
Allegedly he's on constituency business in Clacton.
Young will suffer most when AI ‘tsunami’ hits jobs, says head of IMF
Kristalina Georgieva says research suggests 60% of jobs in advanced economies will be affected, with many entry-level roles wiped out
Artificial intelligence will be a “tsunami hitting the labour market”, with young people worst affected, the head of the International Monetary Fund warned the World Economic Forum on Friday.
Kristalina Georgieva told delegates in Davos that the IMF’s own research suggested there would be a big transformation of demand for skills, as the technology becomes increasingly widespread.
“We expect over the next years, in advanced economies, 60% of jobs to be affected by AI, either enhanced or eliminated or transformed – 40% globally,” she said. “This is like a tsunami hitting the labour market.”
I certainly wouldn't want to be coming out of uni now looking to be a software developer, data scientist, consultancy.
Probably needs a radical rethink of the jobs market.
Also driving jobs are likely to go too. Taxi drivers, lorry drivers, van drivers. For a lorry load up at departure, unload at arrival. Self drive.
We need a forward thinking, proactive, govt to look at the numbers going to Uni and where the jobs of the future are. That’s a lot of income tax and NI to lose.
Tesla is now demonstrating FSD from coast to coast in the USA, It is happening. Driving is disappearing. I noticed also today that insurers are HALVING their premiums for drivers that agree to let the car do the driving, as they are so much less prone to accidents. This is how economics will quickly force humans away from the steering wheel. The way humans aren’t allowed to do laser eye surgery. Safety = profit
Whatever happened to @JosiasJessop? He and I used to have enjoyable arguments on this. Did he flounce? Is he banned? I was gone and now I’m back he is nowhere
Comments
Back in the deep mists of time the Lib Dems were one of the first people to propose an in/out referendum on the EU because they couldn't conceive that out would win. They completely failed to imagine the way in which public opinion might be shifted and the part they might play in that.
So it is with Rejoin. You describe the politics of the status quo. But you fail to imagine how the politics would be different were public opinion also radically different, and the EU itself changed.
For sure, most advocates of Rejoin also lack the imagination to conceive of the work they will need to do to achieve it, so I certainly don't think that Rejoin is likely.
But it's not hard to imagine it happening.
Aircraft shelters are a bit harder - but versus drones, only require basic construction methods.
Kristalina Georgieva says research suggests 60% of jobs in advanced economies will be affected, with many entry-level roles wiped out
Artificial intelligence will be a “tsunami hitting the labour market”, with young people worst affected, the head of the International Monetary Fund warned the World Economic Forum on Friday.
Kristalina Georgieva told delegates in Davos that the IMF’s own research suggested there would be a big transformation of demand for skills, as the technology becomes increasingly widespread.
“We expect over the next years, in advanced economies, 60% of jobs to be affected by AI, either enhanced or eliminated or transformed – 40% globally,” she said. “This is like a tsunami hitting the labour market.”
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jan/23/ai-tsunami-labour-market-youth-employment-says-head-of-imf-davos
I certainly wouldn't want to be coming out of uni now looking to be a software developer, data scientist, consultancy.
AI adds one more means by which we could render the planet uninhabitable. I suggest we won't. And it adds one more means by which local victory in battle could be achieved. I suggest that on the whole we will agree that we don't - we will find a place within the laws of war for AI but it will be finite. The reason being exactly the same: there is so far little willingness to use means which are likely to end in rendering planet uninhabitable. There is mutual self interest in war. This is (sadly) best served by the major players keeping up to date and balancing the powers and risks.
Defence happens so that I can tickle the baby's toes in front of the fire in peace. Chinese, Russians, Trumpians are just the same as us in this respect.
Thank you @Big_G_NorthWales for your very kind reply. Appreciated. Also thank you everyone who liked my post. Again very much appreciated.
I see hyufd felt the need to reply with more nonsense by linking to a case where a driver was prosecuted for hitting a speeding motorbike. I mean really are you on drugs or something? Of course the van driver was prosecuted. He was over twice the legal drink drive limit and driving at over twice the speed limit. Is there any brain in there at all?
A driver involved in an accident who is driving with care and attention doing everything correctly but unfortunately collides with a reckless driver due entirely to the fault of the reckless driver should not be prosecuted (this really shouldn't need saying). He wasn't a careful driver was he? A recent example was shown on a TV documentary. Two HGVs collided head on, on a bend. The onboard cameras showed one driver (from Europe) was on the wrong side of the road. The skid marks and cab records showed the other driver reacted accordingly and was driving appropriately for the conditions. No action was taken against him (obviously). The stuff hyufd posts is idiotic.
I didn't post all the comments made by the blue light police drivers about hyufd's posts, but here is another. hyufd repeatedly said you should stop at a roundabout give way line even if your exit is clear. The response by two of the police officers I showed this to was that if they saw you doing this (and you didn't have L/P plates) they would stop you and breathalyse you, as this is typical behaviour of a drunk driver overcompensating.
There is a driving acronym (TUG) that is repeatedly referenced in the police driving manual. It stands for Take, Use, Give and refers to information you obtain about other drivers while driving and the information you give them. Not just signals, but your actions, car position etc. You would be giving very confusing and dangerous messages by randomly stopping at a roundabout when you have a clear exit.
On a driving test this very specific manoeuvre is classified as a minor fault (not an instant fail), but if you do the same fault (stop unnecessarily at a Give Way) 3 times it is a test failure. But as we all know hyufd knows best.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/football/2026/01/23/how-west-ham-and-taxpayer-will-lose-millions-if-relegated/ (£££)
Proof it it were needed that all true patriots must support West Ham in their bid to stay up.
I honestly despair how much time and effort the Democrats put into “proving” all this and more as if it were some revelation. Americans know and they elected him anyway. Twice.
Just maybe, if they thought about why and how utterly irrelevant their own obsessions are to most people’s lives we wouldn’t be in this mess.
https://www.wsj.com/lifestyle/workplace/ceos-say-ai-is-making-work-more-efficient-employees-tell-a-different-story-6613ce9d?st=ZoxzQg&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink
I have just had a code sprint over the past week to solve a rather complex problem and with the aid of LLMs written code that would have previously taken me couple of months at least to figure out and some junior researcher with only under grad dev skills probably 6 months.
Humanoid droids on the battlefield? Maybe. Your own persona robototron that could be remote programmed to kill us all? No chance
It was an experience I have never forgotten
The .map is excellent showing the airfield and Lossiemouth
If governments have a choice between seeing a young man of 25 die on a battlefield, or a robot costing 25k getting temporarily disabled, what will they choose? What will voters prefer? Which makes more sense morally, financially, emotionally, politically?
Of course armies will become robot armies, and this is a GOOD thing. Humans will stop dying young in absurd battles
Russian General : What’s holding up the advance? Why are we stuck at Raseiniai?
Officer : There’s one man in a British WWII tank, parked on a roundabout. Anyone comes up to the stop line, he engages.
General : 16 days!!!
Officer : There’s no shifting him. He keeps shouting stuff about traffic laws.
Don't take my addiction to snark as anything else.
My wife bought the entire wishlist so I would have some actual Christmas presents - so “Late Soviet Britain” is now physically present in my “to read” pile! I will report back...
(related: a long history of MoD procurement disasters here: https://x.com/JonHawkes275/status/2014653489847140420 )
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GtayoMgHVMo
No more appeasement, just take immediate action to massively increase our defence spending and form new alliances with the EU, Canada, Australia, Japan and the sane parts of the world
It seems astonishing that Trump declares a deal with Rutte over Greenland that did not include the Danes or Greenlanders agreement
I do not think Greenland or Ukraine is anywhere near settled and Trump's plans for Gaza are obscene
Imagine a robot that goes out, and simply holds onto a human prisoner. Send 10 million of those. If you smash them or shoot them, they won't care. Just another one will try and grab you.
Candy Coated Armageddon.
How?
Or maybe it'll all be fine.
We will get the "but the economy will grow by umpty percent" line trotted out. That doesn't pass the smell test. We are not that far behind Germany and France after Brexit. The idea that we would race ahead because of rejoining is nonsense. (It is also a reason why it wouldn't be on offer from France and Germany.)
but someone has to review that code. someone has to maintain it. someone has to debug it at 3am.
and those people are burning out.
i spent two weeks talking to open source maintainers, digging through github discussions, and reading security research.
here's what's actually happening.
the 12x problem
this is Brandolini's Law weaponized: "The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it."
https://webmatrices.com/post/vibe-coding-has-a-12x-cost-problem-maintainers-are-done
https://www.koreatimes.co.kr/foreignaffairs/20260123/as-korea-weighs-joining-trumps-board-of-peace-experts-see-more-gain-than-risk
Korea faces a diplomatic dilemma after receiving the United States’ invitation to join the “Board of Peace,” a Washington-led initiative initially framed around the Gaza conflict but expected to evolve into a broader global forum. Foreign policy experts, meanwhile, contend that Seoul has little choice but to secure a seat at the table...
..“European countries are in conflict with the U.S. over the Greenland issue, so they are in a position to push back. In contrast, Korea is on good terms with Washington and would not want to create unnecessary friction,” said Park Won-gon, a professor of North Korean studies at Ewha Womans University.
Park added that rejecting the invitation could carry risks, saying, “Given Trump’s personality, there is a strong possibility that some form of retaliation could follow if Seoul turns down the invitation.”..
..Sean King, an expert on Asia and vice president at New York-based Park Strategies, was skeptical about the board’s long-term relevance, but still saw practical value for Seoul, given the extensive business interests of Korean conglomerates across the Middle East.
“Korea can take or leave the Board of Peace, but gains more than it loses by joining,” King said.
“I’m thinking especially of the valuable face time it would provide Korean officials with counterparts from Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the UAE,” he said. “It would afford the Lee government even more chances to closely interact with high-ranking U.S. officials, which can only further the country’s strategic interests.”
Accepting the invitation would test Seoul’s commitment to multilateral diplomacy, as the board’s long-term purpose and members remain unclear.
Declining it, however, carries its own risks. Turning down the offer could irritate an unpredictable U.S. president, potentially sending ripple effects through the bilateral alliance..
It’s never going to happen
I agree that for now Rejoin is not credible. But serious renegotiation on the basis of staying out of the EU is entirely possible, could feature in a manifesto, and probably should promise a ratifying referendum.
Until it isn't our important political alliance remains NATO. Perhaps to be renamed EUROCANATO or something. NATO does include Canada and excludes pacifist Ireland. Even without the USA it matters more than the political carthorse and camel that is the EU.
,
And the best way to win the debate is to change the terms of debate, so that the membership fees are viewed as incidental.
They can put their ex-military 0.5" machine gun on it.
I hadn't seen that before but it is a neat summary of politics, particularly US politics since Bannon / MAGA and of course Johnson.
A lie can just be spouted, it needs no research or analysis
(Though a lot can happen between now and October.)
Today's Danish opinion poll from Megafon is beyond crazy. The red bloc regains a majority and the blue bloc loses 9% of the vote since last month:
🟥 Red Bloc 51.7%, 90 seats
🟦 Blue Bloc 41.9%, 73 seats
🟪 M 6.4%, 12 seats
Danish politics has completely changed in just a month.
https://x.com/Gust_2319/status/2014570635582652557
But I’m not sure why you’ve erected a strawman. I’ve not said anything about domestic robots. Tho I do remember predicting on here about 3 years ago that they will be humanoid in shape but maybe 30% of human size, for ease of storage and less menace. This seems to be happening
And posters wonder why PB often seems eerily quiet, these days
Your new euphemism for today.
after AI: you don't even have to know enough to recognize bad code
the contributors submitting these PRs genuinely believe they're helping. they can't tell the difference between "code that compiles" and "code that belongs in this project."
George Galloway will stand in the Gorton & Denton by-election if Andy Burnham is Labour's candidate, a close ally has told me"
https://x.com/christiancalgie/status/2014683004346449988
To the ultimate test of cerebral fitness
This grips me more than would a
Muddy old river or reclining Buddha
Hunt did say even if Downing Street has to bite collective tongues anyone else can criticise to their heart's content. Which brings me back to Farage, he's been awfully quiet.
This is not a moment for business as usual. There are still several hurdles to clear, both regarding the agreement itself and the broader challenges posed by Trump II, before we can move forward on #Turnberry.
All the Elon stans think Optimus will be on general sale in a few years, will quickly replace most jobs and create a utopia as "the robots will make anything you want practically cost-free"
No fucking way are any of these robots entering the market. They will be banned and diverted to military uses.
The polling suggests that a majority of the electorate are open to rejoining, but only a minority see it as a priority.
https://yougov.co.uk/politics/articles/52410-nine-years-after-the-eu-referendum-where-does-public-opinion-stand-on-brexit
Given that, there's almost no prospect of this government having the courage to even think about the idea.
It will be interesting to see how much the rolling shitshow in the US, and its impacts on us , changes that over the next few months.
Did I pick up you are not standing for Holyrood in May ?
To be honest, you seem to have so many commitments I think it is a wise decision
Indeed I wonder why anyone wants to go into public office in this climate
When I’m away you all talk about heat pumps and roundabouts, and sometimes about me, and what I might be doing, and sometimes this commentary dies away completely as it is so dull, because you are all so dull
Then when I’m back you all forget about heat pumps and roundabouts and you all talk excitedly about me, because I’m here, and everything livens up
Frankly, I should get paid for this. But I do it pro bono
How would you vote in a new referendum if, say, Le Pen was running France, Meloni Italy, and a Merz-Afd Coalition in Germany? Plus Orban and all the rest
Because this is really quite likely. The EU is poised to shift decisively to the hard right in the coming years, perhaps even the far right in some cases. I wonder how Roger will feel about it then
Something had to give and pulling my political activities was the easiest to cull.
Also driving jobs are likely to go too. Taxi drivers, lorry drivers, van drivers. For a lorry load up at departure, unload at arrival. Self drive.
We need a forward thinking, proactive, govt to look at the numbers going to Uni and where the jobs of the future are. That’s a lot of income tax and NI to lose.
OpenAI faces a $20bn black hole in its accounts this year, as a series of buy now, pay later deals with suppliers start to come due
It makes 2026 a make-or-break moment for the company, raising questions about whether it could buckle under the weight of its commitments
https://www.ifre.com/people-and-markets/2373243/openai-faces-financial-crunch-point-as-huge-supplier-bills-start-to-come-due
Also, come to Bangkok in the winter. It is so blissfully stress free. The sun shines every day, the food is great and cheap, the people are friendly, life is languid and lazy yet exciting if you want it
I realised today that my main stress at the moment - and I am not joking - is this: “am I drinking too much fresh pomegranate juice”
It’s delicious and beautifully tart and relatively healthy, but also packed with sugar. So that’s my big worry of the moment
The HMS Mersey and HMS Severn were dispatched to shadow a Russian corvette and oil tanker towards the North Sea.
A Wildcat helicopter from 815 Naval Air Squadron was also deployed in the NATO assisted operation.
Why look uniquely to a bankrupt Russia?
Whatever happened to @JosiasJessop? He and I used to have enjoyable arguments on this. Did he flounce? Is he banned? I was gone and now I’m back he is nowhere
Starmer needs to be aware of the danger of trying to stop him standing if he wants too
https://x.com/i/status/2014709065725759984