This is an incredibly sad decision – politicalbetting.com

System · 8:24AM

This is an incredibly sad decision – politicalbetting.com

Gallup will no longer measure presidential approval after 88 years thehill.com/homenews/med…

Morris_Dancer · 8:25AM

I saw this elsewhere. The American posting it described the decision as 'bending the knee'.

bondegezou · 8:30AM

FPT…

theProle said:

bondegezou said:

Cookie said:

Dopermean said:

williamglenn said:

OnlyLivingBoy said:

Cookie said:

OnlyLivingBoy said:

Theuniondivvie said:

Cookie said:

Roger said:
Ch 4 News gives Ratcliffe a well deserved hammering. He avoided £4 billion in tax in the last 5 years lived as a tax exile in Monaco and claimed we had 21 million immigrants when the figure was 3 million. Presumably they were paying the tax he was avoiding

There's a bit of a side-of-a-bus argument going on here. The left repeatedly making the point that 'only' 3 million immigrants have arrived in the last five years isn't the zinger they think it is.
Though otoh it highlights ‘hard headed businessman’ Ratcliffe is either speaking through his arse or is a dishonest propagandiser. Also that the right despite their opportunistic outrage is mostly responsible for that 3 million.

The reality is that average annual net migration was higher under the Tories than under Labour. And yet somehow this is all the fault of "the left". Lol.
I think you're misunderstanding. Noone's denying that the Tories were terrible at controlling immigration. But also, no-one's voting for the left to keep immigration down because they don't appear to consider it a problem. Saying "it's only 3 million in five years" only reinforces this view. And pushes more voters towards Reform i.e. the party which majors on immigration and wasn't the right wing party in government when immigration surged.
And this is bad news for Labour, because the more one right-wing party is clear of the other, the worse Labour do. And Reform is already the one in the lead.
Nobody is saying "it's only three million." They're saying that someone who doesn't know the difference between 3 million and 21 million is perhaps not very well informed on this topic.
As for Reform not being in power when immigration surged, they currently contain more of the Johnson cabinet than the Tories do, so I'm not sure that comment is even true.
Has it occurred to you that maybe these people keep screaming immigration because they want power and they've figured it's the easiest way to get it?
He didn't get the numbers wrong but the dates. He obviously meant to say that the population was 58 million in 2000 rather than in 2020.
LOL! on today's hot topic I think the good news is that it would be fairly easy for you to script AI to repost MAGA propaganda freeing you up to try and excuse Ratcliffe's racist missteps, probably there'd be enough of a productivity boost to take on Rupert Lowe or even the whole of Reform.
Bluntly, my reaction to Ratcliffe was "ill-informed berk". But Ratcliffe isn't up for election. And my reaction to the backlash, led by SKS, to Jim Ratcliffe was "you lot genuinely don't see the problem with immigration, do you? Occasionally you say you do - but it makes you feel bad to be on that side of the argument: and you're much more comfortable bashing anyone calking for less immigration than you are calling for less immigration yourself".
And I'm a comfortable middle class voter in a suburb with nice middle class immigrants. I'm not likely to be pushed to Reform. But voters in, say, Denton, or Gorton, might react differently when reminded about how many immigrants the country has grown by in the last five years. And they're not going to be bashing the Tories there because the Tories are almost completely absent.
Immigration under Starmer’s government has fallen hugely. It’s down 69% from the peak under Johnson and is still falling. Does that not demonstrate that he/they do care about reducing immigration?
It mostly demonstrates that the stuff Sunak did in a panic as the full horror of the Boriswave became apparent is having some effect. I'm not aware of anything significant the Labour government has done to further reduce legal migration.

But also, it's worth remembering that immigration was a massive issue before the Boriswave. What was Brexit about if not immigration (those with longer memories may recall the farce of Cameron's "Emergency Brake" agreement). The reality is that the the British public want zero net migration, and have consistently voted for lower migration at pretty much every plausible opportunity for at least the last 20 years. Don't get me wrong, it's better for it to be at 200k net than 800k net, but any politician trying to claim that current 200k net is OK because it's less that 800k net is likely to get very short shift. It's still at least 200k too high.

Taking a step back, imagine if we could snap our fingers and remove 20% of the population. Leaving aside the morals of what happens to them for a second, just think about how much better it would make the country. House prices would drop spectacularly. Trains wouldn't be nearly as overcrowded. The traffic situation on the roads would improve massively. Etc, etc.

That's what could have happened if we'd just left immigration at more or less zero for the last 25 years.
Ratcliffe is essentially right - we've allowed in way too many extra people, and really without any supporting infrastructure.

Far too late to turn the clock back now, and I'm not for a moment advocating chucking people out who are here legitimately, but it does demonstrate why we should be aiming for net emigration for the next 25 years rather than continuing net immigration.

OK, so most of that is wrong.

The Government doesn’t think 200k is OK. They’re aiming for lower immigration and the numbers are expected to drop further.

Let’s say we could remove 20% of the population, would this realise the utopia you imagine? No, of course not. The country would be 20% less productive. We would have 20% less of an economy. The trains would not stop being overcrowded, because there would be 20% less money to pay for them, so we’d have to run 20% fewer trains.

Populations support themselves. Populations generate wealth that then pays for the infrastructure they need. A smaller population can afford less infrastructure. If we’ve not invested enough in infrastructure, then the problem is not the size of the population, it’s our choice not to invest more in infrastructure.

BartholomewRoberts · 8:30AM

Wulfrun_Phil said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

MarqueeMark said:

kle4 said:

TheScreamingEagles said:

Wulfrun_Phil said:
EDIT

Updated Labour List net favourability ratings of Cabinet members amongst self-declared Labour members.

Taking those featuring in the next PM market:
Streeting + 22
Miliband +70
Mahmood +3
Cooper +29
Healey +45
Lammy +12
Benn +51

Starmer +5

Rayner, Powell and Burnham excluded as not in Cabinet.

"Survation surveyed 1,264 readers of LabourList, the leading dedicated newsletter and news and comment website for Labour supporters, who also said they were Labour Party members between February 5 and 6. Data was weighted to the profile of party members by age group, sex, region and 2025 deputy leadership vote. "

https://labourlist.org/2026/02/cabinet-league-table-february-2026/
This is why Ed Miliband is going to succeed Sir Keir if Sir Keir falls soon.
20+ years experience as an MP, a taste of ministerial experience before having extended experience of opposition including at the highest level, leadership of a major department, displays a sense of purpose and vision (albeit one plenty don't like), popular with party members, has a ruthless streak.

On paper he's not a terrible candidate.
But it's not on paper. The actuality is he is a terrible candidate. Nothing has changed since he was a terrible candidate who lost last time out.
The Tories have changed.

Then they were led by Cameron at his prime. Now ... ?
Also, at the next general election he contests, PM Miliband would be able to stand on his actual record of running the country for 3 years.
Instead of being judged on well crafted scare stories about the terrible things that he would do, he would be judged on what he had actually done.

Not sure this is the positive you think it is.

Certainly is not helping Sir Keir right now.

eek · 8:32AM

Old, old news - I reported this on Wednesday evening..

Tres · 8:33AM

So it goes. All US economic stats just became a little less trustworthy too.

Taz · 8:34AM

eek said:
Old, old news - I reported this on Wednesday evening..

Yes, you did.

eek · 8:35AM

FPT

Theuniondivvie said:
Fckn hell.
Joke country.

https://x.com/rcolvile/status/2021934019303059598?s=61&t=LYVEHh2mqFy1oUJAdCfe-Q

If your aim is to get your preferred choice into the position, making the other candidates joke options works wonders.

Scott_xP · 8:36AM

On topic

https://bsky.app/profile/petridishes.bsky.social/post/3mephlgvgws22

AnneJGP · 8:36AM

Have no fear. He'll go on telling us so himself.

BartholomewRoberts · 8:39AM

bondegezou said:
FPT…

theProle said:

bondegezou said:

Cookie said:

Dopermean said:

williamglenn said:

OnlyLivingBoy said:

Cookie said:

OnlyLivingBoy said:

Theuniondivvie said:

Cookie said:

Roger said:
Ch 4 News gives Ratcliffe a well deserved hammering. He avoided £4 billion in tax in the last 5 years lived as a tax exile in Monaco and claimed we had 21 million immigrants when the figure was 3 million. Presumably they were paying the tax he was avoiding

There's a bit of a side-of-a-bus argument going on here. The left repeatedly making the point that 'only' 3 million immigrants have arrived in the last five years isn't the zinger they think it is.
Though otoh it highlights ‘hard headed businessman’ Ratcliffe is either speaking through his arse or is a dishonest propagandiser. Also that the right despite their opportunistic outrage is mostly responsible for that 3 million.

The reality is that average annual net migration was higher under the Tories than under Labour. And yet somehow this is all the fault of "the left". Lol.
I think you're misunderstanding. Noone's denying that the Tories were terrible at controlling immigration. But also, no-one's voting for the left to keep immigration down because they don't appear to consider it a problem. Saying "it's only 3 million in five years" only reinforces this view. And pushes more voters towards Reform i.e. the party which majors on immigration and wasn't the right wing party in government when immigration surged.
And this is bad news for Labour, because the more one right-wing party is clear of the other, the worse Labour do. And Reform is already the one in the lead.
Nobody is saying "it's only three million." They're saying that someone who doesn't know the difference between 3 million and 21 million is perhaps not very well informed on this topic.
As for Reform not being in power when immigration surged, they currently contain more of the Johnson cabinet than the Tories do, so I'm not sure that comment is even true.
Has it occurred to you that maybe these people keep screaming immigration because they want power and they've figured it's the easiest way to get it?
He didn't get the numbers wrong but the dates. He obviously meant to say that the population was 58 million in 2000 rather than in 2020.
LOL! on today's hot topic I think the good news is that it would be fairly easy for you to script AI to repost MAGA propaganda freeing you up to try and excuse Ratcliffe's racist missteps, probably there'd be enough of a productivity boost to take on Rupert Lowe or even the whole of Reform.
Bluntly, my reaction to Ratcliffe was "ill-informed berk". But Ratcliffe isn't up for election. And my reaction to the backlash, led by SKS, to Jim Ratcliffe was "you lot genuinely don't see the problem with immigration, do you? Occasionally you say you do - but it makes you feel bad to be on that side of the argument: and you're much more comfortable bashing anyone calking for less immigration than you are calling for less immigration yourself".
And I'm a comfortable middle class voter in a suburb with nice middle class immigrants. I'm not likely to be pushed to Reform. But voters in, say, Denton, or Gorton, might react differently when reminded about how many immigrants the country has grown by in the last five years. And they're not going to be bashing the Tories there because the Tories are almost completely absent.
Immigration under Starmer’s government has fallen hugely. It’s down 69% from the peak under Johnson and is still falling. Does that not demonstrate that he/they do care about reducing immigration?
It mostly demonstrates that the stuff Sunak did in a panic as the full horror of the Boriswave became apparent is having some effect. I'm not aware of anything significant the Labour government has done to further reduce legal migration.

But also, it's worth remembering that immigration was a massive issue before the Boriswave. What was Brexit about if not immigration (those with longer memories may recall the farce of Cameron's "Emergency Brake" agreement). The reality is that the the British public want zero net migration, and have consistently voted for lower migration at pretty much every plausible opportunity for at least the last 20 years. Don't get me wrong, it's better for it to be at 200k net than 800k net, but any politician trying to claim that current 200k net is OK because it's less that 800k net is likely to get very short shift. It's still at least 200k too high.

Taking a step back, imagine if we could snap our fingers and remove 20% of the population. Leaving aside the morals of what happens to them for a second, just think about how much better it would make the country. House prices would drop spectacularly. Trains wouldn't be nearly as overcrowded. The traffic situation on the roads would improve massively. Etc, etc.

That's what could have happened if we'd just left immigration at more or less zero for the last 25 years.
Ratcliffe is essentially right - we've allowed in way too many extra people, and really without any supporting infrastructure.

Far too late to turn the clock back now, and I'm not for a moment advocating chucking people out who are here legitimately, but it does demonstrate why we should be aiming for net emigration for the next 25 years rather than continuing net immigration.
OK, so most of that is wrong.

The Government doesn’t think 200k is OK. They’re aiming for lower immigration and the numbers are expected to drop further.

Let’s say we could remove 20% of the population, would this realise the utopia you imagine? No, of course not. The country would be 20% less productive. We would have 20% less of an economy. The trains would not stop being overcrowded, because there would be 20% less money to pay for them, so we’d have to run 20% fewer trains.

Populations support themselves. Populations generate wealth that then pays for the infrastructure they need. A smaller population can afford less infrastructure. If we’ve not invested enough in infrastructure, then the problem is not the size of the population, it’s our choice not to invest more in infrastructure.

You are forgetting the up-front capital costs.

Yes operationally it scales, which is why we neither need nor can't afford migration, we can adapt either way. Lump of labour absolutely is a fallacy, that is 100% correct.

However up-front capital costs do not scale and they take time as well.

From 2000 to 2025 there has been approximately a 17.7% growth in population but a mere 1.9% growth in roads (primarily unclassified/minor roads).

We have gone from 243 people per mile, to 281 people per mile.

To reverse that decline in relative capacity is going to need a hell of a lot of up-front capital costs and not just proportional maintenance costs.

Capital costs nobody in any party is offering.

Stuartinromford · 8:40AM

TSE said:

I find this decision incredibly sad, how else will we know Donald Trump is the greatest President in history?

I'm sure that the President will be happy to fill that gap.

The more worrying thing... Would Gallup have done this if they thought that MAGA's grip on power was temporary?

Stuartinromford · 8:42AM

eek said:
FPT

Theuniondivvie said:
Fckn hell.
Joke country.

https://x.com/rcolvile/status/2021934019303059598?s=61&t=LYVEHh2mqFy1oUJAdCfe-Q
If your aim is to get your preferred choice into the position, making the other candidates joke options works wonders.

As described in The Bishop's Gambit. (Everything about politics used to be in Yes, Minister, before things got worse.)

The risk is that the joke candidate gets the job.

Sandpit · 8:44AM

OFCOM v 4Chan could get interesting.

https://x.com/dshensmith/status/2022008086517453122

eek · 8:44AM

Stuartinromford said:

TSE said:

I find this decision incredibly sad, how else will we know Donald Trump is the greatest President in history?
I'm sure that the President will be happy to fill that gap.

The more worrying thing... Would Gallup have done this if they thought that MAGA's grip on power was temporary?

They also seem to have quietly done it in 2018 - for similar, keep the president happy reasons.

TheScreamingEagles · 8:46AM

I don’t wish to get my hopes up but Zimbabwe might be about to beat the convicts.

TheScreamingEagles · 8:47AM

eek said:
Old, old news - I reported this on Wednesday evening..

Oops, hollibops and all that jazz for the next 16 days.

rkrkrk · 8:47AM

Is Ed M. on a redemption arc now? Do voters even remember him from 2015 or is that ancient history?
Is there a kind of nostalgia for pre-Brexit politics that he can tap into?

My sense is he's probably too geeky and nasal sounding to be a strong leader of the opposition. But if he were already PM and the economy was doing maybe he'd win re-election.

Selebian · 8:49AM

I do understand this decision. The cost of computing power to detect and handle such a small number as presidential approval must have become prohibitive.

Nigelb · 8:49AM

eek said:
Old, old news - I reported this on Wednesday evening..

Yes, I've noted it too.

There's so much shit that comes out of Trump's US these days that each individual thing is barely noticed.
The other point is the remarkable small number of institutions which not inly won't stand up to Trump, but go out of their way to placate the senile paedo protector.

Sandpit · 8:52AM

TheScreamingEagles said:
I don’t wish to get my hopes up but Zimbabwe might be about to beat the convicts.

It’s gonna be close. 3 overs and 40 runs.

rkrkrk · 8:52AM

BartholomewRoberts said:

bondegezou said:
FPT…

theProle said:

bondegezou said:

Cookie said:

Dopermean said:

williamglenn said:

OnlyLivingBoy said:

Cookie said:

OnlyLivingBoy said:

Theuniondivvie said:

Cookie said:

Roger said:
Ch 4 News gives Ratcliffe a well deserved hammering. He avoided £4 billion in tax in the last 5 years lived as a tax exile in Monaco and claimed we had 21 million immigrants when the figure was 3 million. Presumably they were paying the tax he was avoiding

There's a bit of a side-of-a-bus argument going on here. The left repeatedly making the point that 'only' 3 million immigrants have arrived in the last five years isn't the zinger they think it is.
Though otoh it highlights ‘hard headed businessman’ Ratcliffe is either speaking through his arse or is a dishonest propagandiser. Also that the right despite their opportunistic outrage is mostly responsible for that 3 million.

The reality is that average annual net migration was higher under the Tories than under Labour. And yet somehow this is all the fault of "the left". Lol.
I think you're misunderstanding. Noone's denying that the Tories were terrible at controlling immigration. But also, no-one's voting for the left to keep immigration down because they don't appear to consider it a problem. Saying "it's only 3 million in five years" only reinforces this view. And pushes more voters towards Reform i.e. the party which majors on immigration and wasn't the right wing party in government when immigration surged.
And this is bad news for Labour, because the more one right-wing party is clear of the other, the worse Labour do. And Reform is already the one in the lead.
Nobody is saying "it's only three million." They're saying that someone who doesn't know the difference between 3 million and 21 million is perhaps not very well informed on this topic.
As for Reform not being in power when immigration surged, they currently contain more of the Johnson cabinet than the Tories do, so I'm not sure that comment is even true.
Has it occurred to you that maybe these people keep screaming immigration because they want power and they've figured it's the easiest way to get it?
He didn't get the numbers wrong but the dates. He obviously meant to say that the population was 58 million in 2000 rather than in 2020.
LOL! on today's hot topic I think the good news is that it would be fairly easy for you to script AI to repost MAGA propaganda freeing you up to try and excuse Ratcliffe's racist missteps, probably there'd be enough of a productivity boost to take on Rupert Lowe or even the whole of Reform.
Bluntly, my reaction to Ratcliffe was "ill-informed berk". But Ratcliffe isn't up for election. And my reaction to the backlash, led by SKS, to Jim Ratcliffe was "you lot genuinely don't see the problem with immigration, do you? Occasionally you say you do - but it makes you feel bad to be on that side of the argument: and you're much more comfortable bashing anyone calking for less immigration than you are calling for less immigration yourself".
And I'm a comfortable middle class voter in a suburb with nice middle class immigrants. I'm not likely to be pushed to Reform. But voters in, say, Denton, or Gorton, might react differently when reminded about how many immigrants the country has grown by in the last five years. And they're not going to be bashing the Tories there because the Tories are almost completely absent.
Immigration under Starmer’s government has fallen hugely. It’s down 69% from the peak under Johnson and is still falling. Does that not demonstrate that he/they do care about reducing immigration?
It mostly demonstrates that the stuff Sunak did in a panic as the full horror of the Boriswave became apparent is having some effect. I'm not aware of anything significant the Labour government has done to further reduce legal migration.

But also, it's worth remembering that immigration was a massive issue before the Boriswave. What was Brexit about if not immigration (those with longer memories may recall the farce of Cameron's "Emergency Brake" agreement). The reality is that the the British public want zero net migration, and have consistently voted for lower migration at pretty much every plausible opportunity for at least the last 20 years. Don't get me wrong, it's better for it to be at 200k net than 800k net, but any politician trying to claim that current 200k net is OK because it's less that 800k net is likely to get very short shift. It's still at least 200k too high.

Taking a step back, imagine if we could snap our fingers and remove 20% of the population. Leaving aside the morals of what happens to them for a second, just think about how much better it would make the country. House prices would drop spectacularly. Trains wouldn't be nearly as overcrowded. The traffic situation on the roads would improve massively. Etc, etc.

That's what could have happened if we'd just left immigration at more or less zero for the last 25 years.
Ratcliffe is essentially right - we've allowed in way too many extra people, and really without any supporting infrastructure.

Far too late to turn the clock back now, and I'm not for a moment advocating chucking people out who are here legitimately, but it does demonstrate why we should be aiming for net emigration for the next 25 years rather than continuing net immigration.
OK, so most of that is wrong.

The Government doesn’t think 200k is OK. They’re aiming for lower immigration and the numbers are expected to drop further.

Let’s say we could remove 20% of the population, would this realise the utopia you imagine? No, of course not. The country would be 20% less productive. We would have 20% less of an economy. The trains would not stop being overcrowded, because there would be 20% less money to pay for them, so we’d have to run 20% fewer trains.

Populations support themselves. Populations generate wealth that then pays for the infrastructure they need. A smaller population can afford less infrastructure. If we’ve not invested enough in infrastructure, then the problem is not the size of the population, it’s our choice not to invest more in infrastructure.
You are forgetting the up-front capital costs.

Yes operationally it scales, which is why we neither need nor can't afford migration, we can adapt either way. Lump of labour absolutely is a fallacy, that is 100% correct.

However up-front capital costs do not scale and they take time as well.

From 2000 to 2025 there has been approximately a 17.7% growth in population but a mere 1.9% growth in roads (primarily unclassified/minor roads).

We have gone from 243 people per mile, to 281 people per mile.

To reverse that decline in relative capacity is going to need a hell of a lot of up-front capital costs and not just proportional maintenance costs.

Capital costs nobody in any party is offering.

Labour are spending ~110bn extra in capital spending vs Tory plans over the bext 4 years. Perhaps it should be more, but its striking to me how much of your analysis is the same thinking as current govt.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2025/jun/11/labour-spending-review-five-charts-underpinning-rachel-reeves-decisions?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other

LostPassword · 8:54AM

We see this sort of thing in observational sciences, where a long observation series comes to an end, ad it's always very disappointing in that context too. Long observation series' are incredibly valuable. They're the sort of thing that people come back to again and again and find important changes over time that you just can't detect with confidence when you're comparing different observation sources.

Although ICM hadn't been going nearly as long (and MORI have been going longer) I felt it was a great shame when the Guardian brought their polling series to an end. Here's hoping that Ipsos MORI will keep going indefinitely.

Nigelb · 8:55AM

Moderna gives up on entirely on vaccine development for infectious diseases after the FDA decides it won't even review their flu vaccine - on which they've spent hundreds of millions, and which is more effective than existing vaccines.

“Moderna’s CEO announced the company will no longer invest in new Phase 3 vaccine trials for infectious diseases: ‘You cannot make a return on investment if you don’t have access to the U.S. market.’ Vaccines for Epstein-Barr virus, herpes, and shingles have been shelved.”
https://x.com/LeahLibresco/status/2021950503048065390

An effective Epstein-Barr vaccine might almost eliminate future cases of MS.

Trump health policy is as insane as he is.

HYUFD · 8:57AM

i am sure Trump's 37% approval rating with Gallup certainly led to no pushback from the White House and had nothing to do with the decision

Sandpit · 9:01AM

Are we all Zimbabwean today?

Theuniondivvie · 9:01AM

Stuartinromford said:

eek said:
FPT

Theuniondivvie said:
Fckn hell.
Joke country.

https://x.com/rcolvile/status/2021934019303059598?s=61&t=LYVEHh2mqFy1oUJAdCfe-Q
If your aim is to get your preferred choice into the position, making the other candidates joke options works wonders.
As described in The Bishop's Gambit. (Everything about politics used to be in Yes, Minister, before things got worse.)

The risk is that the joke candidate gets the job.

Some might think a serial resigner due to dubious activities and friend of a known convicted paedophile was a joke candidate. How we laughed!

Leon · 9:03AM

Cheer up everyone

We live in a world where THIS exists

https://x.com/philmcraig/status/2021940858195763596?s=46

TheScreamingEagles · 9:03AM

Sandpit said:
Are we all Zimbabwean today?

I’d cheer for an Al Qaeda XI or France if they were playing the Aussies.

LostPassword · 9:04AM

BartholomewRoberts said:

bondegezou said:
FPT…

theProle said:

bondegezou said:

Cookie said:

Dopermean said:

williamglenn said:

OnlyLivingBoy said:

Cookie said:

OnlyLivingBoy said:

Theuniondivvie said:

Cookie said:

Roger said:
Ch 4 News gives Ratcliffe a well deserved hammering. He avoided £4 billion in tax in the last 5 years lived as a tax exile in Monaco and claimed we had 21 million immigrants when the figure was 3 million. Presumably they were paying the tax he was avoiding

There's a bit of a side-of-a-bus argument going on here. The left repeatedly making the point that 'only' 3 million immigrants have arrived in the last five years isn't the zinger they think it is.
Though otoh it highlights ‘hard headed businessman’ Ratcliffe is either speaking through his arse or is a dishonest propagandiser. Also that the right despite their opportunistic outrage is mostly responsible for that 3 million.

The reality is that average annual net migration was higher under the Tories than under Labour. And yet somehow this is all the fault of "the left". Lol.
I think you're misunderstanding. Noone's denying that the Tories were terrible at controlling immigration. But also, no-one's voting for the left to keep immigration down because they don't appear to consider it a problem. Saying "it's only 3 million in five years" only reinforces this view. And pushes more voters towards Reform i.e. the party which majors on immigration and wasn't the right wing party in government when immigration surged.
And this is bad news for Labour, because the more one right-wing party is clear of the other, the worse Labour do. And Reform is already the one in the lead.
Nobody is saying "it's only three million." They're saying that someone who doesn't know the difference between 3 million and 21 million is perhaps not very well informed on this topic.
As for Reform not being in power when immigration surged, they currently contain more of the Johnson cabinet than the Tories do, so I'm not sure that comment is even true.
Has it occurred to you that maybe these people keep screaming immigration because they want power and they've figured it's the easiest way to get it?
He didn't get the numbers wrong but the dates. He obviously meant to say that the population was 58 million in 2000 rather than in 2020.
LOL! on today's hot topic I think the good news is that it would be fairly easy for you to script AI to repost MAGA propaganda freeing you up to try and excuse Ratcliffe's racist missteps, probably there'd be enough of a productivity boost to take on Rupert Lowe or even the whole of Reform.
Bluntly, my reaction to Ratcliffe was "ill-informed berk". But Ratcliffe isn't up for election. And my reaction to the backlash, led by SKS, to Jim Ratcliffe was "you lot genuinely don't see the problem with immigration, do you? Occasionally you say you do - but it makes you feel bad to be on that side of the argument: and you're much more comfortable bashing anyone calking for less immigration than you are calling for less immigration yourself".
And I'm a comfortable middle class voter in a suburb with nice middle class immigrants. I'm not likely to be pushed to Reform. But voters in, say, Denton, or Gorton, might react differently when reminded about how many immigrants the country has grown by in the last five years. And they're not going to be bashing the Tories there because the Tories are almost completely absent.
Immigration under Starmer’s government has fallen hugely. It’s down 69% from the peak under Johnson and is still falling. Does that not demonstrate that he/they do care about reducing immigration?
It mostly demonstrates that the stuff Sunak did in a panic as the full horror of the Boriswave became apparent is having some effect. I'm not aware of anything significant the Labour government has done to further reduce legal migration.

But also, it's worth remembering that immigration was a massive issue before the Boriswave. What was Brexit about if not immigration (those with longer memories may recall the farce of Cameron's "Emergency Brake" agreement). The reality is that the the British public want zero net migration, and have consistently voted for lower migration at pretty much every plausible opportunity for at least the last 20 years. Don't get me wrong, it's better for it to be at 200k net than 800k net, but any politician trying to claim that current 200k net is OK because it's less that 800k net is likely to get very short shift. It's still at least 200k too high.

Taking a step back, imagine if we could snap our fingers and remove 20% of the population. Leaving aside the morals of what happens to them for a second, just think about how much better it would make the country. House prices would drop spectacularly. Trains wouldn't be nearly as overcrowded. The traffic situation on the roads would improve massively. Etc, etc.

That's what could have happened if we'd just left immigration at more or less zero for the last 25 years.
Ratcliffe is essentially right - we've allowed in way too many extra people, and really without any supporting infrastructure.

Far too late to turn the clock back now, and I'm not for a moment advocating chucking people out who are here legitimately, but it does demonstrate why we should be aiming for net emigration for the next 25 years rather than continuing net immigration.
OK, so most of that is wrong.

The Government doesn’t think 200k is OK. They’re aiming for lower immigration and the numbers are expected to drop further.

Let’s say we could remove 20% of the population, would this realise the utopia you imagine? No, of course not. The country would be 20% less productive. We would have 20% less of an economy. The trains would not stop being overcrowded, because there would be 20% less money to pay for them, so we’d have to run 20% fewer trains.

Populations support themselves. Populations generate wealth that then pays for the infrastructure they need. A smaller population can afford less infrastructure. If we’ve not invested enough in infrastructure, then the problem is not the size of the population, it’s our choice not to invest more in infrastructure.
You are forgetting the up-front capital costs.

Yes operationally it scales, which is why we neither need nor can't afford migration, we can adapt either way. Lump of labour absolutely is a fallacy, that is 100% correct.

However up-front capital costs do not scale and they take time as well.

From 2000 to 2025 there has been approximately a 17.7% growth in population but a mere 1.9% growth in roads (primarily unclassified/minor roads).

We have gone from 243 people per mile, to 281 people per mile.

To reverse that decline in relative capacity is going to need a hell of a lot of up-front capital costs and not just proportional maintenance costs.

Capital costs nobody in any party is offering.

This is kinda what I was arguing on here back in whenever, 2006 or something, when we were talking about immigration from the A8 countries. I said that I didn't think it would be as much of an issue if the government would build the infrastructure - schools, hospitals, council houses, railways, electricity generation, water supply, (and, yes, roads I guess) - that a higher population would require. Whether immigrants queue-jumped on council house waiting lists would be a lot less incendiary if the waiting time for a council house was a few months rather than a few decades.

Unfortunately, no government listened to my wise and astute words, and so we are where we are. Trying to cram an extra ~10 million people into the same infrastructure capacity, having failed to do the building required to make that work.

I still prefer the option of building the infrastructure, but it seems pretty clear that if that isn't done - and there's precious little sign of it - that the alternative will be to scare up 10 million people to eject from the country. Needless to say that will be traumatic in more ways than one.

Foxy · 9:06AM

A really interesting finding, which may explain the drop in Total Fertility Rate. Having a child is far more time intensive for parents than it used to be:

https://bsky.app/profile/tobyn.bsky.social/post/3meq4etpgrs2d

And a lot of the shift is in men, who now often do more direct childcare than women did in the Seventies, though women also have greatly increased the amount of time in direct child care:

https://bsky.app/profile/tobyn.bsky.social/post/3meq4a5ozis2d

Sandpit · 9:06AM

TheScreamingEagles said:

Sandpit said:
Are we all Zimbabwean today?
I’d cheer for an Al Qaeda XI or France if they were playing the Aussies.

LOL at the run out to end it.

Dopermean · 9:06AM

BartholomewRoberts said:

bondegezou said:
FPT…

theProle said:

bondegezou said:

Cookie said:

Dopermean said:

williamglenn said:

OnlyLivingBoy said:

Cookie said:

OnlyLivingBoy said:

Theuniondivvie said:

Cookie said:

Roger said:
Ch 4 News gives Ratcliffe a well deserved hammering. He avoided £4 billion in tax in the last 5 years lived as a tax exile in Monaco and claimed we had 21 million immigrants when the figure was 3 million. Presumably they were paying the tax he was avoiding

There's a bit of a side-of-a-bus argument going on here. The left repeatedly making the point that 'only' 3 million immigrants have arrived in the last five years isn't the zinger they think it is.
Though otoh it highlights ‘hard headed businessman’ Ratcliffe is either speaking through his arse or is a dishonest propagandiser. Also that the right despite their opportunistic outrage is mostly responsible for that 3 million.

The reality is that average annual net migration was higher under the Tories than under Labour. And yet somehow this is all the fault of "the left". Lol.
I think you're misunderstanding. Noone's denying that the Tories were terrible at controlling immigration. But also, no-one's voting for the left to keep immigration down because they don't appear to consider it a problem. Saying "it's only 3 million in five years" only reinforces this view. And pushes more voters towards Reform i.e. the party which majors on immigration and wasn't the right wing party in government when immigration surged.
And this is bad news for Labour, because the more one right-wing party is clear of the other, the worse Labour do. And Reform is already the one in the lead.
Nobody is saying "it's only three million." They're saying that someone who doesn't know the difference between 3 million and 21 million is perhaps not very well informed on this topic.
As for Reform not being in power when immigration surged, they currently contain more of the Johnson cabinet than the Tories do, so I'm not sure that comment is even true.
Has it occurred to you that maybe these people keep screaming immigration because they want power and they've figured it's the easiest way to get it?
He didn't get the numbers wrong but the dates. He obviously meant to say that the population was 58 million in 2000 rather than in 2020.
LOL! on today's hot topic I think the good news is that it would be fairly easy for you to script AI to repost MAGA propaganda freeing you up to try and excuse Ratcliffe's racist missteps, probably there'd be enough of a productivity boost to take on Rupert Lowe or even the whole of Reform.
Bluntly, my reaction to Ratcliffe was "ill-informed berk". But Ratcliffe isn't up for election. And my reaction to the backlash, led by SKS, to Jim Ratcliffe was "you lot genuinely don't see the problem with immigration, do you? Occasionally you say you do - but it makes you feel bad to be on that side of the argument: and you're much more comfortable bashing anyone calking for less immigration than you are calling for less immigration yourself".
And I'm a comfortable middle class voter in a suburb with nice middle class immigrants. I'm not likely to be pushed to Reform. But voters in, say, Denton, or Gorton, might react differently when reminded about how many immigrants the country has grown by in the last five years. And they're not going to be bashing the Tories there because the Tories are almost completely absent.
Immigration under Starmer’s government has fallen hugely. It’s down 69% from the peak under Johnson and is still falling. Does that not demonstrate that he/they do care about reducing immigration?
It mostly demonstrates that the stuff Sunak did in a panic as the full horror of the Boriswave became apparent is having some effect. I'm not aware of anything significant the Labour government has done to further reduce legal migration.

But also, it's worth remembering that immigration was a massive issue before the Boriswave. What was Brexit about if not immigration (those with longer memories may recall the farce of Cameron's "Emergency Brake" agreement). The reality is that the the British public want zero net migration, and have consistently voted for lower migration at pretty much every plausible opportunity for at least the last 20 years. Don't get me wrong, it's better for it to be at 200k net than 800k net, but any politician trying to claim that current 200k net is OK because it's less that 800k net is likely to get very short shift. It's still at least 200k too high.

Taking a step back, imagine if we could snap our fingers and remove 20% of the population. Leaving aside the morals of what happens to them for a second, just think about how much better it would make the country. House prices would drop spectacularly. Trains wouldn't be nearly as overcrowded. The traffic situation on the roads would improve massively. Etc, etc.

That's what could have happened if we'd just left immigration at more or less zero for the last 25 years.
Ratcliffe is essentially right - we've allowed in way too many extra people, and really without any supporting infrastructure.

Far too late to turn the clock back now, and I'm not for a moment advocating chucking people out who are here legitimately, but it does demonstrate why we should be aiming for net emigration for the next 25 years rather than continuing net immigration.
OK, so most of that is wrong.

The Government doesn’t think 200k is OK. They’re aiming for lower immigration and the numbers are expected to drop further.

Let’s say we could remove 20% of the population, would this realise the utopia you imagine? No, of course not. The country would be 20% less productive. We would have 20% less of an economy. The trains would not stop being overcrowded, because there would be 20% less money to pay for them, so we’d have to run 20% fewer trains.

Populations support themselves. Populations generate wealth that then pays for the infrastructure they need. A smaller population can afford less infrastructure. If we’ve not invested enough in infrastructure, then the problem is not the size of the population, it’s our choice not to invest more in infrastructure.
You are forgetting the up-front capital costs.

Yes operationally it scales, which is why we neither need nor can't afford migration, we can adapt either way. Lump of labour absolutely is a fallacy, that is 100% correct.

However up-front capital costs do not scale and they take time as well.

From 2000 to 2025 there has been approximately a 17.7% growth in population but a mere 1.9% growth in roads (primarily unclassified/minor roads).

We have gone from 243 people per mile, to 281 people per mile.

To reverse that decline in relative capacity is going to need a hell of a lot of up-front capital costs and not just proportional maintenance costs.

Capital costs nobody in any party is offering.

For simplicity we'll make the assumption that the UK even with it's MAGA hat on, isn't going to deport many retired people in this 20% reduction.
So the 20% is coming from under 65 age groups.

Demographics of UK
0-14 ~18% > 13%
15-64 63% > 48%
65- 19% > 19%

So from 63% supporting 37% to 48% supporting 32%, that's a change in ratio of 1.7 to 1.5.

Anybody seeing a flaw in this plan for a life of milk and honey?

TheScreamingEagles · 9:06AM

Zimbabwe!

HYUFD · 9:07AM

rkrkrk said:
Is Ed M. on a redemption arc now? Do voters even remember him from 2015 or is that ancient history?
Is there a kind of nostalgia for pre-Brexit politics that he can tap into?

My sense is he's probably too geeky and nasal sounding to be a strong leader of the opposition. But if he were already PM and the economy was doing maybe he'd win re-election.

Well, Ed Miliband is popular with 2024 Labour voters still, he has a +13% rating with them on this month's Yougov ratings. He also doesn't do too badly with LDs on -6%.

Reform voters hate him though, he is on -76% with them and he only does a little better with Tories on -67%.

With Green voters he doesn't do that well but at -26% he does better than Greens -61% rating for Starmer

https://ygo-assets-websites-editorial-emea.yougov.net/documents/Internal_Favourability_260211.pdf

wooliedyed · 9:07AM

The Babbers have done it

LostPassword · 9:08AM

Nigelb said:
Moderna gives up on entirely on vaccine development for infectious diseases after the FDA decides it won't even review their flu vaccine - on which they've spent hundreds of millions, and which is more effective than existing vaccines.

“Moderna’s CEO announced the company will no longer invest in new Phase 3 vaccine trials for infectious diseases: ‘You cannot make a return on investment if you don’t have access to the U.S. market.’ Vaccines for Epstein-Barr virus, herpes, and shingles have been shelved.”
https://x.com/LeahLibresco/status/2021950503048065390

An effective Epstein-Barr vaccine might almost eliminate future cases of MS.

Trump health policy is as insane as he is.

In some ways this might be more consequential than a US invasion of Greenland would have been. RFK has managed to end the progress of medical science relating to vaccines that has, over the last 230 years, resulted in massive increases in health and life expectancy. This is real end of the era, remove the legions from Britannia, sort of stuff. You can mark the end of the Enlightenment to this event. Right here.

Battlebus · 9:09AM

Scott_xP said:
On topic

https://bsky.app/profile/petridishes.bsky.social/post/3mephlgvgws22

“But do we need to have numbers about it? Maybe we can just do a drawing. That gets the same idea across. A sad face, and people can draw their own conclusions. Numbers are so—”

Can't see drawings on betting slips catching on.

Dopermean · 9:11AM

eek said:

Stuartinromford said:

TSE said:

I find this decision incredibly sad, how else will we know Donald Trump is the greatest President in history?
I'm sure that the President will be happy to fill that gap.

The more worrying thing... Would Gallup have done this if they thought that MAGA's grip on power was temporary?

They also seem to have quietly done it in 2018 - for similar, keep the president happy reasons.

Presumably when/if the pendulum swings back they will be under pressure from the same people to report Presidential approval.

Foxy · 9:14AM

Nigelb said:
Moderna gives up on entirely on vaccine development for infectious diseases after the FDA decides it won't even review their flu vaccine - on which they've spent hundreds of millions, and which is more effective than existing vaccines.

“Moderna’s CEO announced the company will no longer invest in new Phase 3 vaccine trials for infectious diseases: ‘You cannot make a return on investment if you don’t have access to the U.S. market.’ Vaccines for Epstein-Barr virus, herpes, and shingles have been shelved.”
https://x.com/LeahLibresco/status/2021950503048065390

An effective Epstein-Barr vaccine might almost eliminate future cases of MS.

Trump health policy is as insane as he is.

RFK Jr: I'm not scared of a germ. I used to snort cocaine off of toilet seats.

https://bsky.app/profile/factpostnews.bsky.social/post/3meoq2jnrgb2z

TheScreamingEagles · 9:15AM

England play Scotland on both the cricket and rugby, so I best keep my gob shut about the Aussies.

HYUFD · 9:15AM

'Ashley Roberts has apologised after mistakenly announcing Dick Van Dyke’s death live on air.

The Pussycat Dolls star confused the Mary Poppins star with Dawson’s creek actor James Van Der Beek during Heart FM’s breakfast show on Thursday (12 February).

Van Der Beek’s family announced his death at the age of 48, on Wednesday (11 February), following a bowel cancer diagnosis.

Announcing the news on Heart Breakfast, the Pussycat Dolls singer incorrectly stated that the Mary Poppins actor, who recently turned 100, had died.

Her co-host Jamie Theakston immediately jumped in to correct her: “If you're going to do a sensitive moment, if you're going to do an obituary, you can't just say Dick Van Dyke.”

Roberts quickly apologised for her mistake, confirming that Van Dyke is still very much alive.'
https://www.independent.co.uk/tv/culture/dick-van-dyke-dead-ashley-roberts-blunder-b2919108.html

Malmesbury · 9:16AM

Was at the UCL 200th Anniversary event yesterday.

I saw some election literature, blaming pensioners for everything...

carnforth · 9:17AM

HYUFD said:
'Ashley Roberts has apologised after mistakenly announcing Dick Van Dyke’s death live on air.

The Pussycat Dolls star confused the Mary Poppins star with Dawson’s creek actor James Van Der Beek during Heart FM’s breakfast show on Thursday (12 February).

Van Der Beek’s family announced his death at the age of 48, on Wednesday (11 February), following a bowel cancer diagnosis.

Announcing the news on Heart Breakfast, the Pussycat Dolls singer incorrectly stated that the Mary Poppins actor, who recently turned 100, had died.

Her co-host Jamie Theakston immediately jumped in to correct her: “If you're going to do a sensitive moment, if you're going to do an obituary, you can't just say Dick Van Dyke.”

Roberts quickly apologised for her mistake, confirming that Van Dyke is still very much alive.'
https://www.independent.co.uk/tv/culture/dick-van-dyke-dead-ashley-roberts-blunder-b2919108.html

Abe Vigoda rolls in his grave.

Foxy · 9:19AM

Malmesbury said:
Was at the UCL 200th Anniversary event yesterday.

I saw some election literature, blaming pensioners for everything...

It is an interesting manifesto, and the economic benefits of peace over war undeniable, but I cannot see a mention of pensioners.

SandyRentool · 9:21AM

Not raining here this morning.

Snowing here this morning.

Dopermean · 9:21AM

Sandpit said:

TheScreamingEagles said:

Sandpit said:
Are we all Zimbabwean today?
I’d cheer for an Al Qaeda XI or France if they were playing the Aussies.
LOL at the run out to end it.

Annoyingly the commentary is unavailable to listen back to on BBC sounds, must be some irritating contractual clause

Sweeney74 · 9:22AM

TheScreamingEagles said:
England play Scotland on both the cricket and rugby, so I best keep my gob shut about the Aussies.

Did you read Courtney Lawes piece in The Times? England obsession holds Scotland back — no wonder they never win anything

Ratters · 9:23AM

Sandpit said:
OFCOM v 4Chan could get interesting.

https://x.com/dshensmith/status/2022008086517453122

I mean, the arguments as to why Ofcom has no jurisdiction over 4Chan certainly also apply as to why Florida has no jurisdiction over the BBC. Even more so for the BBC given they geoblock iPlayer so people in the US couldn't access it if they tried.

I suspect the correct punishment from Ofcom would be to tell UK internet providers to block 4Chan if it is not abiding by UK law or accepting its jurisdiction.

(I appreciate people who use 4Chan will be savvy with VPNs so will have little impact, but just from a principle perspective).

Malmesbury · 9:24AM

LostPassword said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

bondegezou said:
FPT…

theProle said:

bondegezou said:

Cookie said:

Dopermean said:

williamglenn said:

OnlyLivingBoy said:

Cookie said:

OnlyLivingBoy said:

Theuniondivvie said:

Cookie said:

Roger said:
Ch 4 News gives Ratcliffe a well deserved hammering. He avoided £4 billion in tax in the last 5 years lived as a tax exile in Monaco and claimed we had 21 million immigrants when the figure was 3 million. Presumably they were paying the tax he was avoiding

There's a bit of a side-of-a-bus argument going on here. The left repeatedly making the point that 'only' 3 million immigrants have arrived in the last five years isn't the zinger they think it is.
Though otoh it highlights ‘hard headed businessman’ Ratcliffe is either speaking through his arse or is a dishonest propagandiser. Also that the right despite their opportunistic outrage is mostly responsible for that 3 million.

The reality is that average annual net migration was higher under the Tories than under Labour. And yet somehow this is all the fault of "the left". Lol.
I think you're misunderstanding. Noone's denying that the Tories were terrible at controlling immigration. But also, no-one's voting for the left to keep immigration down because they don't appear to consider it a problem. Saying "it's only 3 million in five years" only reinforces this view. And pushes more voters towards Reform i.e. the party which majors on immigration and wasn't the right wing party in government when immigration surged.
And this is bad news for Labour, because the more one right-wing party is clear of the other, the worse Labour do. And Reform is already the one in the lead.
Nobody is saying "it's only three million." They're saying that someone who doesn't know the difference between 3 million and 21 million is perhaps not very well informed on this topic.
As for Reform not being in power when immigration surged, they currently contain more of the Johnson cabinet than the Tories do, so I'm not sure that comment is even true.
Has it occurred to you that maybe these people keep screaming immigration because they want power and they've figured it's the easiest way to get it?
He didn't get the numbers wrong but the dates. He obviously meant to say that the population was 58 million in 2000 rather than in 2020.
LOL! on today's hot topic I think the good news is that it would be fairly easy for you to script AI to repost MAGA propaganda freeing you up to try and excuse Ratcliffe's racist missteps, probably there'd be enough of a productivity boost to take on Rupert Lowe or even the whole of Reform.
Bluntly, my reaction to Ratcliffe was "ill-informed berk". But Ratcliffe isn't up for election. And my reaction to the backlash, led by SKS, to Jim Ratcliffe was "you lot genuinely don't see the problem with immigration, do you? Occasionally you say you do - but it makes you feel bad to be on that side of the argument: and you're much more comfortable bashing anyone calking for less immigration than you are calling for less immigration yourself".
And I'm a comfortable middle class voter in a suburb with nice middle class immigrants. I'm not likely to be pushed to Reform. But voters in, say, Denton, or Gorton, might react differently when reminded about how many immigrants the country has grown by in the last five years. And they're not going to be bashing the Tories there because the Tories are almost completely absent.
Immigration under Starmer’s government has fallen hugely. It’s down 69% from the peak under Johnson and is still falling. Does that not demonstrate that he/they do care about reducing immigration?
It mostly demonstrates that the stuff Sunak did in a panic as the full horror of the Boriswave became apparent is having some effect. I'm not aware of anything significant the Labour government has done to further reduce legal migration.

But also, it's worth remembering that immigration was a massive issue before the Boriswave. What was Brexit about if not immigration (those with longer memories may recall the farce of Cameron's "Emergency Brake" agreement). The reality is that the the British public want zero net migration, and have consistently voted for lower migration at pretty much every plausible opportunity for at least the last 20 years. Don't get me wrong, it's better for it to be at 200k net than 800k net, but any politician trying to claim that current 200k net is OK because it's less that 800k net is likely to get very short shift. It's still at least 200k too high.

Taking a step back, imagine if we could snap our fingers and remove 20% of the population. Leaving aside the morals of what happens to them for a second, just think about how much better it would make the country. House prices would drop spectacularly. Trains wouldn't be nearly as overcrowded. The traffic situation on the roads would improve massively. Etc, etc.

That's what could have happened if we'd just left immigration at more or less zero for the last 25 years.
Ratcliffe is essentially right - we've allowed in way too many extra people, and really without any supporting infrastructure.

Far too late to turn the clock back now, and I'm not for a moment advocating chucking people out who are here legitimately, but it does demonstrate why we should be aiming for net emigration for the next 25 years rather than continuing net immigration.
OK, so most of that is wrong.

The Government doesn’t think 200k is OK. They’re aiming for lower immigration and the numbers are expected to drop further.

Let’s say we could remove 20% of the population, would this realise the utopia you imagine? No, of course not. The country would be 20% less productive. We would have 20% less of an economy. The trains would not stop being overcrowded, because there would be 20% less money to pay for them, so we’d have to run 20% fewer trains.

Populations support themselves. Populations generate wealth that then pays for the infrastructure they need. A smaller population can afford less infrastructure. If we’ve not invested enough in infrastructure, then the problem is not the size of the population, it’s our choice not to invest more in infrastructure.
You are forgetting the up-front capital costs.

Yes operationally it scales, which is why we neither need nor can't afford migration, we can adapt either way. Lump of labour absolutely is a fallacy, that is 100% correct.

However up-front capital costs do not scale and they take time as well.

From 2000 to 2025 there has been approximately a 17.7% growth in population but a mere 1.9% growth in roads (primarily unclassified/minor roads).

We have gone from 243 people per mile, to 281 people per mile.

To reverse that decline in relative capacity is going to need a hell of a lot of up-front capital costs and not just proportional maintenance costs.

Capital costs nobody in any party is offering.
This is kinda what I was arguing on here back in whenever, 2006 or something, when we were talking about immigration from the A8 countries. I said that I didn't think it would be as much of an issue if the government would build the infrastructure - schools, hospitals, council houses, railways, electricity generation, water supply, (and, yes, roads I guess) - that a higher population would require. Whether immigrants queue-jumped on council house waiting lists would be a lot less incendiary if the waiting time for a council house was a few months rather than a few decades.

Unfortunately, no government listened to my wise and astute words, and so we are where we are. Trying to cram an extra ~10 million people into the same infrastructure capacity, having failed to do the building required to make that work.

I still prefer the option of building the infrastructure, but it seems pretty clear that if that isn't done - and there's precious little sign of it - that the alternative will be to scare up 10 million people to eject from the country. Needless to say that will be traumatic in more ways than one.

Many years back, the banks had a go at moving desktops to Virtual Machines (VMs).

This is the system where you log into a remote server farm - it looks like you are connecting to a normal Windows machine (generally).

The benefit is that the machine on the actual desktop you login with can be old, slow etc - just needs to display the remote. In addition you can login remotely (WFH) and have everything exactly as out was when you were in the office. No laptop to lug about, lose etc.

Anyway, you could run x VMs on your amount of hardware in the server farm. But, as more people moved over to the new system, the bean counters tried to push back - why not run 2x on y? It would work, but be slower.... then 3x on y.....

Several people got promotions based on "more users, declining cost per seat"

In the end, in several banks, the whole thing became unusable. Whole departments bought desktops/laptops in the old style.

VMs came back later - the server side hardware is cheaper now, and they learnt their lesson. No more squeezing.

The same patterns repeat throughout life

wooliedyed · 9:25AM

Wales polling for the Senedd from More In Common

🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿New Senedd voting intention. Reform UK holds a 7-point lead over Plaid, while Labour is in third.
➡️ REF UK 31% (+29)
🌼 PLAID 24% (+4)
🌹 LAB 20% (–20)
🌳 CON 13% (–13)
🔶 LIB DEM 6% (+1)
🌍 GREEN 5% (+3)
30/1 - 10/2 N=806 (16+) changes w 2021 constituency vote

Malmesbury · 9:26AM

Foxy said:

Nigelb said:
Moderna gives up on entirely on vaccine development for infectious diseases after the FDA decides it won't even review their flu vaccine - on which they've spent hundreds of millions, and which is more effective than existing vaccines.

“Moderna’s CEO announced the company will no longer invest in new Phase 3 vaccine trials for infectious diseases: ‘You cannot make a return on investment if you don’t have access to the U.S. market.’ Vaccines for Epstein-Barr virus, herpes, and shingles have been shelved.”
https://x.com/LeahLibresco/status/2021950503048065390

An effective Epstein-Barr vaccine might almost eliminate future cases of MS.

Trump health policy is as insane as he is.
RFK Jr: I'm not scared of a germ. I used to snort cocaine off of toilet seats.

https://bsky.app/profile/factpostnews.bsky.social/post/3meoq2jnrgb2z

Which gentleman of this parish has been know to advocate the phrase "If someone tells you who they are, believe them?"

The statement of RFK, with regard to the usage of water closets, is the best summation of the man I have heard.

Dopermean · 9:27AM

LostPassword said:

Nigelb said:
Moderna gives up on entirely on vaccine development for infectious diseases after the FDA decides it won't even review their flu vaccine - on which they've spent hundreds of millions, and which is more effective than existing vaccines.

“Moderna’s CEO announced the company will no longer invest in new Phase 3 vaccine trials for infectious diseases: ‘You cannot make a return on investment if you don’t have access to the U.S. market.’ Vaccines for Epstein-Barr virus, herpes, and shingles have been shelved.”
https://x.com/LeahLibresco/status/2021950503048065390

An effective Epstein-Barr vaccine might almost eliminate future cases of MS.

Trump health policy is as insane as he is.
In some ways this might be more consequential than a US invasion of Greenland would have been. RFK has managed to end the progress of medical science relating to vaccines that has, over the last 230 years, resulted in massive increases in health and life expectancy. This is real end of the era, remove the legions from Britannia, sort of stuff. You can mark the end of the Enlightenment to this event. Right here.

Best get boosting our immune systems by snorting coke off pub toilet seats

bondegezou · 9:28AM

Dopermean said:

LostPassword said:

Nigelb said:
Moderna gives up on entirely on vaccine development for infectious diseases after the FDA decides it won't even review their flu vaccine - on which they've spent hundreds of millions, and which is more effective than existing vaccines.

“Moderna’s CEO announced the company will no longer invest in new Phase 3 vaccine trials for infectious diseases: ‘You cannot make a return on investment if you don’t have access to the U.S. market.’ Vaccines for Epstein-Barr virus, herpes, and shingles have been shelved.”
https://x.com/LeahLibresco/status/2021950503048065390

An effective Epstein-Barr vaccine might almost eliminate future cases of MS.

Trump health policy is as insane as he is.
In some ways this might be more consequential than a US invasion of Greenland would have been. RFK has managed to end the progress of medical science relating to vaccines that has, over the last 230 years, resulted in massive increases in health and life expectancy. This is real end of the era, remove the legions from Britannia, sort of stuff. You can mark the end of the Enlightenment to this event. Right here.
Best get boosting our immune systems by snorting coke off pub toilet seats

Do I get a prescription for the cocaine and then have to go to a designated NHS pub toilet seat? I bet there's a waiting list...

Malmesbury · 9:30AM

Ratters said:

Sandpit said:
OFCOM v 4Chan could get interesting.

https://x.com/dshensmith/status/2022008086517453122
I mean, the arguments as to why Ofcom has no jurisdiction over 4Chan certainly also apply as to why Florida has no jurisdiction over the BBC. Even more so for the BBC given they geoblock iPlayer so people in the US couldn't access it if they tried.

I suspect the correct punishment from Ofcom would be to tell UK internet providers to block 4Chan if it is not abiding by UK law or accepting its jurisdiction.

(I appreciate people who use 4Chan will be savvy with VPNs so will have little impact, but just from a principle perspective).

I understand that OFCOM vs 4Chan, is supposed to be the trial run. By OFCOM. Leading to exactly this - demands for ISPs to block 4Chan. Which will mean an up-to-date list system of blocked services for UK ISPs will be managed by OFCOM (they hope). One suggestion is that it will be automatic - OFCOM will provide the list in machine readable form (JSON?) and the ISPs will be expected to implement it with instant updates.

The next issue will be ISPs. Guess which ISP will prove an issue?

MattW · 9:30AM

Foxy said:

Nigelb said:
Moderna gives up on entirely on vaccine development for infectious diseases after the FDA decides it won't even review their flu vaccine - on which they've spent hundreds of millions, and which is more effective than existing vaccines.

“Moderna’s CEO announced the company will no longer invest in new Phase 3 vaccine trials for infectious diseases: ‘You cannot make a return on investment if you don’t have access to the U.S. market.’ Vaccines for Epstein-Barr virus, herpes, and shingles have been shelved.”
https://x.com/LeahLibresco/status/2021950503048065390

An effective Epstein-Barr vaccine might almost eliminate future cases of MS.

Trump health policy is as insane as he is.
RFK Jr: I'm not scared of a germ. I used to snort cocaine off of toilet seats.

https://bsky.app/profile/factpostnews.bsky.social/post/3meoq2jnrgb2z

Is that AI?

Malmesbury · 9:31AM

Foxy said:

Malmesbury said:
Was at the UCL 200th Anniversary event yesterday.

I saw some election literature, blaming pensioners for everything...

It is an interesting manifesto, and the economic benefits of peace over war undeniable, but I cannot see a mention of pensioners.

My apologies - wrong leaflet

EDIT - any idea what "***'s" means?

bondegezou · 9:31AM

MattW said:

Foxy said:

Nigelb said:
Moderna gives up on entirely on vaccine development for infectious diseases after the FDA decides it won't even review their flu vaccine - on which they've spent hundreds of millions, and which is more effective than existing vaccines.

“Moderna’s CEO announced the company will no longer invest in new Phase 3 vaccine trials for infectious diseases: ‘You cannot make a return on investment if you don’t have access to the U.S. market.’ Vaccines for Epstein-Barr virus, herpes, and shingles have been shelved.”
https://x.com/LeahLibresco/status/2021950503048065390

An effective Epstein-Barr vaccine might almost eliminate future cases of MS.

Trump health policy is as insane as he is.
RFK Jr: I'm not scared of a germ. I used to snort cocaine off of toilet seats.

https://bsky.app/profile/factpostnews.bsky.social/post/3meoq2jnrgb2z
Is that AI?

https://news.sky.com/story/robert-f-kennedy-jr-admits-he-used-to-snort-cocaine-off-toilet-seats-13506969

Nigelb · 9:32AM

LostPassword said:

Nigelb said:
Moderna gives up on entirely on vaccine development for infectious diseases after the FDA decides it won't even review their flu vaccine - on which they've spent hundreds of millions, and which is more effective than existing vaccines.

“Moderna’s CEO announced the company will no longer invest in new Phase 3 vaccine trials for infectious diseases: ‘You cannot make a return on investment if you don’t have access to the U.S. market.’ Vaccines for Epstein-Barr virus, herpes, and shingles have been shelved.”
https://x.com/LeahLibresco/status/2021950503048065390

An effective Epstein-Barr vaccine might almost eliminate future cases of MS.

Trump health policy is as insane as he is.
In some ways this might be more consequential than a US invasion of Greenland would have been. RFK has managed to end the progress of medical science relating to vaccines that has, over the last 230 years, resulted in massive increases in health and life expectancy. This is real end of the era, remove the legions from Britannia, sort of stuff. You can mark the end of the Enlightenment to this event. Right here.

Trump has certainly done massive damage to US science, but he's not going to destroy it. The consequences will be more for the US position in the world.
Europe and/or China will pick up some of the slack - Germany after all has Biontech.

MattW · 9:33AM

Sandpit said:

MattW said:
An interesting straw in the wind on oversized vehicles; a few Councils considering preventing oversized vehicles (5m+) from blocking up their car parks, before the problem gets out of hand.

Pedestrians killed in collisions in the USA has almost doubled between 2009 and 2024 (~4000 to ~7500) mainly on the back of increasing use of "Light Trucks".

I'm interested that it generally seems to have public support.

(Mine hardly fits much of the time and that is 4.86m long.)

https://www.mirror.co.uk/money/cars-hit-april-2026-760-36650395
The US issue is primarily that legislation had made cars more and more expensive, compared to light trucks, in the last couple of decades, making trucks more popular as everyday transport for the working classes.

Trump is also rolling back the start/stop feature mandate on cars, which is very unpopular because it defaults by law to being on every time you start the car.
https://x.com/langmanvince/status/2022064655523623088

No - I think it's regulatory capture pure and simple distorting the market for the last 50 years or so, starting with differing regulations for large and smaller vehicles in the CAFE (Corporate Average Fuel Economy) regulations.

They have lower safety standards, and so give higher margins, and large ones are tax deductible whilst small ones are not. And many more rules.

Then any number of protectionist measures prevent USA citizens accessing decent pickups and SUVs imported from abroad.

Theuniondivvie · 9:34AM

MattW said:

Foxy said:

Nigelb said:
Moderna gives up on entirely on vaccine development for infectious diseases after the FDA decides it won't even review their flu vaccine - on which they've spent hundreds of millions, and which is more effective than existing vaccines.

“Moderna’s CEO announced the company will no longer invest in new Phase 3 vaccine trials for infectious diseases: ‘You cannot make a return on investment if you don’t have access to the U.S. market.’ Vaccines for Epstein-Barr virus, herpes, and shingles have been shelved.”
https://x.com/LeahLibresco/status/2021950503048065390

An effective Epstein-Barr vaccine might almost eliminate future cases of MS.

Trump health policy is as insane as he is.
RFK Jr: I'm not scared of a germ. I used to snort cocaine off of toilet seats.

https://bsky.app/profile/factpostnews.bsky.social/post/3meoq2jnrgb2z
Is that AI?

Yes (Authentic Imbecility).

kinabalu · 9:34AM

Selebian said:
I do understand this decision. The cost of computing power to detect and handle such a small number as presidential approval must have become prohibitive.

Yep. And it's going to be replaced with a more sophisticated system that can handle imaginary numbers. So it's all good.

HYUFD · 9:35AM

wooliedyed said:
Wales polling for the Senedd from More In Common

🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿New Senedd voting intention. Reform UK holds a 7-point lead over Plaid, while Labour is in third.
➡️ REF UK 31% (+29)
🌼 PLAID 24% (+4)
🌹 LAB 20% (–20)
🌳 CON 13% (–13)
🔶 LIB DEM 6% (+1)
🌍 GREEN 5% (+3)
30/1 - 10/2 N=806 (16+) changes w 2021 constituency vote

Very good poll for Reform showing them doing as well now in Wales as they are in England and well ahead of Plaid and Labour

Selebian · 9:35AM

Not sure if we've done this, but AI agent wrote a pissy blog post when matploblib pull request was rejected (as against policy, being AI)
https://theshamblog.com/an-ai-agent-published-a-hit-piece-on-me/

We're going to drown in this shit and the points made are valid - a new vector to hurt open source projects by drowning them in crappy PRs and also potential, as the maintainer notes, to intimidate, blackmail and damage the reputations of real people.

Not sure what the solution is. German-style impressum on web pages? But only effective if implemented very widely and there are valid cases to remain anonymous, of course.

Foss · 9:36AM

Malmesbury said:

Ratters said:

Sandpit said:
OFCOM v 4Chan could get interesting.

https://x.com/dshensmith/status/2022008086517453122
I mean, the arguments as to why Ofcom has no jurisdiction over 4Chan certainly also apply as to why Florida has no jurisdiction over the BBC. Even more so for the BBC given they geoblock iPlayer so people in the US couldn't access it if they tried.

I suspect the correct punishment from Ofcom would be to tell UK internet providers to block 4Chan if it is not abiding by UK law or accepting its jurisdiction.

(I appreciate people who use 4Chan will be savvy with VPNs so will have little impact, but just from a principle perspective).
I understand that OFCOM vs 4Chan, is supposed to be the trial run. By OFCOM. Leading to exactly this - demands for ISPs to block 4Chan. Which will mean an up-to-date list system of blocked services for UK ISPs will be managed by OFCOM (they hope). One suggestion is that it will be automatic - OFCOM will provide the list in machine readable form (JSON?) and the ISPs will be expected to implement it with instant updates.

The next issue will be ISPs. Guess which ISP will prove an issue?

Andrews & Arnold?

The tech side of that has been there for two decades with what was called Cleanfeed.

HYUFD · 9:37AM

'The Bangladesh Nationalist Party, or BNP, has secured more than a two-thirds majority, which marks a dramatic turnaround for its leader Tarique Rahman, who is on track to become the next prime minister'
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/cd03znje072t

MattW · 9:38AM

bondegezou said:

MattW said:

Foxy said:

Nigelb said:
Moderna gives up on entirely on vaccine development for infectious diseases after the FDA decides it won't even review their flu vaccine - on which they've spent hundreds of millions, and which is more effective than existing vaccines.

“Moderna’s CEO announced the company will no longer invest in new Phase 3 vaccine trials for infectious diseases: ‘You cannot make a return on investment if you don’t have access to the U.S. market.’ Vaccines for Epstein-Barr virus, herpes, and shingles have been shelved.”
https://x.com/LeahLibresco/status/2021950503048065390

An effective Epstein-Barr vaccine might almost eliminate future cases of MS.

Trump health policy is as insane as he is.
RFK Jr: I'm not scared of a germ. I used to snort cocaine off of toilet seats.

https://bsky.app/profile/factpostnews.bsky.social/post/3meoq2jnrgb2z
Is that AI?
https://news.sky.com/story/robert-f-kennedy-jr-admits-he-used-to-snort-cocaine-off-toilet-seats-13506969

Bloody hell.

Malmesbury · 9:38AM

Theuniondivvie said:

MattW said:

Foxy said:

Nigelb said:
Moderna gives up on entirely on vaccine development for infectious diseases after the FDA decides it won't even review their flu vaccine - on which they've spent hundreds of millions, and which is more effective than existing vaccines.

“Moderna’s CEO announced the company will no longer invest in new Phase 3 vaccine trials for infectious diseases: ‘You cannot make a return on investment if you don’t have access to the U.S. market.’ Vaccines for Epstein-Barr virus, herpes, and shingles have been shelved.”
https://x.com/LeahLibresco/status/2021950503048065390

An effective Epstein-Barr vaccine might almost eliminate future cases of MS.

Trump health policy is as insane as he is.
RFK Jr: I'm not scared of a germ. I used to snort cocaine off of toilet seats.

https://bsky.app/profile/factpostnews.bsky.social/post/3meoq2jnrgb2z
Is that AI?
Yes (Authentic Imbecility).

My father used to ask people such Daniel Dennett, at philosophy conferences, why no one was exploring the field of Artificial Stupidity.

Think he called it, decades ahead of the curve.

HYUFD · 9:38AM

'US President Donald Trump has reversed a key Obama-era scientific ruling that underpins all federal actions on curbing planet-warming gases.

The so-called 2009 "endangerment finding" concluded that a range of greenhouse gases were a threat to public health. It's become the legal bedrock of federal efforts to rein in emissions, especially in vehicles.

The White House called the reversal the "largest deregulation in American history", saying it would make cars cheaper, bringing down costs for automakers by $2,400 per vehicle.

Environmental groups say the move is by far the most significant rollback on climate change yet attempted and are set to challenge it in the courts.'
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cn0zdd7yl4vo

wooliedyed · 9:39AM

HYUFD said:

wooliedyed said:
Wales polling for the Senedd from More In Common

🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿New Senedd voting intention. Reform UK holds a 7-point lead over Plaid, while Labour is in third.
➡️ REF UK 31% (+29)
🌼 PLAID 24% (+4)
🌹 LAB 20% (–20)
🌳 CON 13% (–13)
🔶 LIB DEM 6% (+1)
🌍 GREEN 5% (+3)
30/1 - 10/2 N=806 (16+) changes w 2021 constituency vote
Very good poll for Reform showing them doing as well now in Wales as they are in England and well ahead of Plaid and Labour

For Reference, since MiC last senedd poll in early July 2025 the changes are

Ref +3
Plaid -2
Lab -3
Con +3
LD -1
Grn +1

Would probably generate a Plaid government backed by Labour and the 3 or 4 LD/Green members with Ref plus Con about 3 short (fag packet calcs)

Selebian · 9:40AM

Nigelb said:
Moderna gives up on entirely on vaccine development for infectious diseases after the FDA decides it won't even review their flu vaccine - on which they've spent hundreds of millions, and which is more effective than existing vaccines.

“Moderna’s CEO announced the company will no longer invest in new Phase 3 vaccine trials for infectious diseases: ‘You cannot make a return on investment if you don’t have access to the U.S. market.’ Vaccines for Epstein-Barr virus, herpes, and shingles have been shelved.”
https://x.com/LeahLibresco/status/2021950503048065390

An effective Epstein-Barr vaccine might almost eliminate future cases of MS.

Trump health policy is as insane as he is.

Telling about not getting a return without US access. The insane US drug-buying policies, lack of competition and negotiation etc has actually been subsidising pharma in the rest of the world?

Cookie · 9:40AM

Sweeney74 said:

TheScreamingEagles said:
England play Scotland on both the cricket and rugby, so I best keep my gob shut about the Aussies.
Did you read Courtney Lawes piece in The Times? England obsession holds Scotland back — no wonder they never win anything

On which subject, I liked this, which popped up on my fb feed today:

Agree with all of this. One of the things which drew me to rugby* was that there wasn't the 'love my team-hate everyone else' that there is with football. I wouldn't want to lose that.

*of course, here I am as guilty as everyone else of ascribing virtues to rugby which are not in fact unique to rugby but common to almost all sports which aren't football.

Nigelb · 9:40AM

Malmesbury said:

Foxy said:

Malmesbury said:
Was at the UCL 200th Anniversary event yesterday.

I saw some election literature, blaming pensioners for everything...

It is an interesting manifesto, and the economic benefits of peace over war undeniable, but I cannot see a mention of pensioners.

My apologies - wrong leaflet

EDIT - any idea what "***'s" means?

Whiggish propaganda !

Sean_F · 9:43AM

Theuniondivvie said:

MattW said:

Foxy said:

Nigelb said:
Moderna gives up on entirely on vaccine development for infectious diseases after the FDA decides it won't even review their flu vaccine - on which they've spent hundreds of millions, and which is more effective than existing vaccines.

“Moderna’s CEO announced the company will no longer invest in new Phase 3 vaccine trials for infectious diseases: ‘You cannot make a return on investment if you don’t have access to the U.S. market.’ Vaccines for Epstein-Barr virus, herpes, and shingles have been shelved.”
https://x.com/LeahLibresco/status/2021950503048065390

An effective Epstein-Barr vaccine might almost eliminate future cases of MS.

Trump health policy is as insane as he is.
RFK Jr: I'm not scared of a germ. I used to snort cocaine off of toilet seats.

https://bsky.app/profile/factpostnews.bsky.social/post/3meoq2jnrgb2z
Is that AI?
Yes (Authentic Imbecility).

Protective Stupidity.

Malmesbury · 9:43AM

MattW said:

Sandpit said:

MattW said:
An interesting straw in the wind on oversized vehicles; a few Councils considering preventing oversized vehicles (5m+) from blocking up their car parks, before the problem gets out of hand.

Pedestrians killed in collisions in the USA has almost doubled between 2009 and 2024 (~4000 to ~7500) mainly on the back of increasing use of "Light Trucks".

I'm interested that it generally seems to have public support.

(Mine hardly fits much of the time and that is 4.86m long.)

https://www.mirror.co.uk/money/cars-hit-april-2026-760-36650395
The US issue is primarily that legislation had made cars more and more expensive, compared to light trucks, in the last couple of decades, making trucks more popular as everyday transport for the working classes.

Trump is also rolling back the start/stop feature mandate on cars, which is very unpopular because it defaults by law to being on every time you start the car.
https://x.com/langmanvince/status/2022064655523623088
No - I think it's regulatory capture pure and simple distorting the market for the last 50 years or so, starting with differing regulations for large and smaller vehicles in the CAFE (Corporate Average Fuel Economy) regulations.

They have lower safety standards, and so give higher margins, and large ones are tax deductible whilst small ones are not. And many more rules.

Then any number of protectionist measures prevent USA citizens accessing decent pickups and SUVs imported from abroad.

The US truck thing is a classic example of how US legislation loves to create weird loopholes, which then become The Only Possible Way of Doing Things. See the Car Stealership system in most US states.

Regulating Light* Trucks like cars in the US - it would be easier to introduce firearms licensing.

A number of builders, in the UK, are getting pissed off at the way that prats have taken to long cab pickups - they are actually a useful trade vehicle for some jobs. But the prats using them as run-about cars will (as above) get them restricted.

*ha ha ha

Battlebus · 9:43AM

Selebian said:
Not sure if we've done this, but AI agent wrote a pissy blog post when matploblib pull request was rejected (as against policy, being AI)
https://theshamblog.com/an-ai-agent-published-a-hit-piece-on-me/

We're going to drown in this shit and the points made are valid - a new vector to hurt open source projects by drowning them in crappy PRs and also potential, as the maintainer notes, to intimidate, blackmail and damage the reputations of real people.

Not sure what the solution is. German-style impressum on web pages? But only effective if implemented very widely and there are valid cases to remain anonymous, of course.

I put this through Google Translate but it failed.

Malmesbury · 9:44AM

HYUFD said:
'The Bangladesh Nationalist Party, or BNP, has secured more than a two-thirds majority, which marks a dramatic turnaround for its leader Tarique Rahman, who is on track to become the next prime minister'
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/cd03znje072t

Please God, can the Bangladesh Nationalist Party establish a UK branch and start contesting by-elections?

BNP vs BNP fights would be awesome.

MattW · 9:44AM

Today's off topic question.

(I suspect this is for @Leon .)

Youtube ads are currently advising me that if I wear bamboo underpants, they will be stroked, then stolen, by my GF. Does this happen?

TBF Youtube ads have previously advised me that my teeth can be made entirely uncrooked at minimal cost in a period of months, that standing on a rug with a metal mesh in it will make Type 2 diabetes vanish, and that 7 minutes a day of relaxed Tai-Chi will give me a six pack in about 30 days.

(My cast iron rule, I'm sure as almost all PBers, is: never buy anything advertised on Youtube.)

Foss · 9:47AM

MattW said:
Today's off topic question.

(I suspect this is for @Leon .)

Youtube ads are currently advising me that if I wear bamboo underpants, they will be stroked, then stolen, by my GF. Does this happen?

TBF Youtube ads have previously advised me that my teeth can be made entirely uncrooked at minimal cost in a period of months, that standing on a rug with a metal mesh in it will make Type 2 diabetes vanish, and that 7 minutes a day of relaxed Tai-Chi will give me a six pack in about 30 days.

(My cast iron rule, I'm sure as almost all PBers, is: never buy anything advertised on Youtube.)

YouTube ad-blocking is a medical good.

carnforth · 9:49AM

Selebian said:
Not sure if we've done this, but AI agent wrote a pissy blog post when matploblib pull request was rejected (as against policy, being AI)
https://theshamblog.com/an-ai-agent-published-a-hit-piece-on-me/

We're going to drown in this shit and the points made are valid - a new vector to hurt open source projects by drowning them in crappy PRs and also potential, as the maintainer notes, to intimidate, blackmail and damage the reputations of real people.

Not sure what the solution is. German-style impressum on web pages? But only effective if implemented very widely and there are valid cases to remain anonymous, of course.

I had a fun one last week. I got an enquiry email from a new customer asking a common question. I answered it. Then, this email was replied to with a spam email trying to sell me something

So an AI read my website, came up with a fake enquiry to hook me into an email conversation, then tried to sell me something...

LostPassword · 9:49AM

Malmesbury said:

LostPassword said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

bondegezou said:
FPT…

theProle said:

bondegezou said:

Cookie said:

Dopermean said:

williamglenn said:

OnlyLivingBoy said:

Cookie said:

OnlyLivingBoy said:

Theuniondivvie said:

Cookie said:

Roger said:
Ch 4 News gives Ratcliffe a well deserved hammering. He avoided £4 billion in tax in the last 5 years lived as a tax exile in Monaco and claimed we had 21 million immigrants when the figure was 3 million. Presumably they were paying the tax he was avoiding

There's a bit of a side-of-a-bus argument going on here. The left repeatedly making the point that 'only' 3 million immigrants have arrived in the last five years isn't the zinger they think it is.
Though otoh it highlights ‘hard headed businessman’ Ratcliffe is either speaking through his arse or is a dishonest propagandiser. Also that the right despite their opportunistic outrage is mostly responsible for that 3 million.

The reality is that average annual net migration was higher under the Tories than under Labour. And yet somehow this is all the fault of "the left". Lol.
I think you're misunderstanding. Noone's denying that the Tories were terrible at controlling immigration. But also, no-one's voting for the left to keep immigration down because they don't appear to consider it a problem. Saying "it's only 3 million in five years" only reinforces this view. And pushes more voters towards Reform i.e. the party which majors on immigration and wasn't the right wing party in government when immigration surged.
And this is bad news for Labour, because the more one right-wing party is clear of the other, the worse Labour do. And Reform is already the one in the lead.
Nobody is saying "it's only three million." They're saying that someone who doesn't know the difference between 3 million and 21 million is perhaps not very well informed on this topic.
As for Reform not being in power when immigration surged, they currently contain more of the Johnson cabinet than the Tories do, so I'm not sure that comment is even true.
Has it occurred to you that maybe these people keep screaming immigration because they want power and they've figured it's the easiest way to get it?
He didn't get the numbers wrong but the dates. He obviously meant to say that the population was 58 million in 2000 rather than in 2020.
LOL! on today's hot topic I think the good news is that it would be fairly easy for you to script AI to repost MAGA propaganda freeing you up to try and excuse Ratcliffe's racist missteps, probably there'd be enough of a productivity boost to take on Rupert Lowe or even the whole of Reform.
Bluntly, my reaction to Ratcliffe was "ill-informed berk". But Ratcliffe isn't up for election. And my reaction to the backlash, led by SKS, to Jim Ratcliffe was "you lot genuinely don't see the problem with immigration, do you? Occasionally you say you do - but it makes you feel bad to be on that side of the argument: and you're much more comfortable bashing anyone calking for less immigration than you are calling for less immigration yourself".
And I'm a comfortable middle class voter in a suburb with nice middle class immigrants. I'm not likely to be pushed to Reform. But voters in, say, Denton, or Gorton, might react differently when reminded about how many immigrants the country has grown by in the last five years. And they're not going to be bashing the Tories there because the Tories are almost completely absent.
Immigration under Starmer’s government has fallen hugely. It’s down 69% from the peak under Johnson and is still falling. Does that not demonstrate that he/they do care about reducing immigration?
It mostly demonstrates that the stuff Sunak did in a panic as the full horror of the Boriswave became apparent is having some effect. I'm not aware of anything significant the Labour government has done to further reduce legal migration.

But also, it's worth remembering that immigration was a massive issue before the Boriswave. What was Brexit about if not immigration (those with longer memories may recall the farce of Cameron's "Emergency Brake" agreement). The reality is that the the British public want zero net migration, and have consistently voted for lower migration at pretty much every plausible opportunity for at least the last 20 years. Don't get me wrong, it's better for it to be at 200k net than 800k net, but any politician trying to claim that current 200k net is OK because it's less that 800k net is likely to get very short shift. It's still at least 200k too high.

Taking a step back, imagine if we could snap our fingers and remove 20% of the population. Leaving aside the morals of what happens to them for a second, just think about how much better it would make the country. House prices would drop spectacularly. Trains wouldn't be nearly as overcrowded. The traffic situation on the roads would improve massively. Etc, etc.

That's what could have happened if we'd just left immigration at more or less zero for the last 25 years.
Ratcliffe is essentially right - we've allowed in way too many extra people, and really without any supporting infrastructure.

Far too late to turn the clock back now, and I'm not for a moment advocating chucking people out who are here legitimately, but it does demonstrate why we should be aiming for net emigration for the next 25 years rather than continuing net immigration.
OK, so most of that is wrong.

The Government doesn’t think 200k is OK. They’re aiming for lower immigration and the numbers are expected to drop further.

Let’s say we could remove 20% of the population, would this realise the utopia you imagine? No, of course not. The country would be 20% less productive. We would have 20% less of an economy. The trains would not stop being overcrowded, because there would be 20% less money to pay for them, so we’d have to run 20% fewer trains.

Populations support themselves. Populations generate wealth that then pays for the infrastructure they need. A smaller population can afford less infrastructure. If we’ve not invested enough in infrastructure, then the problem is not the size of the population, it’s our choice not to invest more in infrastructure.
You are forgetting the up-front capital costs.

Yes operationally it scales, which is why we neither need nor can't afford migration, we can adapt either way. Lump of labour absolutely is a fallacy, that is 100% correct.

However up-front capital costs do not scale and they take time as well.

From 2000 to 2025 there has been approximately a 17.7% growth in population but a mere 1.9% growth in roads (primarily unclassified/minor roads).

We have gone from 243 people per mile, to 281 people per mile.

To reverse that decline in relative capacity is going to need a hell of a lot of up-front capital costs and not just proportional maintenance costs.

Capital costs nobody in any party is offering.
This is kinda what I was arguing on here back in whenever, 2006 or something, when we were talking about immigration from the A8 countries. I said that I didn't think it would be as much of an issue if the government would build the infrastructure - schools, hospitals, council houses, railways, electricity generation, water supply, (and, yes, roads I guess) - that a higher population would require. Whether immigrants queue-jumped on council house waiting lists would be a lot less incendiary if the waiting time for a council house was a few months rather than a few decades.

Unfortunately, no government listened to my wise and astute words, and so we are where we are. Trying to cram an extra ~10 million people into the same infrastructure capacity, having failed to do the building required to make that work.

I still prefer the option of building the infrastructure, but it seems pretty clear that if that isn't done - and there's precious little sign of it - that the alternative will be to scare up 10 million people to eject from the country. Needless to say that will be traumatic in more ways than one.
Many years back, the banks had a go at moving desktops to Virtual Machines (VMs).

This is the system where you log into a remote server farm - it looks like you are connecting to a normal Windows machine (generally).

The benefit is that the machine on the actual desktop you login with can be old, slow etc - just needs to display the remote. In addition you can login remotely (WFH) and have everything exactly as out was when you were in the office. No laptop to lug about, lose etc.

Anyway, you could run x VMs on your amount of hardware in the server farm. But, as more people moved over to the new system, the bean counters tried to push back - why not run 2x on y? It would work, but be slower.... then 3x on y.....

Several people got promotions based on "more users, declining cost per seat"

In the end, in several banks, the whole thing became unusable. Whole departments bought desktops/laptops in the old style.

VMs came back later - the server side hardware is cheaper now, and they learnt their lesson. No more squeezing.

The same patterns repeat throughout life

We went through a similar cycle in a science-based workplace - except it was on Unix/Linux and thin clients.

One of the reasons for moving to individual desktops was to avoid the problem of someone starting up an intensive compute task without an appropriate niceness. I know one of the supercomputer vendors tried to sell us some additional compute servers for that sort of post-processing task, but the scars had run deep enough that it didn't happen.

Malmesbury · 9:50AM

Battlebus said:

Selebian said:
Not sure if we've done this, but AI agent wrote a pissy blog post when matploblib pull request was rejected (as against policy, being AI)
https://theshamblog.com/an-ai-agent-published-a-hit-piece-on-me/

We're going to drown in this shit and the points made are valid - a new vector to hurt open source projects by drowning them in crappy PRs and also potential, as the maintainer notes, to intimidate, blackmail and damage the reputations of real people.

Not sure what the solution is. German-style impressum on web pages? But only effective if implemented very widely and there are valid cases to remain anonymous, of course.
I put this through Google Translate but it failed.

Translation

1) A human took a bunch of "AI" tools and set it running on "code improving" a volunteer maintained software project.
2) Such "improvements" are a form of karma farming - "I've submitted 156,467 changes to open source projects. I must be good. Hire me"
3) A volunteer at the coding project rejected the change because it was crap.
4) The AI was used to generate a reaction - posting an attack on the human which rejected the "improvement", to a blog
5) This aped the behaviour of human trying to do the same, previously. There used to be a thing of people trying to submit changes with extra newline or renamed variables.
6) The blog post discusses the morality of the above, and the potential to use more extreme retaliation by the AI. Just as humans have previously done.

Gallowgate · 9:52AM

Sandpit said:

Gallowgate said:

Sandpit said:

Foxy said:

Sandpit said:

Foxy said:

StillWaters said:

dixiedean said:

Roger said:

dixiedean said:

Roger said:

bondegezou said:
NHS waiting list at lowest level in three years

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c3dzez1g451o
I had reason to go to hospital today. I've had periodic problems with arrhythmia over the years. In the past I've been with BUPA and the cardiologists have fixed it with a minimum of fuss and the whole thing is sorted relatively quickly.

Today I used the NHS and it was quite different. Everone was very nice but I never got near a cardiologist. I saw more nurses than I appeared in "Mash". Each one doing their own thing well but the highest I got was a Registrar who could only say after a day of tests. "You need to see a cardiologist' In BUPA the Cardiolgists did all the tests there and then. Maybe half an hour then a week later joined by an anaesthetist a few nurses a theatre -job done. £4,000 the lot
All fine and dandy if you won't miss £4k.
My point was that it would have cost the NHS more than that. To use maybe 6 or 7 people where one would do seemed like they were spending their money in the wrong places
Yebbut.
The NHS needs extra staffing, because if someone is rushed in with a massive coronary, or there's a terrorist they need crash teams on standby permanently.
Not saying it's perfect. Far from it.
But it's there for emergencies.
And it ain't concerned with anyone's bank balance or insurance status should it occur.
Excess capacity - which the NHS needs - doesn’t mean inefficiency which is Roger’s point
I think rogers point is that there are not enough senior decision makers (like yours truly!) so you have to work your way through a filtering process of Specialist Nurses, Physician Assistants and Resident Doctors before you get to the Big Cheesr. These are capable of managing most straightforward conditions.

Such a system of direct access to the top specialists is more expensive, but also limited by numbers. There simply aren't the numbers of us to see everybody immediately.
Didn’t the lower levels of people come in specifically to ration access to the consultant doctor in the first place?

Living somewhere with mostly private healthcare, I can see a specialist for almost anything within a week if I need to, for around £50/20mins, and I have insurance that pays 90% of that so it costs me a fiver.

While recruiting more trainee doctors is clearly a priority, and those training places are currently constrained, should the NHS also be prioritising the hiring of experienced specialists from overseas?
More immigration?
Of doctors, absobloodylutely!
We already bring in so many foreign doctors that it makes it much more difficult for British medicine graduates to get on the training pathways. Hence https://bills.parliament.uk/bills/4062
Those two things are not related.

FPT. They are objectively related. It’s ridiculous to suggest they are not. As usual, you don’t have any idea what is going on in Britain from your gulf ivory tower.

Burgessian · 9:54AM

wooliedyed said:
Wales polling for the Senedd from More In Common

🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿New Senedd voting intention. Reform UK holds a 7-point lead over Plaid, while Labour is in third.
➡️ REF UK 31% (+29)
🌼 PLAID 24% (+4)
🌹 LAB 20% (–20)
🌳 CON 13% (–13)
🔶 LIB DEM 6% (+1)
🌍 GREEN 5% (+3)
30/1 - 10/2 N=806 (16+) changes w 2021 constituency vote

Outside chance of Eluned Morgan staying on as First Minister if Labour edge Plaid, and they form coalition?

Malmesbury · 9:55AM

Cookie said:

Sweeney74 said:

TheScreamingEagles said:
England play Scotland on both the cricket and rugby, so I best keep my gob shut about the Aussies.
Did you read Courtney Lawes piece in The Times? England obsession holds Scotland back — no wonder they never win anything
On which subject, I liked this, which popped up on my fb feed today:

Agree with all of this. One of the things which drew me to rugby* was that there wasn't the 'love my team-hate everyone else' that there is with football. I wouldn't want to lose that.

*of course, here I am as guilty as everyone else of ascribing virtues to rugby which are not in fact unique to rugby but common to almost all sports which aren't football.

A couple of years back, at Twickenham, I went to a Sarcen's vs Harlequins game.

Harlequins got stamped into the ground.

The tickets we had, included a private bar, behind the seating area. Not super posh, but reserved for the people in that block. It was all Harelquins fans.

After the match, the entire Saracens team came in, and started signing stuff. One kid (10 or 11) got his Harlequins shirt signed by the entire Saracens team - wonder what that's worth?

I couldn't help reflecting that if a similar thing had been attempted at a football match, the result would have made the international news. In a bad way.

LostPassword · 9:56AM

Nigelb said:

LostPassword said:

Nigelb said:
Moderna gives up on entirely on vaccine development for infectious diseases after the FDA decides it won't even review their flu vaccine - on which they've spent hundreds of millions, and which is more effective than existing vaccines.

“Moderna’s CEO announced the company will no longer invest in new Phase 3 vaccine trials for infectious diseases: ‘You cannot make a return on investment if you don’t have access to the U.S. market.’ Vaccines for Epstein-Barr virus, herpes, and shingles have been shelved.”
https://x.com/LeahLibresco/status/2021950503048065390

An effective Epstein-Barr vaccine might almost eliminate future cases of MS.

Trump health policy is as insane as he is.
In some ways this might be more consequential than a US invasion of Greenland would have been. RFK has managed to end the progress of medical science relating to vaccines that has, over the last 230 years, resulted in massive increases in health and life expectancy. This is real end of the era, remove the legions from Britannia, sort of stuff. You can mark the end of the Enlightenment to this event. Right here.
Trump has certainly done massive damage to US science, but he's not going to destroy it. The consequences will be more for the US position in the world.
Europe and/or China will pick up some of the slack - Germany after all has Biontech.

Not sure how much I trust medical trials in the PRC.

I currently lack confidence in Europe picking up the slack. There's a collective lack of self-belief and willingness to act. I see Europe being dragged down by the US.

America was the shining city on the hill, and without its beacon European countries look like they will stumble about, lost in the dark, to be picked off by the enemies that circle around us.

Theuniondivvie · 9:57AM

Lol, for ol' felinejobby, the worst thing is trying to take down Trump.

Catturd ™
@catturd2
·
8h
I was always been neutral on Steve Bannon. Didn’t really care or follow his war room..

But now I’ve read the emails between him and Jeffrey Epstein, My God, it’s so disgustingly bad.

And save your breath acting like it was a documentary, i’ve been reading the emails between them, they’re best friends, trying to take down Trump together. It’s so bad.

Anyone from the war room who’s trying to justify this, is full of sht.

It’s so bad, and there’s no coming back from this.

https://x.com/catturd2/status/2022117758285045941?s=20

MattW · 9:57AM

Malmesbury said:

MattW said:

Sandpit said:

MattW said:
An interesting straw in the wind on oversized vehicles; a few Councils considering preventing oversized vehicles (5m+) from blocking up their car parks, before the problem gets out of hand.

Pedestrians killed in collisions in the USA has almost doubled between 2009 and 2024 (~4000 to ~7500) mainly on the back of increasing use of "Light Trucks".

I'm interested that it generally seems to have public support.

(Mine hardly fits much of the time and that is 4.86m long.)

https://www.mirror.co.uk/money/cars-hit-april-2026-760-36650395
The US issue is primarily that legislation had made cars more and more expensive, compared to light trucks, in the last couple of decades, making trucks more popular as everyday transport for the working classes.

Trump is also rolling back the start/stop feature mandate on cars, which is very unpopular because it defaults by law to being on every time you start the car.
https://x.com/langmanvince/status/2022064655523623088
No - I think it's regulatory capture pure and simple distorting the market for the last 50 years or so, starting with differing regulations for large and smaller vehicles in the CAFE (Corporate Average Fuel Economy) regulations.

They have lower safety standards, and so give higher margins, and large ones are tax deductible whilst small ones are not. And many more rules.

Then any number of protectionist measures prevent USA citizens accessing decent pickups and SUVs imported from abroad.

The US truck thing is a classic example of how US legislation loves to create weird loopholes, which then become The Only Possible Way of Doing Things. See the Car Stealership system in most US states.

Regulating Light* Trucks like cars in the US - it would be easier to introduce firearms licensing.

A number of builders, in the UK, are getting pissed off at the way that prats have taken to long cab pickups - they are actually a useful trade vehicle for some jobs. But the prats using them as run-about cars will (as above) get them restricted.

*ha ha ha

That one is partly addressed, in that the tax loophole for extended cab pickups was looked at in the 2024/5 budget.

There was an SKS wobble when someone whinged, but I think in the end it was improved. There may still be a loophole for zero emissions ones, though.

https://basc.org.uk/understanding-tax-changes-for-double-and-extended-cab-pickups/

Nigelb · 9:58AM

Selebian said:

Nigelb said:
Moderna gives up on entirely on vaccine development for infectious diseases after the FDA decides it won't even review their flu vaccine - on which they've spent hundreds of millions, and which is more effective than existing vaccines.

“Moderna’s CEO announced the company will no longer invest in new Phase 3 vaccine trials for infectious diseases: ‘You cannot make a return on investment if you don’t have access to the U.S. market.’ Vaccines for Epstein-Barr virus, herpes, and shingles have been shelved.”
https://x.com/LeahLibresco/status/2021950503048065390

An effective Epstein-Barr vaccine might almost eliminate future cases of MS.

Trump health policy is as insane as he is.
Telling about not getting a return without US access. The insane US drug-buying policies, lack of competition and negotiation etc has actually been subsidising pharma in the rest of the world?

The US market has been the largest and most profitable for many, many decades.

Moderna is a US company, which just spent hundreds of millions on a vaccine trial whose design was approved by the FDA, produced results which on the face of it appear superior to existing vaccines, and has now been told that the FDA won't even review those results.

It's a clear ideological decision that creates huge financial risks to developing any mRNA vaccine for infectious diseases in the US.

As far as the "subsidy" is concerned, that's debatable.
The US is the world's richest country, and its consumers demand and get access to the newest treatments. That will always come at a premium; the only debate is the size of that premium.

Cookie · 9:59AM

MattW said:
Today's off topic question.

(I suspect this is for @Leon .)

Youtube ads are currently advising me that if I wear bamboo underpants, they will be stroked, then stolen, by my GF. Does this happen?

TBF Youtube ads have previously advised me that my teeth can be made entirely uncrooked at minimal cost in a period of months, that standing on a rug with a metal mesh in it will make Type 2 diabetes vanish, and that 7 minutes a day of relaxed Tai-Chi will give me a six pack in about 30 days.

(My cast iron rule, I'm sure as almost all PBers, is: never buy anything advertised on Youtube.)

I started getting the tai chi ones recently - I suspect it must know I turned 50.

Youtube ads make me nostalgic for real telly, where the merits the ads claimed for their products had to be rooted in some sort of reality.

Malmesbury · 9:59AM

Gallowgate said:

Sandpit said:

Gallowgate said:

Sandpit said:

Foxy said:

Sandpit said:

Foxy said:

StillWaters said:

dixiedean said:

Roger said:

dixiedean said:

Roger said:

bondegezou said:
NHS waiting list at lowest level in three years

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c3dzez1g451o
I had reason to go to hospital today. I've had periodic problems with arrhythmia over the years. In the past I've been with BUPA and the cardiologists have fixed it with a minimum of fuss and the whole thing is sorted relatively quickly.

Today I used the NHS and it was quite different. Everone was very nice but I never got near a cardiologist. I saw more nurses than I appeared in "Mash". Each one doing their own thing well but the highest I got was a Registrar who could only say after a day of tests. "You need to see a cardiologist' In BUPA the Cardiolgists did all the tests there and then. Maybe half an hour then a week later joined by an anaesthetist a few nurses a theatre -job done. £4,000 the lot
All fine and dandy if you won't miss £4k.
My point was that it would have cost the NHS more than that. To use maybe 6 or 7 people where one would do seemed like they were spending their money in the wrong places
Yebbut.
The NHS needs extra staffing, because if someone is rushed in with a massive coronary, or there's a terrorist they need crash teams on standby permanently.
Not saying it's perfect. Far from it.
But it's there for emergencies.
And it ain't concerned with anyone's bank balance or insurance status should it occur.
Excess capacity - which the NHS needs - doesn’t mean inefficiency which is Roger’s point
I think rogers point is that there are not enough senior decision makers (like yours truly!) so you have to work your way through a filtering process of Specialist Nurses, Physician Assistants and Resident Doctors before you get to the Big Cheesr. These are capable of managing most straightforward conditions.

Such a system of direct access to the top specialists is more expensive, but also limited by numbers. There simply aren't the numbers of us to see everybody immediately.
Didn’t the lower levels of people come in specifically to ration access to the consultant doctor in the first place?

Living somewhere with mostly private healthcare, I can see a specialist for almost anything within a week if I need to, for around £50/20mins, and I have insurance that pays 90% of that so it costs me a fiver.

While recruiting more trainee doctors is clearly a priority, and those training places are currently constrained, should the NHS also be prioritising the hiring of experienced specialists from overseas?
More immigration?
Of doctors, absobloodylutely!
We already bring in so many foreign doctors that it makes it much more difficult for British medicine graduates to get on the training pathways. Hence https://bills.parliament.uk/bills/4062
Those two things are not related.
FPT. They are objectively related. It’s ridiculous to suggest they are not. As usual, you don’t have any idea what is going on in Britain from your gulf ivory tower.

One example that made me laugh, was when my godson was told that the medical school of his choice had a sudden shortage of places.

This was because the overseas aid budget was looking at a slight underspend, that year. So they increased the number of full ride scholarships for people from third world countries to study medicine at a UK university. Full overseas fees, so the uni was on it, like a tramp on chips.

I was most impressed by his reaction - no Reform style rants. Just decided to become a diplomat and work for the Foreigner Office, instead.

Selebian · 10:01AM

Battlebus said:

Selebian said:
Not sure if we've done this, but AI agent wrote a pissy blog post when matploblib pull request was rejected (as against policy, being AI)
https://theshamblog.com/an-ai-agent-published-a-hit-piece-on-me/

We're going to drown in this shit and the points made are valid - a new vector to hurt open source projects by drowning them in crappy PRs and also potential, as the maintainer notes, to intimidate, blackmail and damage the reputations of real people.

Not sure what the solution is. German-style impressum on web pages? But only effective if implemented very widely and there are valid cases to remain anonymous, of course.
I put this through Google Translate but it failed.

Sometimes you have to follow the link, unless you want very long posts on here. Or simply ignore if you can't be bothered.

@Malmesbury summary is a good tldr, although I'm not sure on point 4 - the matploblib guy seems to think this was an automated AI action, rather than a human getting a LLM to write a pissy blog post. If that's correct then this stuff will be produced at ridiculous volumes, if there's not even need for the human intervention.

You could, for example, set up such an agent with a pissy and pedantic personality and an interest in politics and trains, point it here and... Would we even notice? Maybe one of our new posters is!

MattW · 10:02AM

Foss said:

MattW said:
Today's off topic question.

(I suspect this is for @Leon .)

Youtube ads are currently advising me that if I wear bamboo underpants, they will be stroked, then stolen, by my GF. Does this happen?

TBF Youtube ads have previously advised me that my teeth can be made entirely uncrooked at minimal cost in a period of months, that standing on a rug with a metal mesh in it will make Type 2 diabetes vanish, and that 7 minutes a day of relaxed Tai-Chi will give me a six pack in about 30 days.

(My cast iron rule, I'm sure as almost all PBers, is: never buy anything advertised on Youtube.)
YouTube ad-blocking is a medical good.

Yes, but that is £5 per month to Big Tech Bro, and I'm already trying to keep it light on paid subscriptions.

Big_G_NorthWales · 10:02AM

Burgessian said:

wooliedyed said:
Wales polling for the Senedd from More In Common

🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿New Senedd voting intention. Reform UK holds a 7-point lead over Plaid, while Labour is in third.
➡️ REF UK 31% (+29)
🌼 PLAID 24% (+4)
🌹 LAB 20% (–20)
🌳 CON 13% (–13)
🔶 LIB DEM 6% (+1)
🌍 GREEN 5% (+3)
30/1 - 10/2 N=806 (16+) changes w 2021 constituency vote
Outside chance of Eluned Morgan staying on as First Minister if Labour edge Plaid, and they form coalition?

Good morning

No

Labour in Wales are at the same point in time they were in Scotland after decades of government, and the Scots showed them they had enough and turned to the SNP

I expect a Plaid first minister but with a difficult choice of partner due to the unpopularity of labour

Just a small point but in that poll the conservatives were +3

Malmesbury · 10:03AM

Selebian said:

Battlebus said:

Selebian said:
Not sure if we've done this, but AI agent wrote a pissy blog post when matploblib pull request was rejected (as against policy, being AI)
https://theshamblog.com/an-ai-agent-published-a-hit-piece-on-me/

We're going to drown in this shit and the points made are valid - a new vector to hurt open source projects by drowning them in crappy PRs and also potential, as the maintainer notes, to intimidate, blackmail and damage the reputations of real people.

Not sure what the solution is. German-style impressum on web pages? But only effective if implemented very widely and there are valid cases to remain anonymous, of course.
I put this through Google Translate but it failed.
Sometimes you have to follow the link, unless you want very long posts on here. Or simply ignore if you can't be bothered.

@Malmesbury summary is a good tldr, although I'm not sure on point 4 - the matploblib guy seems to think this was an automated AI action, rather than a human getting a LLM to write a pissy blog post. If that's correct then this stuff will be produced at ridiculous volumes, if there's not even need for the human intervention.

You could, for example, set up such an agent with a pissy and pedantic personality and an interest in politics and trains, point it here and... Would we even notice? Maybe one of our new posters is!

Yes, could have been completely automated. AI is really monkey-see-money-do, so automated shit posting on rejection of a pull request is perfectly possible. Likely, even.

MattW · 10:03AM

Cookie said:

MattW said:
Today's off topic question.

(I suspect this is for @Leon .)

Youtube ads are currently advising me that if I wear bamboo underpants, they will be stroked, then stolen, by my GF. Does this happen?

TBF Youtube ads have previously advised me that my teeth can be made entirely uncrooked at minimal cost in a period of months, that standing on a rug with a metal mesh in it will make Type 2 diabetes vanish, and that 7 minutes a day of relaxed Tai-Chi will give me a six pack in about 30 days.

(My cast iron rule, I'm sure as almost all PBers, is: never buy anything advertised on Youtube.)
I started getting the tai chi ones recently - I suspect it must know I turned 50.

Youtube ads make me nostalgic for real telly, where the merits the ads claimed for their products had to be rooted in some sort of reality.

Youtube is covered by the ASA, but it obviously does not work.

Eabhal · 10:04AM

Foxy said:
A really interesting finding, which may explain the drop in Total Fertility Rate. Having a child is far more time intensive for parents than it used to be:

https://bsky.app/profile/tobyn.bsky.social/post/3meq4etpgrs2d

And a lot of the shift is in men, who now often do more direct childcare than women did in the Seventies, though women also have greatly increased the amount of time in direct child care:

https://bsky.app/profile/tobyn.bsky.social/post/3meq4a5ozis2d

It's weird. What happened to kids just doing their own thing for 6 hours after school, and all weekend? I just cycled about, read books and played video games - and from a very young age.

Foss · 10:04AM

MattW said:

Foss said:

MattW said:
Today's off topic question.

(I suspect this is for @Leon .)

Youtube ads are currently advising me that if I wear bamboo underpants, they will be stroked, then stolen, by my GF. Does this happen?

TBF Youtube ads have previously advised me that my teeth can be made entirely uncrooked at minimal cost in a period of months, that standing on a rug with a metal mesh in it will make Type 2 diabetes vanish, and that 7 minutes a day of relaxed Tai-Chi will give me a six pack in about 30 days.

(My cast iron rule, I'm sure as almost all PBers, is: never buy anything advertised on Youtube.)
YouTube ad-blocking is a medical good.
Yes, but that is £5 per month to Big Tech Bro, and I'm already trying to keep it light on paid subscriptions.

I didn't suggest paying...

MattW · 10:09AM

Off to do things, but on the car-size thing, this is a useful website called Carsized comparing my huge Estate with a GMC pickup.

https://www.carsized.com/en/cars/compare/skoda-superb-2015-estate-vs-gmc-sierra-2019-pickup-2500-crew-cab/

MarqueeMark · 10:09AM

MattW said:

bondegezou said:

MattW said:

Foxy said:

Nigelb said:
Moderna gives up on entirely on vaccine development for infectious diseases after the FDA decides it won't even review their flu vaccine - on which they've spent hundreds of millions, and which is more effective than existing vaccines.

“Moderna’s CEO announced the company will no longer invest in new Phase 3 vaccine trials for infectious diseases: ‘You cannot make a return on investment if you don’t have access to the U.S. market.’ Vaccines for Epstein-Barr virus, herpes, and shingles have been shelved.”
https://x.com/LeahLibresco/status/2021950503048065390

An effective Epstein-Barr vaccine might almost eliminate future cases of MS.

Trump health policy is as insane as he is.
RFK Jr: I'm not scared of a germ. I used to snort cocaine off of toilet seats.

https://bsky.app/profile/factpostnews.bsky.social/post/3meoq2jnrgb2z
Is that AI?
https://news.sky.com/story/robert-f-kennedy-jr-admits-he-used-to-snort-cocaine-off-toilet-seats-13506969
Bloody hell.

Hard to know which has done more damage to his brain, the worm or the coke.

Sandpit · 10:11AM

MattW said:

Sandpit said:

MattW said:
An interesting straw in the wind on oversized vehicles; a few Councils considering preventing oversized vehicles (5m+) from blocking up their car parks, before the problem gets out of hand.

Pedestrians killed in collisions in the USA has almost doubled between 2009 and 2024 (~4000 to ~7500) mainly on the back of increasing use of "Light Trucks".

I'm interested that it generally seems to have public support.

(Mine hardly fits much of the time and that is 4.86m long.)

https://www.mirror.co.uk/money/cars-hit-april-2026-760-36650395
The US issue is primarily that legislation had made cars more and more expensive, compared to light trucks, in the last couple of decades, making trucks more popular as everyday transport for the working classes.

Trump is also rolling back the start/stop feature mandate on cars, which is very unpopular because it defaults by law to being on every time you start the car.
https://x.com/langmanvince/status/2022064655523623088
No - I think it's regulatory capture pure and simple distorting the market for the last 50 years or so, starting with differing regulations for large and smaller vehicles in the CAFE (Corporate Average Fuel Economy) regulations.

They have lower safety standards, and so give higher margins, and large ones are tax deductible whilst small ones are not. And many more rules.

Then any number of protectionist measures prevent USA citizens accessing decent pickups and SUVs imported from abroad.

Why would Americans ever want to import trucks?

This is an incredibly sad decision – politicalbetting.com

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