Not that they are backwards looking reactionaries or anything.
I would bring it back in smoking rooms. Should be peoples' choice, but not inflict that choice on others.
You would still be inflicting it on staff..
No, you'd take your drink in and bring it out.
Who empties the ashtrays?
What people can't be paid to empty an ashtray now? Is the ash going to jump out and infest them with cancer? Piss off.
So they wear a personal respirator to enter the smoking chamber to collect the smokers' detritus?
You are being utterly absurd. They would clean the ashtrays after the room had been vacated, and frankly many cleaners have to do far worse, as do vast amounts of other workers that you depend on to live what is clearly a very sheltered life.
I would ensure my pub remained no smoking and not expose my staff to the toxic nature of it
That would be your choice. If a landlord wants to make some money by offering a well-ventilated room as a smoking space, providing it was not 'manned', I find it profoundly illiberal to stop them.
Take it from me, it is not illiberal to prevent cancer or copd being caught by anyone and especially working staff in hospitality
Yes it is. I wish everyone a long and healthy life, and I've not smoked more than 20 cigarettes in my entire existence, but if someone would rather be carried away by a smoking related illness at 75, than by something else at 85 or God-willing 95, that is their choice. And in sum, who are we to say that it is a wrong or bad one?
Restore Britain to repeal the 1834 Act banning children under 14 from being sent up chimneys.
And while they're at it bring back the yellow pages. And the testcard.
Things were better back then.
Political dialogue should be restricted to CeeFax.
Yes please.
And while we're on this I remember doing my spread betting by phone - I'd usually get "Clive" - and receiving a proper contract note in the post the next day.
If I lost - which sometimes happened - I could go down the local and torch my sorrows with a few ciggies.
The public are probably thinking: if we could do so much so quickly at the start of the Covid 19 pandemic, why can't we build some new prisons over the next 3 months?
The public have some idea of how long it takes to build a huge building. It’s longer than 3 months. Use some common sense.
Not that they are backwards looking reactionaries or anything.
I would bring it back in smoking rooms. Should be peoples' choice, but not inflict that choice on others.
You would still be inflicting it on staff..
No, you'd take your drink in and bring it out.
Who empties the ashtrays?
What people can't be paid to empty an ashtray now? Is the ash going to jump out and infest them with cancer? Piss off.
So they wear a personal respirator to enter the smoking chamber to collect the smokers' detritus?
You are being utterly absurd. They would clean the ashtrays after the room had been vacated, and frankly many cleaners have to do far worse, as do vast amounts of other workers that you depend on to live what is clearly a very sheltered life.
I would ensure my pub remained no smoking and not expose my staff to the toxic nature of it
That would be your choice. If a landlord wants to make some money by offering a well-ventilated room as a smoking space, providing it was not 'manned', I find it profoundly illiberal to stop them.
Take it from me, it is not illiberal to prevent cancer or copd being caught by anyone and especially working staff in hospitality
Yes it is. I wish everyone a long and healthy life, and I've not smoked more than 20 cigarettes in my entire existence, but if someone would rather be carried away by a smoking related illness at 75, than by something else at 85 or God-willing 95, that is their choice. And in sum, who are we to say that it is a wrong or bad one?
You seem to miss the point that being in a smoking environment can adversely affect the health of the non smokers
The public are probably thinking: if we could do so much so quickly at the start of the Covid 19 pandemic, why can't we build some new prisons over the next 3 months?
The public have some idea of how long it takes to build a huge building. It’s longer than 3 months. Use some common sense.
The owner of British Gas has claimed that most households would rather speak with an AI chatbot than deal with the company’s staff as it prepares to cut 1,300 jobs from its call centres.
Centrica, the supplier’s FTSE 100 owner, plans to cut 800 jobs as the company carries out a “targeted deployment of AI tools”, on top of the 500 cutsit confirmed last month.
I don't believe this for one minute.
And you'd spent ten minutes going through pointless menus and "I'm sorry. I didn't quite catch that." AI statements before you got to any of the poor residual workers, who'd then be dealing with some very frustrated customers.
The thing is most of the staff in call centres are just reading from a script and aren't allowed to use their initiative to help you, so they might as will be an AI bot for all the good they do.
I think it was the fifth time I called Scottish Power about an issue they were failing to fix, and I asked what guarantee there was that them saying they would do the thing they said they'd do the previous times would work this time* and I finally got an off-script response. Although it was them angrily demanding to know if I was calling them a liar.
If the call centre is just there to absorb customers' energy to complain, that's much more economically done with AI bots.
* It didn't work. Had to take it to the ombudsman.
Not that they are backwards looking reactionaries or anything.
I would bring it back in smoking rooms. Should be peoples' choice, but not inflict that choice on others.
You would still be inflicting it on staff..
No, you'd take your drink in and bring it out.
Who empties the ashtrays?
What people can't be paid to empty an ashtray now? Is the ash going to jump out and infest them with cancer? Piss off.
So they wear a personal respirator to enter the smoking chamber to collect the smokers' detritus?
You are being utterly absurd. They would clean the ashtrays after the room had been vacated, and frankly many cleaners have to do far worse, as do vast amounts of other workers that you depend on to live what is clearly a very sheltered life.
I would ensure my pub remained no smoking and not expose my staff to the toxic nature of it
That would be your choice. If a landlord wants to make some money by offering a well-ventilated room as a smoking space, providing it was not 'manned', I find it profoundly illiberal to stop them.
Take it from me, it is not illiberal to prevent cancer or copd being caught by anyone and especially working staff in hospitality
Yes it is. I wish everyone a long and healthy life, and I've not smoked more than 20 cigarettes in my entire existence, but if someone would rather be carried away by a smoking related illness at 75, than by something else at 85 or God-willing 95, that is their choice. And in sum, who are we to say that it is a wrong or bad one?
You seem to miss the point that being in a smoking environment can adversely affect the health of the non smokers
Anyway, it is back to the 1950s all over again
They would not have to be in the environment except after the smoking was over. Then I'm afraid I don't see the difference with cleaning toilets or emptying stinking bins full of nearly finished bottles of booze - unpleasant but somebody has to do it.
The public are probably thinking: if we could do so much so quickly at the start of the Covid 19 pandemic, why can't we build some new prisons over the next 3 months?
COVID patients were much less likely to run away than prisoners?
The public are probably thinking: if we could do so much so quickly at the start of the Covid 19 pandemic, why can't we build some new prisons over the next 3 months?
The public have some idea of how long it takes to build a huge building. It’s longer than 3 months. Use some common sense.
Well we had early prisoner releases two years ago. Two years maybe isn't too long to do something about it.
It's completely bonkers to think that teams playing 4 home matches per year - and which are nowhere near sell outs - could be worth hundreds of millions of pounds.
But of course that's what people have paid for them - so good luck to the ECB. But it seems obvious there is no prospect of a commercial return any time soon - so it appears they have been bought as trophy assets and in the hope it takes off in the long run.
It would be very interesting if in the next ECB TV rights deal Sky said we'll have all England games and the T20 Blast but we will pass on the Hundred. I reckon the ECB may well have trouble getting a decent fee for the Hundred - I think they "allocated" about £40m per year of Sky's current £200m+ per year to the Hundred. Would anyone else pay £40m per year for it? I doubt it.
Gate receipts will be peanuts so without a substantial TV rights fee the whole thing is completely unviable.
The owner of British Gas has claimed that most households would rather speak with an AI chatbot than deal with the company’s staff as it prepares to cut 1,300 jobs from its call centres.
Centrica, the supplier’s FTSE 100 owner, plans to cut 800 jobs as the company carries out a “targeted deployment of AI tools”, on top of the 500 cutsit confirmed last month.
I don't believe this for one minute.
And you'd spent ten minutes going through pointless menus and "I'm sorry. I didn't quite catch that." AI statements before you got to any of the poor residual workers, who'd then be dealing with some very frustrated customers.
The thing is most of the staff in call centres are just reading from a script and aren't allowed to use their initiative to help you, so they might as will be an AI bot for all the good they do.
I think it was the fifth time I called Scottish Power about an issue they were failing to fix, and I asked what guarantee there was that them saying they would do the thing they said they'd do the previous times would work this time* and I finally got an off-script response. Although it was them angrily demanding to know if I was calling them a liar.
If the call centre is just there to absorb customers' energy to complain, that's much more economically done with AI bots.
* It didn't work. Had to take it to the ombudsman.
Unfortunately, what the public wants is John Lewis standards of customer service coupled with Amazon pricing.
It's completely bonkers to think that teams playing 4 home matches per year - and which are nowhere near sell outs - could be worth hundreds of millions of pounds.
But of course that's what people have paid for them - so good luck to the ECB. But it seems obvious there is no prospect of a commercial return any time soon - so it appears they have been bought as trophy assets and in the hope it takes off in the long run.
It would be very interesting if in the next ECB TV rights deal Sky said we'll have all England games and the T20 Blast but we will pass on the Hundred. I reckon the ECB may well have trouble getting a decent fee for the Hundred - I think they "allocated" about £40m per year of Sky's current £200m+ per year to the Hundred. Would anyone else pay £40m per year for it? I doubt it.
Gate receipts will be peanuts so without a substantial TV rights fee the whole thing is completely unviable.
The vision from the Indians putting the money in is much bigger. Its a global set of T20 competitions that play all year around all around the world and the MI, SuperGiants etc are the brands, players get signed to a "club" for all the competitions, rather than being 10 unconnected competitions.
They now "own" big stakes in IPL, MLC, CPL, Hundred, SA20, MiddleEast T20.
The other good question on prisons is why are we paying the Eton school fees to house 10,772 criminals who aren't even British citizens? Deport them, use the space freed up to keep some of our own nasties off the streets. If their countries won't take them, stop visas until they change their minds.
Not that they are backwards looking reactionaries or anything.
I would bring it back in smoking rooms. Should be peoples' choice, but not inflict that choice on others.
You would still be inflicting it on staff..
No, you'd take your drink in and bring it out.
Who empties the ashtrays?
What people can't be paid to empty an ashtray now? Is the ash going to jump out and infest them with cancer? Piss off.
So they wear a personal respirator to enter the smoking chamber to collect the smokers' detritus?
You are being utterly absurd. They would clean the ashtrays after the room had been vacated, and frankly many cleaners have to do far worse, as do vast amounts of other workers that you depend on to live what is clearly a very sheltered life.
I would ensure my pub remained no smoking and not expose my staff to the toxic nature of it
That would be your choice. If a landlord wants to make some money by offering a well-ventilated room as a smoking space, providing it was not 'manned', I find it profoundly illiberal to stop them.
Take it from me, it is not illiberal to prevent cancer or copd being caught by anyone and especially working staff in hospitality
Yes it is. I wish everyone a long and healthy life, and I've not smoked more than 20 cigarettes in my entire existence, but if someone would rather be carried away by a smoking related illness at 75, than by something else at 85 or God-willing 95, that is their choice. And in sum, who are we to say that it is a wrong or bad one?
You seem to miss the point that being in a smoking environment can adversely affect the health of the non smokers
Anyway, it is back to the 1950s all over again
If people are not exposed to the smoke but are exposed to a room in which the smoke has been evacuated via ventilation but the smell still remains on the walls and the detritus remains in the ashtrays, then that is unpleasant but not carcinogenic or COPD-inducing
It's completely bonkers to think that teams playing 4 home matches per year - and which are nowhere near sell outs - could be worth hundreds of millions of pounds.
But of course that's what people have paid for them - so good luck to the ECB. But it seems obvious there is no prospect of a commercial return any time soon - so it appears they have been bought as trophy assets and in the hope it takes off in the long run.
It would be very interesting if in the next ECB TV rights deal Sky said we'll have all England games and the T20 Blast but we will pass on the Hundred. I reckon the ECB may well have trouble getting a decent fee for the Hundred - I think they "allocated" about £40m per year of Sky's current £200m+ per year to the Hundred. Would anyone else pay £40m per year for it? I doubt it.
Gate receipts will be peanuts so without a substantial TV rights fee the whole thing is completely unviable.
The vision from the Indians putting the miney in is much bigger. Its a global set of T20 competitions that play all year around all around the world and the MI, SuperGiants etc are the brands, players get signed to a "club" for all the competitions.
It all sounds fine in theory.
But we've seen what happened with LIV Golf. We can see what will happen with Mike Tindall's proposed international rugby league - so much so it may never even start.
Sky pays peanuts for the IPL (DAZN initially won UK rights then abandoned them).
The issue is how many people really care about any of these T20 teams? Sure it's huge in India but I can't see substantial revenues being generated anywhere else.
👀 According to Downing Street read out of meeting between FM and new PM, Andy Burnham told John Swinney a second Indy ref was “off limits” because it would take focus from cost of living.
I don't know if they had time to ask Truss, but I would hazard a guess that all of May, Boris, Sunak, Starmer and Burnham have now all said some variation or another of "now is not the time", and the SNP still don't really seem to have worked out what to do with that. Maybe they're quite happy to get the same result each time. Who knows.
The other good question on prisons is why are we paying the Eton school fees to house 10,772 criminals who aren't even British citizens? Deport them, use the space freed up to keep some of our own nasties off the streets. If their countries won't take them, stop visas until they change their minds.
It's completely bonkers to think that teams playing 4 home matches per year - and which are nowhere near sell outs - could be worth hundreds of millions of pounds.
But of course that's what people have paid for them - so good luck to the ECB. But it seems obvious there is no prospect of a commercial return any time soon - so it appears they have been bought as trophy assets and in the hope it takes off in the long run.
It would be very interesting if in the next ECB TV rights deal Sky said we'll have all England games and the T20 Blast but we will pass on the Hundred. I reckon the ECB may well have trouble getting a decent fee for the Hundred - I think they "allocated" about £40m per year of Sky's current £200m+ per year to the Hundred. Would anyone else pay £40m per year for it? I doubt it.
Gate receipts will be peanuts so without a substantial TV rights fee the whole thing is completely unviable.
The vision from the Indians putting the miney in is much bigger. Its a global set of T20 competitions that play all year around all around the world and the MI, SuperGiants etc are the brands, players get signed to a "club" for all the competitions.
It all sounds fine in theory.
But we've seen what happened with LIV Golf. We can see what will happen with Mike Tindall's proposed international rugby league - so much so it may never even start.
Sky pays peanuts for the IPL (DAZN initially won UK rights then abandoned them).
The issue is how many people really care about any of these T20 teams? Sure it's huge in India but I can't see substantial revenues being generated anywhere else.
Apparently Willow TV in the US has 4 million subscribers alone. The global audience for IPL is insane. Indians watch these T20 games all around the world and there is a lot of them Just because the UK audience doesnt care, it isnt true elsewhere.
The owner of British Gas has claimed that most households would rather speak with an AI chatbot than deal with the company’s staff as it prepares to cut 1,300 jobs from its call centres.
Centrica, the supplier’s FTSE 100 owner, plans to cut 800 jobs as the company carries out a “targeted deployment of AI tools”, on top of the 500 cutsit confirmed last month.
I don't believe this for one minute.
And you'd spent ten minutes going through pointless menus and "I'm sorry. I didn't quite catch that." AI statements before you got to any of the poor residual workers, who'd then be dealing with some very frustrated customers.
The thing is most of the staff in call centres are just reading from a script and aren't allowed to use their initiative to help you, so they might as will be an AI bot for all the good they do.
I think it was the fifth time I called Scottish Power about an issue they were failing to fix, and I asked what guarantee there was that them saying they would do the thing they said they'd do the previous times would work this time* and I finally got an off-script response. Although it was them angrily demanding to know if I was calling them a liar.
If the call centre is just there to absorb customers' energy to complain, that's much more economically done with AI bots.
* It didn't work. Had to take it to the ombudsman.
Sorry to hear that.
I've had a human conversation (eventually) with every operator I can recall getting through to, except HSBC.
If people are not exposed to the smoke but are exposed to a room in which the smoke has been evacuated via ventilation but the smell still remains on the walls and the detritus remains in the ashtrays, then that is unpleasant but not carcinogenic or COPD-inducing
It can still quite easily trigger attacks in people who suffer from Asthma or other respiratory conditions.
The owner of British Gas has claimed that most households would rather speak with an AI chatbot than deal with the company’s staff as it prepares to cut 1,300 jobs from its call centres.
Centrica, the supplier’s FTSE 100 owner, plans to cut 800 jobs as the company carries out a “targeted deployment of AI tools”, on top of the 500 cutsit confirmed last month.
I don't believe this for one minute.
And you'd spent ten minutes going through pointless menus and "I'm sorry. I didn't quite catch that." AI statements before you got to any of the poor residual workers, who'd then be dealing with some very frustrated customers.
The thing is most of the staff in call centres are just reading from a script and aren't allowed to use their initiative to help you, so they might as will be an AI bot for all the good they do.
I think it was the fifth time I called Scottish Power about an issue they were failing to fix, and I asked what guarantee there was that them saying they would do the thing they said they'd do the previous times would work this time* and I finally got an off-script response. Although it was them angrily demanding to know if I was calling them a liar.
If the call centre is just there to absorb customers' energy to complain, that's much more economically done with AI bots.
* It didn't work. Had to take it to the ombudsman.
I think there's a case for statutory fine for every successful ombudsman referral. All people care about is if their issue gets dealt with. Companies can then decide if that's most effectively delivered by AI, humans or a mixture of both.
The owner of British Gas has claimed that most households would rather speak with an AI chatbot than deal with the company’s staff as it prepares to cut 1,300 jobs from its call centres.
Centrica, the supplier’s FTSE 100 owner, plans to cut 800 jobs as the company carries out a “targeted deployment of AI tools”, on top of the 500 cutsit confirmed last month.
I don't believe this for one minute.
Having dealt extensively with British Gas staff over the past year I absolutely believe that claim. Their human staff are uniquely stupid, obstructive, rude and useless. An AI that can only tell you to sod off would be an upgrade.
It's completely bonkers to think that teams playing 4 home matches per year - and which are nowhere near sell outs - could be worth hundreds of millions of pounds.
But of course that's what people have paid for them - so good luck to the ECB. But it seems obvious there is no prospect of a commercial return any time soon - so it appears they have been bought as trophy assets and in the hope it takes off in the long run.
It would be very interesting if in the next ECB TV rights deal Sky said we'll have all England games and the T20 Blast but we will pass on the Hundred. I reckon the ECB may well have trouble getting a decent fee for the Hundred - I think they "allocated" about £40m per year of Sky's current £200m+ per year to the Hundred. Would anyone else pay £40m per year for it? I doubt it.
Gate receipts will be peanuts so without a substantial TV rights fee the whole thing is completely unviable.
The vision from the Indians putting the miney in is much bigger. Its a global set of T20 competitions that play all year around all around the world and the MI, SuperGiants etc are the brands, players get signed to a "club" for all the competitions.
It all sounds fine in theory.
But we've seen what happened with LIV Golf. We can see what will happen with Mike Tindall's proposed international rugby league - so much so it may never even start.
Sky pays peanuts for the IPL (DAZN initially won UK rights then abandoned them).
The issue is how many people really care about any of these T20 teams? Sure it's huge in India but I can't see substantial revenues being generated anywhere else.
Apparently Willow TV in the US has 4 million subscribers alone. The global audience for IPL is insane. Indians watch these T20 games all around the world and there is a lot of them Just because the UK audience doesnt care, it isnt true elsewhere.
Also big difference between Indians approach and LIV / Rubgy360, Indians are doing it with the cricket authorities, those other examples tried to break adminstration of the game.
👀 According to Downing Street read out of meeting between FM and new PM, Andy Burnham told John Swinney a second Indy ref was “off limits” because it would take focus from cost of living.
I don't know if they had time to ask Truss, but I would hazard a guess that all of May, Boris, Sunak, Starmer and Burnham have now all said some variation or another of "now is not the time", and the SNP still don't really seem to have worked out what to do with that. Maybe they're quite happy to get the same result each time. Who knows.
SNP votes come from those wanting independence. If / when independence occurs I suspect the SNP would split in 2/3 parties
Equally as with Brexit currently the Scottish Government can blame someone else - that falls apart when the buck stops at them
The owner of British Gas has claimed that most households would rather speak with an AI chatbot than deal with the company’s staff as it prepares to cut 1,300 jobs from its call centres.
Centrica, the supplier’s FTSE 100 owner, plans to cut 800 jobs as the company carries out a “targeted deployment of AI tools”, on top of the 500 cutsit confirmed last month.
I don't believe this for one minute.
Having dealt extensively with British Gas staff over the past year I absolutely believe that claim. Their human staff are uniquely stupid, obstructive, rude and useless. An AI that can only tell you to sod off would be an upgrade.
Having worked on contract once for British Gas it is easy for me to believe that even the crudest bots would be an improvement on their existing staff.
On reflection, even a row of houseplants would be an improvement, so that's not really saying much.
Smoking in pubs - that should be up to the individual pub not some national right wing nanny state diktat.
I'm tired of right wing parties like the Conservatives, Reform and Restore interfering in people's lives, telling us all what we should do and where we can smoke or not smoke.
It's this kind of woke, namby pamby, cancel culture, snowflake politics that drives prople to the "left".
Not that they are backwards looking reactionaries or anything.
I would bring it back in smoking rooms. Should be peoples' choice, but not inflict that choice on others.
You would still be inflicting it on staff..
No, you'd take your drink in and bring it out.
Who empties the ashtrays?
What people can't be paid to empty an ashtray now? Is the ash going to jump out and infest them with cancer? Piss off.
So they wear a personal respirator to enter the smoking chamber to collect the smokers' detritus?
You are being utterly absurd. They would clean the ashtrays after the room had been vacated, and frankly many cleaners have to do far worse, as do vast amounts of other workers that you depend on to live what is clearly a very sheltered life.
I would ensure my pub remained no smoking and not expose my staff to the toxic nature of it
That would be your choice. If a landlord wants to make some money by offering a well-ventilated room as a smoking space, providing it was not 'manned', I find it profoundly illiberal to stop them.
All products of combustion are bad for you, whether it's tobacco, burnt toast, candles or a tower block inferno. It's not just the smoke, it's the ash and the residue left on walls and floors and it's cumulative and carcinogenic. Ventilation is meaningless if you're not deep cleaning the surfaces and furniture after every use.
Do enough people here hate Sophie Cunningham to make me love her even more?
Who ?
She’s an excellent women’s basketball player. Her and her incredible teammate, Caitlin Clarke, are being , apparently, picked on and fouled by their opponents. The refs seem to be ignoring much of it
Some suspect that it’s because Sophie and Caitlin are white girls done good
It's completely bonkers to think that teams playing 4 home matches per year - and which are nowhere near sell outs - could be worth hundreds of millions of pounds.
But of course that's what people have paid for them - so good luck to the ECB. But it seems obvious there is no prospect of a commercial return any time soon - so it appears they have been bought as trophy assets and in the hope it takes off in the long run.
It would be very interesting if in the next ECB TV rights deal Sky said we'll have all England games and the T20 Blast but we will pass on the Hundred. I reckon the ECB may well have trouble getting a decent fee for the Hundred - I think they "allocated" about £40m per year of Sky's current £200m+ per year to the Hundred. Would anyone else pay £40m per year for it? I doubt it.
Gate receipts will be peanuts so without a substantial TV rights fee the whole thing is completely unviable.
The vision from the Indians putting the miney in is much bigger. Its a global set of T20 competitions that play all year around all around the world and the MI, SuperGiants etc are the brands, players get signed to a "club" for all the competitions.
It all sounds fine in theory.
But we've seen what happened with LIV Golf. We can see what will happen with Mike Tindall's proposed international rugby league - so much so it may never even start.
Sky pays peanuts for the IPL (DAZN initially won UK rights then abandoned them).
The issue is how many people really care about any of these T20 teams? Sure it's huge in India but I can't see substantial revenues being generated anywhere else.
Apparently Willow TV in the US has 4 million subscribers alone. The global audience for IPL is insane. Indians watch these T20 games all around the world and there is a lot of them Just because the UK audience doesnt care, it isnt true elsewhere.
Also big difference between Indians approach and LIV / Rubgy360, Indians are doing it with the cricket authorities, those other examples tried to break adminstration of the game.
Yes. There was a separate breakaway T20 comp, the ICL, which went the same way as Nana and the Angles.
The other good question on prisons is why are we paying the Eton school fees to house 10,772 criminals who aren't even British citizens? Deport them, use the space freed up to keep some of our own nasties off the streets. If their countries won't take them, stop visas until they change their minds.
The why is of course the ECHR...
Not the ECHR, it would mean we'd have to take back Shamima Begum.
The owner of British Gas has claimed that most households would rather speak with an AI chatbot than deal with the company’s staff as it prepares to cut 1,300 jobs from its call centres.
Centrica, the supplier’s FTSE 100 owner, plans to cut 800 jobs as the company carries out a “targeted deployment of AI tools”, on top of the 500 cutsit confirmed last month.
I don't believe this for one minute.
Having dealt extensively with British Gas staff over the past year I absolutely believe that claim. Their human staff are uniquely stupid, obstructive, rude and useless. An AI that can only tell you to sod off would be an upgrade.
Do enough people here hate Sophie Cunningham to make me love her even more?
Who ?
She’s an excellent women’s basketball player. Her and her incredible teammate, Caitlin Clarke, are being , apparently, picked on and fouled by their opponents. The refs seem to be ignoring much of it
Some suspect that it’s because Sophie and Caitlin are white girls done good
I don't really care for basketball. Are they as bad as the Argentine footballers ?
The public are probably thinking: if we could do so much so quickly at the start of the Covid 19 pandemic, why can't we build some new prisons over the next 3 months?
We should just commandeer some four star hotels. If they are good enough for illegal migrants, they are good enough for villains.
On Trump seemingly adding new conditions to the US Saudi nuclear deal, including Saudi Israel normalization, a Saudi source says: “It was signed. So nothing to renegotiate.”
Ok, so how many of us have clocked that the Commonwealth Games starts tonight and the King and Queen emerged from a tardis 5 minutes ago?
I've just watched one of Star Trek's greatsest ever episodes.
Strange New Worlds is back.
You mean you watched the Best of Both Worlds?
No, this episode is called Valles Marineris.
Today was episode 1 of season 4, the final episode of this season which airs on the 24th of September has made me so exited simply by releasing title of that episode.
Not that they are backwards looking reactionaries or anything.
I would bring it back in smoking rooms. Should be peoples' choice, but not inflict that choice on others.
You would still be inflicting it on staff..
No, you'd take your drink in and bring it out.
Who empties the ashtrays?
What people can't be paid to empty an ashtray now? Is the ash going to jump out and infest them with cancer? Piss off.
So they wear a personal respirator to enter the smoking chamber to collect the smokers' detritus?
You are being utterly absurd. They would clean the ashtrays after the room had been vacated, and frankly many cleaners have to do far worse, as do vast amounts of other workers that you depend on to live what is clearly a very sheltered life.
I would ensure my pub remained no smoking and not expose my staff to the toxic nature of it
That would be your choice. If a landlord wants to make some money by offering a well-ventilated room as a smoking space, providing it was not 'manned', I find it profoundly illiberal to stop them.
Take it from me, it is not illiberal to prevent cancer or copd being caught by anyone and especially working staff in hospitality
Yes it is. I wish everyone a long and healthy life, and I've not smoked more than 20 cigarettes in my entire existence, but if someone would rather be carried away by a smoking related illness at 75, than by something else at 85 or God-willing 95, that is their choice. And in sum, who are we to say that it is a wrong or bad one?
You seem to miss the point that being in a smoking environment can adversely affect the health of the non smokers
Anyway, it is back to the 1950s all over again
If people are not exposed to the smoke but are exposed to a room in which the smoke has been evacuated via ventilation but the smell still remains on the walls and the detritus remains in the ashtrays, then that is unpleasant but not carcinogenic or COPD-inducing
I suspect the health negatives are more than just the immediate inhalation of nicotine and tar.
One can just hope this bunch of ****s never reach government. Although I suspect being hangers, floggers and racists, fags are the least of our worries.
Do enough people here hate Sophie Cunningham to make me love her even more?
Never heard of her
I presume she’s safe to Google ?
She will shake her clothed ass at you
Shake shake shake, shake shake shake Shake yo booty Shake yo booty
I saw KC and the Sunshine Band live at Hallandale racecourse thirty years ago, when I briefly worked there
Tonight, we are enjoying the Boney M Experience.
The Summer Music Nights are in full swing at Britain's racecourses.
At Sandown, it's the Ministry of Sound (Classical) tomorrow and Billy Ocean next Wednesday - you'll remember "when the going gets tough, the tough go racing".
York has Craig David tomorrow evening.
Newmarket have Aitch (I thought he was in Steps but I think it's someone else), Jessie J, Craig David and the Kaiser Chiefs still to come.
Lingfield, where money is more of an object, have Absolute Country, Abba Party and Rum & Reggae over the next three Saturday nights.
Throw in lager at £7.95 per pint and it's a licence to print money.
The owner of British Gas has claimed that most households would rather speak with an AI chatbot than deal with the company’s staff as it prepares to cut 1,300 jobs from its call centres.
Centrica, the supplier’s FTSE 100 owner, plans to cut 800 jobs as the company carries out a “targeted deployment of AI tools”, on top of the 500 cutsit confirmed last month.
I don't believe this for one minute.
Yes, thats nonsense.
I'm with British Gas Lite, who are very fond of outsourcing their customer care/ online staff to India. Chat bots are purely a means to keep real human staff at arms length from customers
Ok, so how many of us have clocked that the Commonwealth Games starts tonight and the King and Queen emerged from a tardis 5 minutes ago?
I've just watched one of Star Trek's greatsest ever episodes.
Strange New Worlds is back.
You mean you watched the Best of Both Worlds?
No, this episode is called Valles Marineris.
Today was episode 1 of season 4, the final episode of this season which airs on the 24th of September has made me so exited simply by releasing title of that episode.
Tomorrow's Enterprise.
To talk Trek for a moment, there was a book where Kirk's Enterprise was also thrown back 65 million years and diverted the Chichxulub asteroid thus changing history. When they returned to their 24th century, humans had never evolved and Romulans and Klingons were at war in the Solar System.
Needless to say, everything got put back to how it should be - I don't think they used the Guardian of Forever.
The owner of British Gas has claimed that most households would rather speak with an AI chatbot than deal with the company’s staff as it prepares to cut 1,300 jobs from its call centres.
Centrica, the supplier’s FTSE 100 owner, plans to cut 800 jobs as the company carries out a “targeted deployment of AI tools”, on top of the 500 cutsit confirmed last month.
I don't believe this for one minute.
Yes, thats nonsense.
I'm with British Gas Lite, who are very fond of outsourcing their customer care/ online staff to India. Chat bots are purely a means to keep real human staff at arms length from customers
The owner of British Gas has claimed that most households would rather speak with an AI chatbot than deal with the company’s staff as it prepares to cut 1,300 jobs from its call centres.
Centrica, the supplier’s FTSE 100 owner, plans to cut 800 jobs as the company carries out a “targeted deployment of AI tools”, on top of the 500 cutsit confirmed last month.
I don't believe this for one minute.
Having dealt extensively with British Gas staff over the past year I absolutely believe that claim. Their human staff are uniquely stupid, obstructive, rude and useless. An AI that can only tell you to sod off would be an upgrade.
Mainly based in South Africa.
Used to get S Africans all the time, then they started setting up loads of staff in India, to deal with the BG Lite online only tariffs. If you thought the South Africans were bad ...
I don't see anything that has suddenly made the Tories more competent, or looking more competent, since they were turfed out in 2024?
The only real change has been that Reform has been foolish enough to relieve the Tories of some of their most incompetent ministers, such that both of them risk being seen as not up to the job of government.
History suggests that when parties are decisively thrown out of government for negative reasons, it takes more than one GE before people forget and their reputation recovers. I see nothing different, this time.
I think Mr Meeks yesterday had a better analysis on the Tories - basically they have very few seats they can win and a lot of the seats they currently have are likely to be lost in the next election to the Lib Dems thanks to their shift to the right towards Reform.
Basically if Reform sits at 20% and Burnham consolidates the left wing vote (as he will) the Tories are doomed whenever the next election is..
My take on Meeks is that he is likely influenced to some extent by dislike of the Tories. The other take is that Badenoch is polling way ahead of the party and that gets more important at election time. Once again, those of us on PB, obsessed by test cricket, pizza, radiohead, F1, politics and betting tend to forget that the vast, vast majority of the country cares little for politics, and many cannot even tell you who is the leader of the Liberal Democrats. We should also remember that at the next election every seat starts from scratch. Yes there is an incumbency effect, yes local performance of councils and councillors matters and yes the activist base is important, but I think its simply wrong to say that there are very few seats where the Tories can win. Why? In 2019 they won many of them, and those voters can return.
I remember people saying the same thing in 2022-2024 when he was predicting an epochal defeat for the Tories.
Which is a totally fair point, but I think my point about leaders vs party ratings, and the general public is true too.
I wouldn't be surprised by (a) further Tory decline to sub 100 seats or (b) a modest recovery to near or just over 200.
Hard to see more than that.
If you look at Mr Meek's analysis he doesn't and I don't see any seats that the Tories don't already have where they have a chance of winning.
I think keeping 100 seats will take a miracle for the Tory party - and that's ignoring the current insane plan of removing anyone without the "right viewpoint" on a single issue - which when mentioned at an election will cost the Tory party some votes to the Lib Dems...
You need seats that are narrowly held by Labour, but
a) aren't nice enough to be Lib Dem b) are too nice and have too many people with actual jobs to go Reform.
There are a few, I suspect. Central London, some of the NW London fringes like Hendon and Finchley. There must be similar demographics elsewhere.
But not many.
Which I think is the effect @MoonRabbit identifies in her analysis: Milton Keynes, Trafford, plus the London fringes. Swindon maybe too much Reform. I think the effect also requires Labour to lose votes to the Greens.
The Barratt Home seats?
If Ref crashes then some of the ex-mining and steel seats (Balsover, Peniston) might be worth watching as well.
The other part of the Tories' wait for Reform to collapse calculation then kicks in. Will the dispossessed Reform voter switch to the Conservatives at that point? Andy Burnham seems keen to win them over and these are seats that voted Labour for a century. There's still plenty of muscle memory.
Kemi's unyielding right-wing posture and straight-talking schtik is designed to make her, and the party, palatable to trad Tories who have drifted to Reform. And who, at the end of the day, don't really see Reform as fit to run the country. You won't ever get the Lee Andersons back tho.
The Meeks prognosis is bleak, and has some truth to it, but Conservatives will be encouraged by Kemi's ratings - miles better than Farage's - and that the LibDems really don't seem to be doing much nationally. If the Home Counties middle classes want rid of Labour badly enough they will revert back to the Tories.
Trad Tories who have drifted to Reform. And who, at the end of the day, don't really see Reform as fit to run the country
Suspect this intersection in the Venn diagram is small. ie Trad Tories who don't see Reform as fit to run the country are within the 19% that are sticking with the Tories in current polls and didn't drift to Reform in the first place.
We'll see.
+1 - if you don't trust Reform to run the country you are never going to be voting for Reform, so you are going to be reporting as one of those 18% who are voting Tory.
I think Badenoch's strategy is that when Reform collapses, voters who entirely thought Reform was fit to run the country have no choice but to vote Conservative instead.
That this might actually be her best strategy shows the dire straits the party is in. She's making two big assumptions: (a) Reform will collapse; (b) Reform voters will switch to the Conservatives when it does.
Is she not also coping (or trying to) with the loss of the centrist Tories, the one Nation Tories etc that Johnson gave the heave-ho to?
While many on the left hate the Tories, there is a strand of conservatism (small c) in the country. Sound money (stop laughing at the back), fiscal responsibility, self-reliance, state support for those in genuine need, defence of the realm, pro-business, small government.
That case can be made again, but the 14 years from 2010-2024 make it harder to say why.
I fervently believe that Farage is finally reaping what he has sown and that Reform is his latest vessel. May the ship go down with him. When it does (assuming it does) there will be plenty able to return to the Tories if they can be shown a valid reason.
This is why Badenoch's ECHR stuff is politically inept... she is keeping the Lib Dems alive to eat the previously Tory shires...
I’d have thought ECHR is a minuscule issue compared with Badenoch’s views on the switch to electricity and renewables.
Almost everyone sensible knows the current refugee system is insane for the 21st century. But a very large majority of people are pro-Green energy, Lib Dems even more so.
The Tory ECHR policy is using a nuclear bomb to fix a single issue.
It would add us to a list that contains just Russia and Belarus which isn’t really somewhere you want to be.
It’s also just a tick box exercise when comparing against Reform that will please reform favouring Tory voters but disgust Lib Dem tending ones.
Again what is Kemi doing beyond creating a Reform lite party that is still in no man’s land with no clear reason for existence
“Reform the ECHR/Refugee Convention or leave in 12 months”
“O&G revenues to fund renewables”
I think a large majority of people could support those variances on her policies.
Hmm. The first is just saying leave ECHR in 12 months without a debate about its merits. There is zero possibility of the UK unilaterally demanding and getting significant revisions to the treaty, even if it knew what specific revisions it wanted.
O&G revenues to fund renewables doesn't make much sense either. It's hypothecation where energy sources are subsidised anyway. ie we're paying for them somehow or or other. Making electricity cheaper is a good goal. Ed Miliband has been doing some work correcting the previous government allowing costs to get out of control but not enough. Basically I think it's stop nuclear, which is the really big money sink - probably have to see Hinckley Point and Sizewell through to their (very) bitter ends, and finish up current wind projects. Investments from now on are batteries, grid upgrade and solar.
You've missed off the critical bit if this is your strategy - lots and lots of gas turbines. What you've described will work in summer, but living on solar at out latitude isn't going to work for the winter.
There's plenty of wind power under development as well as 6GW from the two new nuclear plants. These may, or may not, have been good investment decisions in hindsight but they contribute to a decent energy mix filled out with additional batteries, particularly, but also solar. But don't go for more wind in AR8 or any further nuclear including SMR if you want the cheapest electricity you can get from this point on
Most importantly, though:
Why is it a problem? If solar provides 100% of our summer daytime use; 70% of our spring and autumn, and 25% of our winter, it will have massively reduced the amount of gas we need to import, at pretty low costs. Now, sure, we use gas in winter, and during the night... but so what? And that will naturally -and gradually- decline as more and more batteries are added to the grid.
The owner of British Gas has claimed that most households would rather speak with an AI chatbot than deal with the company’s staff as it prepares to cut 1,300 jobs from its call centres.
Centrica, the supplier’s FTSE 100 owner, plans to cut 800 jobs as the company carries out a “targeted deployment of AI tools”, on top of the 500 cutsit confirmed last month.
I don't believe this for one minute.
Having dealt extensively with British Gas staff over the past year I absolutely believe that claim. Their human staff are uniquely stupid, obstructive, rude and useless. An AI that can only tell you to sod off would be an upgrade.
Mainly based in South Africa.
Used to get S Africans all the time, then they started setting up loads of staff in India, to deal with the BG Lite online only tariffs. If you thought the South Africans were bad ...
The owner of British Gas has claimed that most households would rather speak with an AI chatbot than deal with the company’s staff as it prepares to cut 1,300 jobs from its call centres.
Centrica, the supplier’s FTSE 100 owner, plans to cut 800 jobs as the company carries out a “targeted deployment of AI tools”, on top of the 500 cutsit confirmed last month.
I don't believe this for one minute.
Having dealt extensively with British Gas staff over the past year I absolutely believe that claim. Their human staff are uniquely stupid, obstructive, rude and useless. An AI that can only tell you to sod off would be an upgrade.
Mainly based in South Africa.
Used to get S Africans all the time, then they started setting up loads of staff in India, to deal with the BG Lite online only tariffs. If you thought the South Africans were bad ...
Last night someone on here, I can't recall who, caused a bit of a stir by saying that 20 million immigrants may have entered the UK at various times over the last 25/30 years or so.
On Trump seemingly adding new conditions to the US Saudi nuclear deal, including Saudi Israel normalization, a Saudi source says: “It was signed. So nothing to renegotiate.”
On Trump seemingly adding new conditions to the US Saudi nuclear deal, including Saudi Israel normalization, a Saudi source says: “It was signed. So nothing to renegotiate.”
"Only 6 per cent of people say they would volunteer to fight if Britain faced the threat of an invasion, a poll has found.
Asked whether they would be willing to defend the country in the face of an “imminent invasion”, 52 per cent of people claimed that they would be ineligible to fight because of age or disability.
While 14 per cent said that they would agree to serve if called up, 17 per cent claimed they would refuse any order to defend their homeland."
On Trump seemingly adding new conditions to the US Saudi nuclear deal, including Saudi Israel normalization, a Saudi source says: “It was signed. So nothing to renegotiate.”
Malice, Greed and Narcissism are all formidable runners in the Trump2 handicap stakes but Cluelessness should not be underestimated. It might yet get its nose in front on the line.
"Only 6 per cent of people say they would volunteer to fight if Britain faced the threat of an invasion, a poll has found.
Asked whether they would be willing to defend the country in the face of an “imminent invasion”, 52 per cent of people claimed that they would be ineligible to fight because of age or disability.
While 14 per cent said that they would agree to serve if called up, 17 per cent claimed they would refuse any order to defend their homeland."
I don't see anything that has suddenly made the Tories more competent, or looking more competent, since they were turfed out in 2024?
The only real change has been that Reform has been foolish enough to relieve the Tories of some of their most incompetent ministers, such that both of them risk being seen as not up to the job of government.
History suggests that when parties are decisively thrown out of government for negative reasons, it takes more than one GE before people forget and their reputation recovers. I see nothing different, this time.
I think Mr Meeks yesterday had a better analysis on the Tories - basically they have very few seats they can win and a lot of the seats they currently have are likely to be lost in the next election to the Lib Dems thanks to their shift to the right towards Reform.
Basically if Reform sits at 20% and Burnham consolidates the left wing vote (as he will) the Tories are doomed whenever the next election is..
My take on Meeks is that he is likely influenced to some extent by dislike of the Tories. The other take is that Badenoch is polling way ahead of the party and that gets more important at election time. Once again, those of us on PB, obsessed by test cricket, pizza, radiohead, F1, politics and betting tend to forget that the vast, vast majority of the country cares little for politics, and many cannot even tell you who is the leader of the Liberal Democrats. We should also remember that at the next election every seat starts from scratch. Yes there is an incumbency effect, yes local performance of councils and councillors matters and yes the activist base is important, but I think its simply wrong to say that there are very few seats where the Tories can win. Why? In 2019 they won many of them, and those voters can return.
I remember people saying the same thing in 2022-2024 when he was predicting an epochal defeat for the Tories.
Which is a totally fair point, but I think my point about leaders vs party ratings, and the general public is true too.
I wouldn't be surprised by (a) further Tory decline to sub 100 seats or (b) a modest recovery to near or just over 200.
Hard to see more than that.
If you look at Mr Meek's analysis he doesn't and I don't see any seats that the Tories don't already have where they have a chance of winning.
I think keeping 100 seats will take a miracle for the Tory party - and that's ignoring the current insane plan of removing anyone without the "right viewpoint" on a single issue - which when mentioned at an election will cost the Tory party some votes to the Lib Dems...
You need seats that are narrowly held by Labour, but
a) aren't nice enough to be Lib Dem b) are too nice and have too many people with actual jobs to go Reform.
There are a few, I suspect. Central London, some of the NW London fringes like Hendon and Finchley. There must be similar demographics elsewhere.
But not many.
Which I think is the effect @MoonRabbit identifies in her analysis: Milton Keynes, Trafford, plus the London fringes. Swindon maybe too much Reform. I think the effect also requires Labour to lose votes to the Greens.
The Barratt Home seats?
If Ref crashes then some of the ex-mining and steel seats (Balsover, Peniston) might be worth watching as well.
The other part of the Tories' wait for Reform to collapse calculation then kicks in. Will the dispossessed Reform voter switch to the Conservatives at that point? Andy Burnham seems keen to win them over and these are seats that voted Labour for a century. There's still plenty of muscle memory.
Kemi's unyielding right-wing posture and straight-talking schtik is designed to make her, and the party, palatable to trad Tories who have drifted to Reform. And who, at the end of the day, don't really see Reform as fit to run the country. You won't ever get the Lee Andersons back tho.
The Meeks prognosis is bleak, and has some truth to it, but Conservatives will be encouraged by Kemi's ratings - miles better than Farage's - and that the LibDems really don't seem to be doing much nationally. If the Home Counties middle classes want rid of Labour badly enough they will revert back to the Tories.
Trad Tories who have drifted to Reform. And who, at the end of the day, don't really see Reform as fit to run the country
Suspect this intersection in the Venn diagram is small. ie Trad Tories who don't see Reform as fit to run the country are within the 19% that are sticking with the Tories in current polls and didn't drift to Reform in the first place.
We'll see.
+1 - if you don't trust Reform to run the country you are never going to be voting for Reform, so you are going to be reporting as one of those 18% who are voting Tory.
I think Badenoch's strategy is that when Reform collapses, voters who entirely thought Reform was fit to run the country have no choice but to vote Conservative instead.
That this might actually be her best strategy shows the dire straits the party is in. She's making two big assumptions: (a) Reform will collapse; (b) Reform voters will switch to the Conservatives when it does.
Is she not also coping (or trying to) with the loss of the centrist Tories, the one Nation Tories etc that Johnson gave the heave-ho to?
While many on the left hate the Tories, there is a strand of conservatism (small c) in the country. Sound money (stop laughing at the back), fiscal responsibility, self-reliance, state support for those in genuine need, defence of the realm, pro-business, small government.
That case can be made again, but the 14 years from 2010-2024 make it harder to say why.
I fervently believe that Farage is finally reaping what he has sown and that Reform is his latest vessel. May the ship go down with him. When it does (assuming it does) there will be plenty able to return to the Tories if they can be shown a valid reason.
This is why Badenoch's ECHR stuff is politically inept... she is keeping the Lib Dems alive to eat the previously Tory shires...
I’d have thought ECHR is a minuscule issue compared with Badenoch’s views on the switch to electricity and renewables.
Almost everyone sensible knows the current refugee system is insane for the 21st century. But a very large majority of people are pro-Green energy, Lib Dems even more so.
The Tory ECHR policy is using a nuclear bomb to fix a single issue.
It would add us to a list that contains just Russia and Belarus which isn’t really somewhere you want to be.
It’s also just a tick box exercise when comparing against Reform that will please reform favouring Tory voters but disgust Lib Dem tending ones.
Again what is Kemi doing beyond creating a Reform lite party that is still in no man’s land with no clear reason for existence
“Reform the ECHR/Refugee Convention or leave in 12 months”
“O&G revenues to fund renewables”
I think a large majority of people could support those variances on her policies.
Hmm. The first is just saying leave ECHR in 12 months without a debate about its merits. There is zero possibility of the UK unilaterally demanding and getting significant revisions to the treaty, even if it knew what specific revisions it wanted.
O&G revenues to fund renewables doesn't make much sense either. It's hypothecation where energy sources are subsidised anyway. ie we're paying for them somehow or or other. Making electricity cheaper is a good goal. Ed Miliband has been doing some work correcting the previous government allowing costs to get out of control but not enough. Basically I think it's stop nuclear, which is the really big money sink - probably have to see Hinckley Point and Sizewell through to their (very) bitter ends, and finish up current wind projects. Investments from now on are batteries, grid upgrade and solar.
You've missed off the critical bit if this is your strategy - lots and lots of gas turbines. What you've described will work in summer, but living on solar at out latitude isn't going to work for the winter.
There's plenty of wind power under development as well as 6GW from the two new nuclear plants. These may, or may not, have been good investment decisions in hindsight but they contribute to a decent energy mix filled out with additional batteries, particularly, but also solar. But don't go for more wind in AR8 or any further nuclear including SMR if you want the cheapest electricity you can get from this point on
Most importantly, though:
Why is it a problem? If solar provides 100% of our summer daytime use; 70% of our spring and autumn, and 25% of our winter, it will have massively reduced the amount of gas we need to import, at pretty low costs. Now, sure, we use gas in winter, and during the night... but so what? And that will naturally -and gradually- decline as more and more batteries are added to the grid.
I agree with this, although I believe new gas turbines have got a lot more expensive, as have other electric generation technologies, so building new gas power stations "just in case" is looking relatively less cost effective, compared with going straight to batteries.
Add: batteries were majorly responsible for preventing a blackout in June along with some deft placing of interconnector supplies. At the moment in conjunction with gas generation, but batteries are already a critical part of the mix
Alphabet beat on every headline number tonight. Revenue up 24%. Cloud up 82%. EPS of $9.11. But $6.26 of that EPS came from paper gains on Alphabet's Anthropic stake*, not from operations. Strip that out and operating EPS is about $2.85. Free cash flow went negative for the first time in Alphabet's history. Long-term debt more than doubled in six months. Stock buybacks dropped to zero. https://x.com/HedgieMarkets/status/2080035162906390756
*Actually Anthropic and SpaceX. But SpaceX is also likely way overvalued if they don't get Starship to work.
AI is here to stay, obviously. What's not obvious is the value being given to all of the companies spending tens of billions to try and dominate the market.
What's certain is that some of them will fail to do so.
The other problem is that when customers are charged more realistic prices, they might walk away.
They're already doing so, which is a problem as both OpenAI and Anthropic have enormous financial commitments that require constant, rapid growth to sustain. Despite AI's numerous problems the biggest issue was never technical, but financial. It just costs too much for the benefits it provides.
Read an interesting article about the Chinese approach.
Basically they interrogate your AI to train theirs for a fraction of the price.
It's never as good as the latest model, but usually at least as good as the last one if not better and what's more oftena lot cheaper or even free.
Whether intentionall or not they may be bleeding the US dry.
The US spends 100's of millions on a new model and to pay for it need lots of customers to use it, either upgrade or pay more. The chineses make a copy for 10's of millions and sell it or charge a far lower fee or again even make it free.
Customers have choice;
1) Pay more for the new model and hope it gives them the edge and pays for itself. 2) Stick with the current model,paying the same but risk fall behind or missing out on savings or. 3) Switch to the far cheaper just as good chinese model, which might give a marginal improvement at lower cost?
At what point and how many existing users have to take option 3 and go Chinese for the US model to be finacially unsustainable?
Answers?
Peter.
The Chinese ethos of cheaply training 'trailing-edge' models is a sensible one I believe, because the performance of LLMs is starting the plateau. So the gap between a US frontier model and a less costly Chinese one is narrowing all the time. Also, OpenAI and Anthropic are basically producing gold plated models, where they spend crazy money to enhance the model's capabilities by small amounts.
But, the Chinese method does nothing for inference costs, and that's the big killer. These days the amount of money required to run the datacentres for AI is gigantic and growing constantly. That's why the American companies can't just offer big discounts for access to their older models.
I think we're at the beginning of a race to the bottom, because the single biggest attribute of an LLM model is no longer capability but cost. They're becoming a commodity. Which is death for the US developers because of their financial position.
I've maintained for some time that the future of corporate AI is not vast, billion dollar datacentres but a server that sits in the corner and runs a couple of useful models. No monthly token charges and your data never leaves the building. Home users will still mostly use the cloud (although hardware prices coming down will make local hosting more attractive for heavy users) but that's nowhere near enough of a market to keep the big AI vendors in business.
I run Qwen 3.6 35bn MOE at home, and it's incredibly capable and decently quick. It's basically Sonnet from 12 months ago.
Fable in Claude Code is awesome. I used to be a pretty good developer and it's as good as me at the things I was good at, and MUCH better than me at all the bits I hated. Every time I think I'll save some Fable tokens and drop back to Opus or Sonnet I start shouting at it "You're so STUPID".
I'm also using Qwen 3.6. I only have a 16G video card but it still runs acceptably (for me). I do have 192G of main memory tho.
It might not be as good as Claude but the function/price ratio is clearly better. There's always some manual tweaking anyway.
If you were purely vibe coding then I guess the more advanced model might be worth the cost.
"Only 6 per cent of people say they would volunteer to fight if Britain faced the threat of an invasion, a poll has found.
Asked whether they would be willing to defend the country in the face of an “imminent invasion”, 52 per cent of people claimed that they would be ineligible to fight because of age or disability.
While 14 per cent said that they would agree to serve if called up, 17 per cent claimed they would refuse any order to defend their homeland."
Ok, so how many of us have clocked that the Commonwealth Games starts tonight and the King and Queen emerged from a tardis 5 minutes ago?
Dafuq?????
(runs to iPlayer)
Channel 5!
You have to sign in to Channel 5, so f*** it. I've just seen it in some kind of YouTube pirated thing. Sylvester McCoy was in it, and he's far too old now. If memory serves it's Jodie's police box they are using.
I don't see anything that has suddenly made the Tories more competent, or looking more competent, since they were turfed out in 2024?
The only real change has been that Reform has been foolish enough to relieve the Tories of some of their most incompetent ministers, such that both of them risk being seen as not up to the job of government.
History suggests that when parties are decisively thrown out of government for negative reasons, it takes more than one GE before people forget and their reputation recovers. I see nothing different, this time.
I think Mr Meeks yesterday had a better analysis on the Tories - basically they have very few seats they can win and a lot of the seats they currently have are likely to be lost in the next election to the Lib Dems thanks to their shift to the right towards Reform.
Basically if Reform sits at 20% and Burnham consolidates the left wing vote (as he will) the Tories are doomed whenever the next election is..
My take on Meeks is that he is likely influenced to some extent by dislike of the Tories. The other take is that Badenoch is polling way ahead of the party and that gets more important at election time. Once again, those of us on PB, obsessed by test cricket, pizza, radiohead, F1, politics and betting tend to forget that the vast, vast majority of the country cares little for politics, and many cannot even tell you who is the leader of the Liberal Democrats. We should also remember that at the next election every seat starts from scratch. Yes there is an incumbency effect, yes local performance of councils and councillors matters and yes the activist base is important, but I think its simply wrong to say that there are very few seats where the Tories can win. Why? In 2019 they won many of them, and those voters can return.
I remember people saying the same thing in 2022-2024 when he was predicting an epochal defeat for the Tories.
Which is a totally fair point, but I think my point about leaders vs party ratings, and the general public is true too.
I wouldn't be surprised by (a) further Tory decline to sub 100 seats or (b) a modest recovery to near or just over 200.
Hard to see more than that.
If you look at Mr Meek's analysis he doesn't and I don't see any seats that the Tories don't already have where they have a chance of winning.
I think keeping 100 seats will take a miracle for the Tory party - and that's ignoring the current insane plan of removing anyone without the "right viewpoint" on a single issue - which when mentioned at an election will cost the Tory party some votes to the Lib Dems...
You need seats that are narrowly held by Labour, but
a) aren't nice enough to be Lib Dem b) are too nice and have too many people with actual jobs to go Reform.
There are a few, I suspect. Central London, some of the NW London fringes like Hendon and Finchley. There must be similar demographics elsewhere.
But not many.
Which I think is the effect @MoonRabbit identifies in her analysis: Milton Keynes, Trafford, plus the London fringes. Swindon maybe too much Reform. I think the effect also requires Labour to lose votes to the Greens.
The Barratt Home seats?
If Ref crashes then some of the ex-mining and steel seats (Balsover, Peniston) might be worth watching as well.
The other part of the Tories' wait for Reform to collapse calculation then kicks in. Will the dispossessed Reform voter switch to the Conservatives at that point? Andy Burnham seems keen to win them over and these are seats that voted Labour for a century. There's still plenty of muscle memory.
Kemi's unyielding right-wing posture and straight-talking schtik is designed to make her, and the party, palatable to trad Tories who have drifted to Reform. And who, at the end of the day, don't really see Reform as fit to run the country. You won't ever get the Lee Andersons back tho.
The Meeks prognosis is bleak, and has some truth to it, but Conservatives will be encouraged by Kemi's ratings - miles better than Farage's - and that the LibDems really don't seem to be doing much nationally. If the Home Counties middle classes want rid of Labour badly enough they will revert back to the Tories.
Trad Tories who have drifted to Reform. And who, at the end of the day, don't really see Reform as fit to run the country
Suspect this intersection in the Venn diagram is small. ie Trad Tories who don't see Reform as fit to run the country are within the 19% that are sticking with the Tories in current polls and didn't drift to Reform in the first place.
We'll see.
+1 - if you don't trust Reform to run the country you are never going to be voting for Reform, so you are going to be reporting as one of those 18% who are voting Tory.
I think Badenoch's strategy is that when Reform collapses, voters who entirely thought Reform was fit to run the country have no choice but to vote Conservative instead.
That this might actually be her best strategy shows the dire straits the party is in. She's making two big assumptions: (a) Reform will collapse; (b) Reform voters will switch to the Conservatives when it does.
Is she not also coping (or trying to) with the loss of the centrist Tories, the one Nation Tories etc that Johnson gave the heave-ho to?
While many on the left hate the Tories, there is a strand of conservatism (small c) in the country. Sound money (stop laughing at the back), fiscal responsibility, self-reliance, state support for those in genuine need, defence of the realm, pro-business, small government.
That case can be made again, but the 14 years from 2010-2024 make it harder to say why.
I fervently believe that Farage is finally reaping what he has sown and that Reform is his latest vessel. May the ship go down with him. When it does (assuming it does) there will be plenty able to return to the Tories if they can be shown a valid reason.
This is why Badenoch's ECHR stuff is politically inept... she is keeping the Lib Dems alive to eat the previously Tory shires...
I’d have thought ECHR is a minuscule issue compared with Badenoch’s views on the switch to electricity and renewables.
Almost everyone sensible knows the current refugee system is insane for the 21st century. But a very large majority of people are pro-Green energy, Lib Dems even more so.
The Tory ECHR policy is using a nuclear bomb to fix a single issue.
It would add us to a list that contains just Russia and Belarus which isn’t really somewhere you want to be.
It’s also just a tick box exercise when comparing against Reform that will please reform favouring Tory voters but disgust Lib Dem tending ones.
Again what is Kemi doing beyond creating a Reform lite party that is still in no man’s land with no clear reason for existence
“Reform the ECHR/Refugee Convention or leave in 12 months”
“O&G revenues to fund renewables”
I think a large majority of people could support those variances on her policies.
Hmm. The first is just saying leave ECHR in 12 months without a debate about its merits. There is zero possibility of the UK unilaterally demanding and getting significant revisions to the treaty, even if it knew what specific revisions it wanted.
O&G revenues to fund renewables doesn't make much sense either. It's hypothecation where energy sources are subsidised anyway. ie we're paying for them somehow or or other. Making electricity cheaper is a good goal. Ed Miliband has been doing some work correcting the previous government allowing costs to get out of control but not enough. Basically I think it's stop nuclear, which is the really big money sink - probably have to see Hinckley Point and Sizewell through to their (very) bitter ends, and finish up current wind projects. Investments from now on are batteries, grid upgrade and solar.
You've missed off the critical bit if this is your strategy - lots and lots of gas turbines. What you've described will work in summer, but living on solar at out latitude isn't going to work for the winter.
There's plenty of wind power under development as well as 6GW from the two new nuclear plants. These may, or may not, have been good investment decisions in hindsight but they contribute to a decent energy mix filled out with additional batteries, particularly, but also solar. But don't go for more wind in AR8 or any further nuclear including SMR if you want the cheapest electricity you can get from this point on
Most importantly, though:
Why is it a problem? If solar provides 100% of our summer daytime use; 70% of our spring and autumn, and 25% of our winter, it will have massively reduced the amount of gas we need to import, at pretty low costs. Now, sure, we use gas in winter, and during the night... but so what? And that will naturally -and gradually- decline as more and more batteries are added to the grid.
We're also fortunate in the UK that wind inversely correlates with sun. I have a basic model based on NESO data from 2024 that found that the challenge will be having enough storage in the autumn rather than the windy winter months.
It also found that there is rapidly diminishing marginal returns to battery investment - getting the UK to about 95% (350 days) renewables/battery coverage is relatively easy - but you'd need 4x as much to get to 99%, and 8x as much to get to 100%. It's complex though, depending on the exact mix of wind, solar and CCGT and gas storage you have - the main lesson is that after setting the appropropriate parameters, we should let the market make that efficient allocation.
At the moment industry/government instinct is the opposite (rent-seeking behaviour + regulatory capture, imo), so I think there's a good chance we throw this opportunity away. 77% of the potential energy produced by Seagreen last year was curtailed - that's 2.7 TWh of power that the people of Dundee and Angus should have had for free, about 5x as much as they actually used.
"Only 6 per cent of people say they would volunteer to fight if Britain faced the threat of an invasion, a poll has found.
Asked whether they would be willing to defend the country in the face of an “imminent invasion”, 52 per cent of people claimed that they would be ineligible to fight because of age or disability.
While 14 per cent said that they would agree to serve if called up, 17 per cent claimed they would refuse any order to defend their homeland."
I don't see anything that has suddenly made the Tories more competent, or looking more competent, since they were turfed out in 2024?
The only real change has been that Reform has been foolish enough to relieve the Tories of some of their most incompetent ministers, such that both of them risk being seen as not up to the job of government.
History suggests that when parties are decisively thrown out of government for negative reasons, it takes more than one GE before people forget and their reputation recovers. I see nothing different, this time.
I think Mr Meeks yesterday had a better analysis on the Tories - basically they have very few seats they can win and a lot of the seats they currently have are likely to be lost in the next election to the Lib Dems thanks to their shift to the right towards Reform.
Basically if Reform sits at 20% and Burnham consolidates the left wing vote (as he will) the Tories are doomed whenever the next election is..
My take on Meeks is that he is likely influenced to some extent by dislike of the Tories. The other take is that Badenoch is polling way ahead of the party and that gets more important at election time. Once again, those of us on PB, obsessed by test cricket, pizza, radiohead, F1, politics and betting tend to forget that the vast, vast majority of the country cares little for politics, and many cannot even tell you who is the leader of the Liberal Democrats. We should also remember that at the next election every seat starts from scratch. Yes there is an incumbency effect, yes local performance of councils and councillors matters and yes the activist base is important, but I think its simply wrong to say that there are very few seats where the Tories can win. Why? In 2019 they won many of them, and those voters can return.
I remember people saying the same thing in 2022-2024 when he was predicting an epochal defeat for the Tories.
Which is a totally fair point, but I think my point about leaders vs party ratings, and the general public is true too.
I wouldn't be surprised by (a) further Tory decline to sub 100 seats or (b) a modest recovery to near or just over 200.
Hard to see more than that.
If you look at Mr Meek's analysis he doesn't and I don't see any seats that the Tories don't already have where they have a chance of winning.
I think keeping 100 seats will take a miracle for the Tory party - and that's ignoring the current insane plan of removing anyone without the "right viewpoint" on a single issue - which when mentioned at an election will cost the Tory party some votes to the Lib Dems...
You need seats that are narrowly held by Labour, but
a) aren't nice enough to be Lib Dem b) are too nice and have too many people with actual jobs to go Reform.
There are a few, I suspect. Central London, some of the NW London fringes like Hendon and Finchley. There must be similar demographics elsewhere.
But not many.
Which I think is the effect @MoonRabbit identifies in her analysis: Milton Keynes, Trafford, plus the London fringes. Swindon maybe too much Reform. I think the effect also requires Labour to lose votes to the Greens.
The Barratt Home seats?
If Ref crashes then some of the ex-mining and steel seats (Balsover, Peniston) might be worth watching as well.
The other part of the Tories' wait for Reform to collapse calculation then kicks in. Will the dispossessed Reform voter switch to the Conservatives at that point? Andy Burnham seems keen to win them over and these are seats that voted Labour for a century. There's still plenty of muscle memory.
Kemi's unyielding right-wing posture and straight-talking schtik is designed to make her, and the party, palatable to trad Tories who have drifted to Reform. And who, at the end of the day, don't really see Reform as fit to run the country. You won't ever get the Lee Andersons back tho.
The Meeks prognosis is bleak, and has some truth to it, but Conservatives will be encouraged by Kemi's ratings - miles better than Farage's - and that the LibDems really don't seem to be doing much nationally. If the Home Counties middle classes want rid of Labour badly enough they will revert back to the Tories.
Trad Tories who have drifted to Reform. And who, at the end of the day, don't really see Reform as fit to run the country
Suspect this intersection in the Venn diagram is small. ie Trad Tories who don't see Reform as fit to run the country are within the 19% that are sticking with the Tories in current polls and didn't drift to Reform in the first place.
We'll see.
+1 - if you don't trust Reform to run the country you are never going to be voting for Reform, so you are going to be reporting as one of those 18% who are voting Tory.
I think Badenoch's strategy is that when Reform collapses, voters who entirely thought Reform was fit to run the country have no choice but to vote Conservative instead.
That this might actually be her best strategy shows the dire straits the party is in. She's making two big assumptions: (a) Reform will collapse; (b) Reform voters will switch to the Conservatives when it does.
Is she not also coping (or trying to) with the loss of the centrist Tories, the one Nation Tories etc that Johnson gave the heave-ho to?
While many on the left hate the Tories, there is a strand of conservatism (small c) in the country. Sound money (stop laughing at the back), fiscal responsibility, self-reliance, state support for those in genuine need, defence of the realm, pro-business, small government.
That case can be made again, but the 14 years from 2010-2024 make it harder to say why.
I fervently believe that Farage is finally reaping what he has sown and that Reform is his latest vessel. May the ship go down with him. When it does (assuming it does) there will be plenty able to return to the Tories if they can be shown a valid reason.
This is why Badenoch's ECHR stuff is politically inept... she is keeping the Lib Dems alive to eat the previously Tory shires...
I’d have thought ECHR is a minuscule issue compared with Badenoch’s views on the switch to electricity and renewables.
Almost everyone sensible knows the current refugee system is insane for the 21st century. But a very large majority of people are pro-Green energy, Lib Dems even more so.
The Tory ECHR policy is using a nuclear bomb to fix a single issue.
It would add us to a list that contains just Russia and Belarus which isn’t really somewhere you want to be.
It’s also just a tick box exercise when comparing against Reform that will please reform favouring Tory voters but disgust Lib Dem tending ones.
Again what is Kemi doing beyond creating a Reform lite party that is still in no man’s land with no clear reason for existence
“Reform the ECHR/Refugee Convention or leave in 12 months”
“O&G revenues to fund renewables”
I think a large majority of people could support those variances on her policies.
Hmm. The first is just saying leave ECHR in 12 months without a debate about its merits. There is zero possibility of the UK unilaterally demanding and getting significant revisions to the treaty, even if it knew what specific revisions it wanted.
O&G revenues to fund renewables doesn't make much sense either. It's hypothecation where energy sources are subsidised anyway. ie we're paying for them somehow or or other. Making electricity cheaper is a good goal. Ed Miliband has been doing some work correcting the previous government allowing costs to get out of control but not enough. Basically I think it's stop nuclear, which is the really big money sink - probably have to see Hinckley Point and Sizewell through to their (very) bitter ends, and finish up current wind projects. Investments from now on are batteries, grid upgrade and solar.
You've missed off the critical bit if this is your strategy - lots and lots of gas turbines. What you've described will work in summer, but living on solar at out latitude isn't going to work for the winter.
There's plenty of wind power under development as well as 6GW from the two new nuclear plants. These may, or may not, have been good investment decisions in hindsight but they contribute to a decent energy mix filled out with additional batteries, particularly, but also solar. But don't go for more wind in AR8 or any further nuclear including SMR if you want the cheapest electricity you can get from this point on
Most importantly, though:
Why is it a problem? If solar provides 100% of our summer daytime use; 70% of our spring and autumn, and 25% of our winter, it will have massively reduced the amount of gas we need to import, at pretty low costs. Now, sure, we use gas in winter, and during the night... but so what? And that will naturally -and gradually- decline as more and more batteries are added to the grid.
We're also fortunate in the UK that wind inversely correlates with sun. I have a basic model based on NESO data from 2024 that found that the challenge will be having enough storage in the autumn rather than the windy winter months.
It also found that there is rapidly diminishing marginal returns to battery investment - getting the UK to about 95% (350 days) renewables/battery coverage is relatively easy - but you'd need 4x as much to get to 99%, and 8x as much to get to 100%. It's complex though, depending on the exact mix of wind, solar and CCGT and gas storage you have - the main lesson is that after setting the appropropriate parameters, we should let the market make that efficient allocation.
At the moment industry/government instinct is the opposite (rent-seeking behaviour + regulatory capture, imo), so I think there's a good chance we throw this opportunity away. 77% of the potential energy produced by Seagreen last year was curtailed - that's 2.7 TWh of power that the people of Dundee and Angus should have had for free, about 5x as much as they actually used.
And which is why Net Zero is silly. You can get Net 90% for very little. So let's get there, and then we can worry about the next 10% later.
I don't see anything that has suddenly made the Tories more competent, or looking more competent, since they were turfed out in 2024?
The only real change has been that Reform has been foolish enough to relieve the Tories of some of their most incompetent ministers, such that both of them risk being seen as not up to the job of government.
History suggests that when parties are decisively thrown out of government for negative reasons, it takes more than one GE before people forget and their reputation recovers. I see nothing different, this time.
I think Mr Meeks yesterday had a better analysis on the Tories - basically they have very few seats they can win and a lot of the seats they currently have are likely to be lost in the next election to the Lib Dems thanks to their shift to the right towards Reform.
Basically if Reform sits at 20% and Burnham consolidates the left wing vote (as he will) the Tories are doomed whenever the next election is..
My take on Meeks is that he is likely influenced to some extent by dislike of the Tories. The other take is that Badenoch is polling way ahead of the party and that gets more important at election time. Once again, those of us on PB, obsessed by test cricket, pizza, radiohead, F1, politics and betting tend to forget that the vast, vast majority of the country cares little for politics, and many cannot even tell you who is the leader of the Liberal Democrats. We should also remember that at the next election every seat starts from scratch. Yes there is an incumbency effect, yes local performance of councils and councillors matters and yes the activist base is important, but I think its simply wrong to say that there are very few seats where the Tories can win. Why? In 2019 they won many of them, and those voters can return.
I remember people saying the same thing in 2022-2024 when he was predicting an epochal defeat for the Tories.
Which is a totally fair point, but I think my point about leaders vs party ratings, and the general public is true too.
I wouldn't be surprised by (a) further Tory decline to sub 100 seats or (b) a modest recovery to near or just over 200.
Hard to see more than that.
If you look at Mr Meek's analysis he doesn't and I don't see any seats that the Tories don't already have where they have a chance of winning.
I think keeping 100 seats will take a miracle for the Tory party - and that's ignoring the current insane plan of removing anyone without the "right viewpoint" on a single issue - which when mentioned at an election will cost the Tory party some votes to the Lib Dems...
You need seats that are narrowly held by Labour, but
a) aren't nice enough to be Lib Dem b) are too nice and have too many people with actual jobs to go Reform.
There are a few, I suspect. Central London, some of the NW London fringes like Hendon and Finchley. There must be similar demographics elsewhere.
But not many.
Which I think is the effect @MoonRabbit identifies in her analysis: Milton Keynes, Trafford, plus the London fringes. Swindon maybe too much Reform. I think the effect also requires Labour to lose votes to the Greens.
The Barratt Home seats?
If Ref crashes then some of the ex-mining and steel seats (Balsover, Peniston) might be worth watching as well.
The other part of the Tories' wait for Reform to collapse calculation then kicks in. Will the dispossessed Reform voter switch to the Conservatives at that point? Andy Burnham seems keen to win them over and these are seats that voted Labour for a century. There's still plenty of muscle memory.
Kemi's unyielding right-wing posture and straight-talking schtik is designed to make her, and the party, palatable to trad Tories who have drifted to Reform. And who, at the end of the day, don't really see Reform as fit to run the country. You won't ever get the Lee Andersons back tho.
The Meeks prognosis is bleak, and has some truth to it, but Conservatives will be encouraged by Kemi's ratings - miles better than Farage's - and that the LibDems really don't seem to be doing much nationally. If the Home Counties middle classes want rid of Labour badly enough they will revert back to the Tories.
Trad Tories who have drifted to Reform. And who, at the end of the day, don't really see Reform as fit to run the country
Suspect this intersection in the Venn diagram is small. ie Trad Tories who don't see Reform as fit to run the country are within the 19% that are sticking with the Tories in current polls and didn't drift to Reform in the first place.
We'll see.
+1 - if you don't trust Reform to run the country you are never going to be voting for Reform, so you are going to be reporting as one of those 18% who are voting Tory.
I think Badenoch's strategy is that when Reform collapses, voters who entirely thought Reform was fit to run the country have no choice but to vote Conservative instead.
That this might actually be her best strategy shows the dire straits the party is in. She's making two big assumptions: (a) Reform will collapse; (b) Reform voters will switch to the Conservatives when it does.
Is she not also coping (or trying to) with the loss of the centrist Tories, the one Nation Tories etc that Johnson gave the heave-ho to?
While many on the left hate the Tories, there is a strand of conservatism (small c) in the country. Sound money (stop laughing at the back), fiscal responsibility, self-reliance, state support for those in genuine need, defence of the realm, pro-business, small government.
That case can be made again, but the 14 years from 2010-2024 make it harder to say why.
I fervently believe that Farage is finally reaping what he has sown and that Reform is his latest vessel. May the ship go down with him. When it does (assuming it does) there will be plenty able to return to the Tories if they can be shown a valid reason.
This is why Badenoch's ECHR stuff is politically inept... she is keeping the Lib Dems alive to eat the previously Tory shires...
I’d have thought ECHR is a minuscule issue compared with Badenoch’s views on the switch to electricity and renewables.
Almost everyone sensible knows the current refugee system is insane for the 21st century. But a very large majority of people are pro-Green energy, Lib Dems even more so.
The Tory ECHR policy is using a nuclear bomb to fix a single issue.
It would add us to a list that contains just Russia and Belarus which isn’t really somewhere you want to be.
It’s also just a tick box exercise when comparing against Reform that will please reform favouring Tory voters but disgust Lib Dem tending ones.
Again what is Kemi doing beyond creating a Reform lite party that is still in no man’s land with no clear reason for existence
“Reform the ECHR/Refugee Convention or leave in 12 months”
“O&G revenues to fund renewables”
I think a large majority of people could support those variances on her policies.
Hmm. The first is just saying leave ECHR in 12 months without a debate about its merits. There is zero possibility of the UK unilaterally demanding and getting significant revisions to the treaty, even if it knew what specific revisions it wanted.
O&G revenues to fund renewables doesn't make much sense either. It's hypothecation where energy sources are subsidised anyway. ie we're paying for them somehow or or other. Making electricity cheaper is a good goal. Ed Miliband has been doing some work correcting the previous government allowing costs to get out of control but not enough. Basically I think it's stop nuclear, which is the really big money sink - probably have to see Hinckley Point and Sizewell through to their (very) bitter ends, and finish up current wind projects. Investments from now on are batteries, grid upgrade and solar.
You've missed off the critical bit if this is your strategy - lots and lots of gas turbines. What you've described will work in summer, but living on solar at out latitude isn't going to work for the winter.
There's plenty of wind power under development as well as 6GW from the two new nuclear plants. These may, or may not, have been good investment decisions in hindsight but they contribute to a decent energy mix filled out with additional batteries, particularly, but also solar. But don't go for more wind in AR8 or any further nuclear including SMR if you want the cheapest electricity you can get from this point on
Most importantly, though:
Why is it a problem? If solar provides 100% of our summer daytime use; 70% of our spring and autumn, and 25% of our winter, it will have massively reduced the amount of gas we need to import, at pretty low costs. Now, sure, we use gas in winter, and during the night... but so what? And that will naturally -and gradually- decline as more and more batteries are added to the grid.
I agree with this, although I believe new gas turbines have got a lot more expensive, as have other electric generation technologies, so building new gas power stations "just in case" is looking relatively less cost effective, compared with going straight to batteries.
Add: batteries were majorly responsible for preventing a blackout in June along with some deft placing of interconnector supplies. At the moment in conjunction with gas generation, but batteries are already a critical part of the mix
The cost of gas fired power generation is not the power stations themselves (although, I admit the prices for them have recently spiked thanks to AI), but the natural gas itself.
"Only 6 per cent of people say they would volunteer to fight if Britain faced the threat of an invasion, a poll has found.
Asked whether they would be willing to defend the country in the face of an “imminent invasion”, 52 per cent of people claimed that they would be ineligible to fight because of age or disability.
While 14 per cent said that they would agree to serve if called up, 17 per cent claimed they would refuse any order to defend their homeland."
I don't see anything that has suddenly made the Tories more competent, or looking more competent, since they were turfed out in 2024?
The only real change has been that Reform has been foolish enough to relieve the Tories of some of their most incompetent ministers, such that both of them risk being seen as not up to the job of government.
History suggests that when parties are decisively thrown out of government for negative reasons, it takes more than one GE before people forget and their reputation recovers. I see nothing different, this time.
I think Mr Meeks yesterday had a better analysis on the Tories - basically they have very few seats they can win and a lot of the seats they currently have are likely to be lost in the next election to the Lib Dems thanks to their shift to the right towards Reform.
Basically if Reform sits at 20% and Burnham consolidates the left wing vote (as he will) the Tories are doomed whenever the next election is..
My take on Meeks is that he is likely influenced to some extent by dislike of the Tories. The other take is that Badenoch is polling way ahead of the party and that gets more important at election time. Once again, those of us on PB, obsessed by test cricket, pizza, radiohead, F1, politics and betting tend to forget that the vast, vast majority of the country cares little for politics, and many cannot even tell you who is the leader of the Liberal Democrats. We should also remember that at the next election every seat starts from scratch. Yes there is an incumbency effect, yes local performance of councils and councillors matters and yes the activist base is important, but I think its simply wrong to say that there are very few seats where the Tories can win. Why? In 2019 they won many of them, and those voters can return.
I remember people saying the same thing in 2022-2024 when he was predicting an epochal defeat for the Tories.
Which is a totally fair point, but I think my point about leaders vs party ratings, and the general public is true too.
I wouldn't be surprised by (a) further Tory decline to sub 100 seats or (b) a modest recovery to near or just over 200.
Hard to see more than that.
If you look at Mr Meek's analysis he doesn't and I don't see any seats that the Tories don't already have where they have a chance of winning.
I think keeping 100 seats will take a miracle for the Tory party - and that's ignoring the current insane plan of removing anyone without the "right viewpoint" on a single issue - which when mentioned at an election will cost the Tory party some votes to the Lib Dems...
You need seats that are narrowly held by Labour, but
a) aren't nice enough to be Lib Dem b) are too nice and have too many people with actual jobs to go Reform.
There are a few, I suspect. Central London, some of the NW London fringes like Hendon and Finchley. There must be similar demographics elsewhere.
But not many.
Which I think is the effect @MoonRabbit identifies in her analysis: Milton Keynes, Trafford, plus the London fringes. Swindon maybe too much Reform. I think the effect also requires Labour to lose votes to the Greens.
The Barratt Home seats?
If Ref crashes then some of the ex-mining and steel seats (Balsover, Peniston) might be worth watching as well.
The other part of the Tories' wait for Reform to collapse calculation then kicks in. Will the dispossessed Reform voter switch to the Conservatives at that point? Andy Burnham seems keen to win them over and these are seats that voted Labour for a century. There's still plenty of muscle memory.
Kemi's unyielding right-wing posture and straight-talking schtik is designed to make her, and the party, palatable to trad Tories who have drifted to Reform. And who, at the end of the day, don't really see Reform as fit to run the country. You won't ever get the Lee Andersons back tho.
The Meeks prognosis is bleak, and has some truth to it, but Conservatives will be encouraged by Kemi's ratings - miles better than Farage's - and that the LibDems really don't seem to be doing much nationally. If the Home Counties middle classes want rid of Labour badly enough they will revert back to the Tories.
Trad Tories who have drifted to Reform. And who, at the end of the day, don't really see Reform as fit to run the country
Suspect this intersection in the Venn diagram is small. ie Trad Tories who don't see Reform as fit to run the country are within the 19% that are sticking with the Tories in current polls and didn't drift to Reform in the first place.
We'll see.
+1 - if you don't trust Reform to run the country you are never going to be voting for Reform, so you are going to be reporting as one of those 18% who are voting Tory.
I think Badenoch's strategy is that when Reform collapses, voters who entirely thought Reform was fit to run the country have no choice but to vote Conservative instead.
That this might actually be her best strategy shows the dire straits the party is in. She's making two big assumptions: (a) Reform will collapse; (b) Reform voters will switch to the Conservatives when it does.
Is she not also coping (or trying to) with the loss of the centrist Tories, the one Nation Tories etc that Johnson gave the heave-ho to?
While many on the left hate the Tories, there is a strand of conservatism (small c) in the country. Sound money (stop laughing at the back), fiscal responsibility, self-reliance, state support for those in genuine need, defence of the realm, pro-business, small government.
That case can be made again, but the 14 years from 2010-2024 make it harder to say why.
I fervently believe that Farage is finally reaping what he has sown and that Reform is his latest vessel. May the ship go down with him. When it does (assuming it does) there will be plenty able to return to the Tories if they can be shown a valid reason.
This is why Badenoch's ECHR stuff is politically inept... she is keeping the Lib Dems alive to eat the previously Tory shires...
I’d have thought ECHR is a minuscule issue compared with Badenoch’s views on the switch to electricity and renewables.
Almost everyone sensible knows the current refugee system is insane for the 21st century. But a very large majority of people are pro-Green energy, Lib Dems even more so.
The Tory ECHR policy is using a nuclear bomb to fix a single issue.
It would add us to a list that contains just Russia and Belarus which isn’t really somewhere you want to be.
It’s also just a tick box exercise when comparing against Reform that will please reform favouring Tory voters but disgust Lib Dem tending ones.
Again what is Kemi doing beyond creating a Reform lite party that is still in no man’s land with no clear reason for existence
“Reform the ECHR/Refugee Convention or leave in 12 months”
“O&G revenues to fund renewables”
I think a large majority of people could support those variances on her policies.
Hmm. The first is just saying leave ECHR in 12 months without a debate about its merits. There is zero possibility of the UK unilaterally demanding and getting significant revisions to the treaty, even if it knew what specific revisions it wanted.
O&G revenues to fund renewables doesn't make much sense either. It's hypothecation where energy sources are subsidised anyway. ie we're paying for them somehow or or other. Making electricity cheaper is a good goal. Ed Miliband has been doing some work correcting the previous government allowing costs to get out of control but not enough. Basically I think it's stop nuclear, which is the really big money sink - probably have to see Hinckley Point and Sizewell through to their (very) bitter ends, and finish up current wind projects. Investments from now on are batteries, grid upgrade and solar.
You've missed off the critical bit if this is your strategy - lots and lots of gas turbines. What you've described will work in summer, but living on solar at out latitude isn't going to work for the winter.
There's plenty of wind power under development as well as 6GW from the two new nuclear plants. These may, or may not, have been good investment decisions in hindsight but they contribute to a decent energy mix filled out with additional batteries, particularly, but also solar. But don't go for more wind in AR8 or any further nuclear including SMR if you want the cheapest electricity you can get from this point on
Most importantly, though:
Why is it a problem? If solar provides 100% of our summer daytime use; 70% of our spring and autumn, and 25% of our winter, it will have massively reduced the amount of gas we need to import, at pretty low costs. Now, sure, we use gas in winter, and during the night... but so what? And that will naturally -and gradually- decline as more and more batteries are added to the grid.
We're also fortunate in the UK that wind inversely correlates with sun. I have a basic model based on NESO data from 2024 that found that the challenge will be having enough storage in the autumn rather than the windy winter months.
It also found that there is rapidly diminishing marginal returns to battery investment - getting the UK to about 95% (350 days) renewables/battery coverage is relatively easy - but you'd need 4x as much to get to 99%, and 8x as much to get to 100%. It's complex though, depending on the exact mix of wind, solar and CCGT and gas storage you have - the main lesson is that after setting the appropropriate parameters, we should let the market make that efficient allocation.
At the moment industry/government instinct is the opposite (rent-seeking behaviour + regulatory capture, imo), so I think there's a good chance we throw this opportunity away. 77% of the potential energy produced by Seagreen last year was curtailed - that's 2.7 TWh of power that the people of Dundee and Angus should have had for free, about 5x as much as they actually used.
And which is why Net Zero is silly. You can get Net 90% for very little. So let's get there, and then we can worry about the next 10% later.
Well, why Gross Zero is silly. Though I appreciate the netting off bit remains a bit tricky - I have faith in human ingenuity to come up with something at scale over the next 25 years.
Anyone know anything about this company planning to put mirrors in space to provide daylight at night?
They say that a 60 foot mirror will illuminated a disc three miles wide, but that's only going to get you enough sunlight for twilight (with the light from a small mirror sort over a large area), and it's not going to help you with solar farms or growing more food.
"Only 6 per cent of people say they would volunteer to fight if Britain faced the threat of an invasion, a poll has found.
Asked whether they would be willing to defend the country in the face of an “imminent invasion”, 52 per cent of people claimed that they would be ineligible to fight because of age or disability.
While 14 per cent said that they would agree to serve if called up, 17 per cent claimed they would refuse any order to defend their homeland."
This is always the case in a period of peace. I have friends my age who were genuinely perplexed and angry about Burnham allowing the Russians to conduct a live firing exercise 40 miles of the coast in the middle of the Channel, the busiest shipping lane in the world. So the instinct is there.
And historically only a small proportion of people are fit enough to actually fight - 10s of thousands of young people are rejected by the British Army each year on health grounds, and stuff like diabetes among young people is higher than ever. It's why the dichotomy made between active travel investment and defence spending was the most stupid one I've heard all year. Otoh, if you're good at COD you're probably good at flying a drone...
Alphabet beat on every headline number tonight. Revenue up 24%. Cloud up 82%. EPS of $9.11. But $6.26 of that EPS came from paper gains on Alphabet's Anthropic stake*, not from operations. Strip that out and operating EPS is about $2.85. Free cash flow went negative for the first time in Alphabet's history. Long-term debt more than doubled in six months. Stock buybacks dropped to zero. https://x.com/HedgieMarkets/status/2080035162906390756
*Actually Anthropic and SpaceX. But SpaceX is also likely way overvalued if they don't get Starship to work.
AI is here to stay, obviously. What's not obvious is the value being given to all of the companies spending tens of billions to try and dominate the market.
What's certain is that some of them will fail to do so.
The other problem is that when customers are charged more realistic prices, they might walk away.
They're already doing so, which is a problem as both OpenAI and Anthropic have enormous financial commitments that require constant, rapid growth to sustain. Despite AI's numerous problems the biggest issue was never technical, but financial. It just costs too much for the benefits it provides.
Read an interesting article about the Chinese approach.
Basically they interrogate your AI to train theirs for a fraction of the price.
It's never as good as the latest model, but usually at least as good as the last one if not better and what's more oftena lot cheaper or even free.
Whether intentionall or not they may be bleeding the US dry.
The US spends 100's of millions on a new model and to pay for it need lots of customers to use it, either upgrade or pay more. The chineses make a copy for 10's of millions and sell it or charge a far lower fee or again even make it free.
Customers have choice;
1) Pay more for the new model and hope it gives them the edge and pays for itself. 2) Stick with the current model,paying the same but risk fall behind or missing out on savings or. 3) Switch to the far cheaper just as good chinese model, which might give a marginal improvement at lower cost?
At what point and how many existing users have to take option 3 and go Chinese for the US model to be finacially unsustainable?
Answers?
Peter.
The Chinese ethos of cheaply training 'trailing-edge' models is a sensible one I believe, because the performance of LLMs is starting the plateau. So the gap between a US frontier model and a less costly Chinese one is narrowing all the time. Also, OpenAI and Anthropic are basically producing gold plated models, where they spend crazy money to enhance the model's capabilities by small amounts.
But, the Chinese method does nothing for inference costs, and that's the big killer. These days the amount of money required to run the datacentres for AI is gigantic and growing constantly. That's why the American companies can't just offer big discounts for access to their older models.
I think we're at the beginning of a race to the bottom, because the single biggest attribute of an LLM model is no longer capability but cost. They're becoming a commodity. Which is death for the US developers because of their financial position.
I've maintained for some time that the future of corporate AI is not vast, billion dollar datacentres but a server that sits in the corner and runs a couple of useful models. No monthly token charges and your data never leaves the building. Home users will still mostly use the cloud (although hardware prices coming down will make local hosting more attractive for heavy users) but that's nowhere near enough of a market to keep the big AI vendors in business.
I run Qwen 3.6 35bn MOE at home, and it's incredibly capable and decently quick. It's basically Sonnet from 12 months ago.
Fable in Claude Code is awesome. I used to be a pretty good developer and it's as good as me at the things I was good at, and MUCH better than me at all the bits I hated. Every time I think I'll save some Fable tokens and drop back to Opus or Sonnet I start shouting at it "You're so STUPID".
I'm also using Qwen 3.6. I only have a 16G video card but it still runs acceptably (for me). I do have 192G of main memory tho.
It might not be as good as Claude but the function/price ratio is clearly better. There's always some manual tweaking anyway.
If you were purely vibe coding then I guess the more advanced model might be worth the cost.
I run Qwen 3.6 35bn MoE, which is extremely fast and pretty decent
Anyone know anything about this company planning to put mirrors in space to provide daylight at night?
They say that a 60 foot mirror will illuminated a disc three miles wide, but that's only going to get you enough sunlight for twilight (with the light from a small mirror sort over a large area), and it's not going to help you with solar farms or growing more food.
What am I missing?
An economic case?
Remind me, how many years bad luck does one get if a 60 foot mirror smashes.
I don't see anything that has suddenly made the Tories more competent, or looking more competent, since they were turfed out in 2024?
The only real change has been that Reform has been foolish enough to relieve the Tories of some of their most incompetent ministers, such that both of them risk being seen as not up to the job of government.
History suggests that when parties are decisively thrown out of government for negative reasons, it takes more than one GE before people forget and their reputation recovers. I see nothing different, this time.
I think Mr Meeks yesterday had a better analysis on the Tories - basically they have very few seats they can win and a lot of the seats they currently have are likely to be lost in the next election to the Lib Dems thanks to their shift to the right towards Reform.
Basically if Reform sits at 20% and Burnham consolidates the left wing vote (as he will) the Tories are doomed whenever the next election is..
My take on Meeks is that he is likely influenced to some extent by dislike of the Tories. The other take is that Badenoch is polling way ahead of the party and that gets more important at election time. Once again, those of us on PB, obsessed by test cricket, pizza, radiohead, F1, politics and betting tend to forget that the vast, vast majority of the country cares little for politics, and many cannot even tell you who is the leader of the Liberal Democrats. We should also remember that at the next election every seat starts from scratch. Yes there is an incumbency effect, yes local performance of councils and councillors matters and yes the activist base is important, but I think its simply wrong to say that there are very few seats where the Tories can win. Why? In 2019 they won many of them, and those voters can return.
I remember people saying the same thing in 2022-2024 when he was predicting an epochal defeat for the Tories.
Which is a totally fair point, but I think my point about leaders vs party ratings, and the general public is true too.
I wouldn't be surprised by (a) further Tory decline to sub 100 seats or (b) a modest recovery to near or just over 200.
Hard to see more than that.
If you look at Mr Meek's analysis he doesn't and I don't see any seats that the Tories don't already have where they have a chance of winning.
I think keeping 100 seats will take a miracle for the Tory party - and that's ignoring the current insane plan of removing anyone without the "right viewpoint" on a single issue - which when mentioned at an election will cost the Tory party some votes to the Lib Dems...
You need seats that are narrowly held by Labour, but
a) aren't nice enough to be Lib Dem b) are too nice and have too many people with actual jobs to go Reform.
There are a few, I suspect. Central London, some of the NW London fringes like Hendon and Finchley. There must be similar demographics elsewhere.
But not many.
Which I think is the effect @MoonRabbit identifies in her analysis: Milton Keynes, Trafford, plus the London fringes. Swindon maybe too much Reform. I think the effect also requires Labour to lose votes to the Greens.
The Barratt Home seats?
If Ref crashes then some of the ex-mining and steel seats (Balsover, Peniston) might be worth watching as well.
The other part of the Tories' wait for Reform to collapse calculation then kicks in. Will the dispossessed Reform voter switch to the Conservatives at that point? Andy Burnham seems keen to win them over and these are seats that voted Labour for a century. There's still plenty of muscle memory.
Kemi's unyielding right-wing posture and straight-talking schtik is designed to make her, and the party, palatable to trad Tories who have drifted to Reform. And who, at the end of the day, don't really see Reform as fit to run the country. You won't ever get the Lee Andersons back tho.
The Meeks prognosis is bleak, and has some truth to it, but Conservatives will be encouraged by Kemi's ratings - miles better than Farage's - and that the LibDems really don't seem to be doing much nationally. If the Home Counties middle classes want rid of Labour badly enough they will revert back to the Tories.
Trad Tories who have drifted to Reform. And who, at the end of the day, don't really see Reform as fit to run the country
Suspect this intersection in the Venn diagram is small. ie Trad Tories who don't see Reform as fit to run the country are within the 19% that are sticking with the Tories in current polls and didn't drift to Reform in the first place.
We'll see.
+1 - if you don't trust Reform to run the country you are never going to be voting for Reform, so you are going to be reporting as one of those 18% who are voting Tory.
I think Badenoch's strategy is that when Reform collapses, voters who entirely thought Reform was fit to run the country have no choice but to vote Conservative instead.
That this might actually be her best strategy shows the dire straits the party is in. She's making two big assumptions: (a) Reform will collapse; (b) Reform voters will switch to the Conservatives when it does.
Is she not also coping (or trying to) with the loss of the centrist Tories, the one Nation Tories etc that Johnson gave the heave-ho to?
While many on the left hate the Tories, there is a strand of conservatism (small c) in the country. Sound money (stop laughing at the back), fiscal responsibility, self-reliance, state support for those in genuine need, defence of the realm, pro-business, small government.
That case can be made again, but the 14 years from 2010-2024 make it harder to say why.
I fervently believe that Farage is finally reaping what he has sown and that Reform is his latest vessel. May the ship go down with him. When it does (assuming it does) there will be plenty able to return to the Tories if they can be shown a valid reason.
This is why Badenoch's ECHR stuff is politically inept... she is keeping the Lib Dems alive to eat the previously Tory shires...
I’d have thought ECHR is a minuscule issue compared with Badenoch’s views on the switch to electricity and renewables.
Almost everyone sensible knows the current refugee system is insane for the 21st century. But a very large majority of people are pro-Green energy, Lib Dems even more so.
The Tory ECHR policy is using a nuclear bomb to fix a single issue.
It would add us to a list that contains just Russia and Belarus which isn’t really somewhere you want to be.
It’s also just a tick box exercise when comparing against Reform that will please reform favouring Tory voters but disgust Lib Dem tending ones.
Again what is Kemi doing beyond creating a Reform lite party that is still in no man’s land with no clear reason for existence
“Reform the ECHR/Refugee Convention or leave in 12 months”
“O&G revenues to fund renewables”
I think a large majority of people could support those variances on her policies.
Hmm. The first is just saying leave ECHR in 12 months without a debate about its merits. There is zero possibility of the UK unilaterally demanding and getting significant revisions to the treaty, even if it knew what specific revisions it wanted.
O&G revenues to fund renewables doesn't make much sense either. It's hypothecation where energy sources are subsidised anyway. ie we're paying for them somehow or or other. Making electricity cheaper is a good goal. Ed Miliband has been doing some work correcting the previous government allowing costs to get out of control but not enough. Basically I think it's stop nuclear, which is the really big money sink - probably have to see Hinckley Point and Sizewell through to their (very) bitter ends, and finish up current wind projects. Investments from now on are batteries, grid upgrade and solar.
You've missed off the critical bit if this is your strategy - lots and lots of gas turbines. What you've described will work in summer, but living on solar at out latitude isn't going to work for the winter.
There's plenty of wind power under development as well as 6GW from the two new nuclear plants. These may, or may not, have been good investment decisions in hindsight but they contribute to a decent energy mix filled out with additional batteries, particularly, but also solar. But don't go for more wind in AR8 or any further nuclear including SMR if you want the cheapest electricity you can get from this point on
Most importantly, though:
Why is it a problem? If solar provides 100% of our summer daytime use; 70% of our spring and autumn, and 25% of our winter, it will have massively reduced the amount of gas we need to import, at pretty low costs. Now, sure, we use gas in winter, and during the night... but so what? And that will naturally -and gradually- decline as more and more batteries are added to the grid.
We're also fortunate in the UK that wind inversely correlates with sun. I have a basic model based on NESO data from 2024 that found that the challenge will be having enough storage in the autumn rather than the windy winter months.
It also found that there is rapidly diminishing marginal returns to battery investment - getting the UK to about 95% (350 days) renewables/battery coverage is relatively easy - but you'd need 4x as much to get to 99%, and 8x as much to get to 100%. It's complex though, depending on the exact mix of wind, solar and CCGT and gas storage you have - the main lesson is that after setting the appropropriate parameters, we should let the market make that efficient allocation.
At the moment industry/government instinct is the opposite (rent-seeking behaviour + regulatory capture, imo), so I think there's a good chance we throw this opportunity away. 77% of the potential energy produced by Seagreen last year was curtailed - that's 2.7 TWh of power that the people of Dundee and Angus should have had for free, about 5x as much as they actually used.
And which is why Net Zero is silly. You can get Net 90% for very little. So let's get there, and then we can worry about the next 10% later.
Well, why Gross Zero is silly. Though I appreciate the netting off bit remains a bit tricky - I have faith in human ingenuity to come up with something at scale over the next 25 years.
Net Zero is an ambition rather than a reality? Like Vision Zero etc You set out an ambitious target, hope to get most of the way there and to still have a target to meet.
I don't see anything that has suddenly made the Tories more competent, or looking more competent, since they were turfed out in 2024?
The only real change has been that Reform has been foolish enough to relieve the Tories of some of their most incompetent ministers, such that both of them risk being seen as not up to the job of government.
History suggests that when parties are decisively thrown out of government for negative reasons, it takes more than one GE before people forget and their reputation recovers. I see nothing different, this time.
I think Mr Meeks yesterday had a better analysis on the Tories - basically they have very few seats they can win and a lot of the seats they currently have are likely to be lost in the next election to the Lib Dems thanks to their shift to the right towards Reform.
Basically if Reform sits at 20% and Burnham consolidates the left wing vote (as he will) the Tories are doomed whenever the next election is..
My take on Meeks is that he is likely influenced to some extent by dislike of the Tories. The other take is that Badenoch is polling way ahead of the party and that gets more important at election time. Once again, those of us on PB, obsessed by test cricket, pizza, radiohead, F1, politics and betting tend to forget that the vast, vast majority of the country cares little for politics, and many cannot even tell you who is the leader of the Liberal Democrats. We should also remember that at the next election every seat starts from scratch. Yes there is an incumbency effect, yes local performance of councils and councillors matters and yes the activist base is important, but I think its simply wrong to say that there are very few seats where the Tories can win. Why? In 2019 they won many of them, and those voters can return.
I remember people saying the same thing in 2022-2024 when he was predicting an epochal defeat for the Tories.
Which is a totally fair point, but I think my point about leaders vs party ratings, and the general public is true too.
I wouldn't be surprised by (a) further Tory decline to sub 100 seats or (b) a modest recovery to near or just over 200.
Hard to see more than that.
If you look at Mr Meek's analysis he doesn't and I don't see any seats that the Tories don't already have where they have a chance of winning.
I think keeping 100 seats will take a miracle for the Tory party - and that's ignoring the current insane plan of removing anyone without the "right viewpoint" on a single issue - which when mentioned at an election will cost the Tory party some votes to the Lib Dems...
You need seats that are narrowly held by Labour, but
a) aren't nice enough to be Lib Dem b) are too nice and have too many people with actual jobs to go Reform.
There are a few, I suspect. Central London, some of the NW London fringes like Hendon and Finchley. There must be similar demographics elsewhere.
But not many.
Which I think is the effect @MoonRabbit identifies in her analysis: Milton Keynes, Trafford, plus the London fringes. Swindon maybe too much Reform. I think the effect also requires Labour to lose votes to the Greens.
The Barratt Home seats?
If Ref crashes then some of the ex-mining and steel seats (Balsover, Peniston) might be worth watching as well.
The other part of the Tories' wait for Reform to collapse calculation then kicks in. Will the dispossessed Reform voter switch to the Conservatives at that point? Andy Burnham seems keen to win them over and these are seats that voted Labour for a century. There's still plenty of muscle memory.
Kemi's unyielding right-wing posture and straight-talking schtik is designed to make her, and the party, palatable to trad Tories who have drifted to Reform. And who, at the end of the day, don't really see Reform as fit to run the country. You won't ever get the Lee Andersons back tho.
The Meeks prognosis is bleak, and has some truth to it, but Conservatives will be encouraged by Kemi's ratings - miles better than Farage's - and that the LibDems really don't seem to be doing much nationally. If the Home Counties middle classes want rid of Labour badly enough they will revert back to the Tories.
Trad Tories who have drifted to Reform. And who, at the end of the day, don't really see Reform as fit to run the country
Suspect this intersection in the Venn diagram is small. ie Trad Tories who don't see Reform as fit to run the country are within the 19% that are sticking with the Tories in current polls and didn't drift to Reform in the first place.
We'll see.
+1 - if you don't trust Reform to run the country you are never going to be voting for Reform, so you are going to be reporting as one of those 18% who are voting Tory.
I think Badenoch's strategy is that when Reform collapses, voters who entirely thought Reform was fit to run the country have no choice but to vote Conservative instead.
That this might actually be her best strategy shows the dire straits the party is in. She's making two big assumptions: (a) Reform will collapse; (b) Reform voters will switch to the Conservatives when it does.
Is she not also coping (or trying to) with the loss of the centrist Tories, the one Nation Tories etc that Johnson gave the heave-ho to?
While many on the left hate the Tories, there is a strand of conservatism (small c) in the country. Sound money (stop laughing at the back), fiscal responsibility, self-reliance, state support for those in genuine need, defence of the realm, pro-business, small government.
That case can be made again, but the 14 years from 2010-2024 make it harder to say why.
I fervently believe that Farage is finally reaping what he has sown and that Reform is his latest vessel. May the ship go down with him. When it does (assuming it does) there will be plenty able to return to the Tories if they can be shown a valid reason.
This is why Badenoch's ECHR stuff is politically inept... she is keeping the Lib Dems alive to eat the previously Tory shires...
I’d have thought ECHR is a minuscule issue compared with Badenoch’s views on the switch to electricity and renewables.
Almost everyone sensible knows the current refugee system is insane for the 21st century. But a very large majority of people are pro-Green energy, Lib Dems even more so.
The Tory ECHR policy is using a nuclear bomb to fix a single issue.
It would add us to a list that contains just Russia and Belarus which isn’t really somewhere you want to be.
It’s also just a tick box exercise when comparing against Reform that will please reform favouring Tory voters but disgust Lib Dem tending ones.
Again what is Kemi doing beyond creating a Reform lite party that is still in no man’s land with no clear reason for existence
“Reform the ECHR/Refugee Convention or leave in 12 months”
“O&G revenues to fund renewables”
I think a large majority of people could support those variances on her policies.
Hmm. The first is just saying leave ECHR in 12 months without a debate about its merits. There is zero possibility of the UK unilaterally demanding and getting significant revisions to the treaty, even if it knew what specific revisions it wanted.
O&G revenues to fund renewables doesn't make much sense either. It's hypothecation where energy sources are subsidised anyway. ie we're paying for them somehow or or other. Making electricity cheaper is a good goal. Ed Miliband has been doing some work correcting the previous government allowing costs to get out of control but not enough. Basically I think it's stop nuclear, which is the really big money sink - probably have to see Hinckley Point and Sizewell through to their (very) bitter ends, and finish up current wind projects. Investments from now on are batteries, grid upgrade and solar.
You've missed off the critical bit if this is your strategy - lots and lots of gas turbines. What you've described will work in summer, but living on solar at out latitude isn't going to work for the winter.
There's plenty of wind power under development as well as 6GW from the two new nuclear plants. These may, or may not, have been good investment decisions in hindsight but they contribute to a decent energy mix filled out with additional batteries, particularly, but also solar. But don't go for more wind in AR8 or any further nuclear including SMR if you want the cheapest electricity you can get from this point on
Most importantly, though:
Why is it a problem? If solar provides 100% of our summer daytime use; 70% of our spring and autumn, and 25% of our winter, it will have massively reduced the amount of gas we need to import, at pretty low costs. Now, sure, we use gas in winter, and during the night... but so what? And that will naturally -and gradually- decline as more and more batteries are added to the grid.
We're also fortunate in the UK that wind inversely correlates with sun. I have a basic model based on NESO data from 2024 that found that the challenge will be having enough storage in the autumn rather than the windy winter months.
It also found that there is rapidly diminishing marginal returns to battery investment - getting the UK to about 95% (350 days) renewables/battery coverage is relatively easy - but you'd need 4x as much to get to 99%, and 8x as much to get to 100%. It's complex though, depending on the exact mix of wind, solar and CCGT and gas storage you have - the main lesson is that after setting the appropropriate parameters, we should let the market make that efficient allocation.
At the moment industry/government instinct is the opposite (rent-seeking behaviour + regulatory capture, imo), so I think there's a good chance we throw this opportunity away. 77% of the potential energy produced by Seagreen last year was curtailed - that's 2.7 TWh of power that the people of Dundee and Angus should have had for free, about 5x as much as they actually used.
And which is why Net Zero is silly. You can get Net 90% for very little. So let's get there, and then we can worry about the next 10% later.
Well, why Gross Zero is silly. Though I appreciate the netting off bit remains a bit tricky - I have faith in human ingenuity to come up with something at scale over the next 25 years.
Net Zero is an ambition rather than a reality? Like Vision Zero etc You set out an ambitious target, hope to get most of the way there and to still have a target to meet.
Alphabet beat on every headline number tonight. Revenue up 24%. Cloud up 82%. EPS of $9.11. But $6.26 of that EPS came from paper gains on Alphabet's Anthropic stake*, not from operations. Strip that out and operating EPS is about $2.85. Free cash flow went negative for the first time in Alphabet's history. Long-term debt more than doubled in six months. Stock buybacks dropped to zero. https://x.com/HedgieMarkets/status/2080035162906390756
*Actually Anthropic and SpaceX. But SpaceX is also likely way overvalued if they don't get Starship to work.
AI is here to stay, obviously. What's not obvious is the value being given to all of the companies spending tens of billions to try and dominate the market.
What's certain is that some of them will fail to do so.
The other problem is that when customers are charged more realistic prices, they might walk away.
They're already doing so, which is a problem as both OpenAI and Anthropic have enormous financial commitments that require constant, rapid growth to sustain. Despite AI's numerous problems the biggest issue was never technical, but financial. It just costs too much for the benefits it provides.
Read an interesting article about the Chinese approach.
Basically they interrogate your AI to train theirs for a fraction of the price.
It's never as good as the latest model, but usually at least as good as the last one if not better and what's more oftena lot cheaper or even free.
Whether intentionall or not they may be bleeding the US dry.
The US spends 100's of millions on a new model and to pay for it need lots of customers to use it, either upgrade or pay more. The chineses make a copy for 10's of millions and sell it or charge a far lower fee or again even make it free.
Customers have choice;
1) Pay more for the new model and hope it gives them the edge and pays for itself. 2) Stick with the current model,paying the same but risk fall behind or missing out on savings or. 3) Switch to the far cheaper just as good chinese model, which might give a marginal improvement at lower cost?
At what point and how many existing users have to take option 3 and go Chinese for the US model to be finacially unsustainable?
Answers?
Peter.
The Chinese ethos of cheaply training 'trailing-edge' models is a sensible one I believe, because the performance of LLMs is starting the plateau. So the gap between a US frontier model and a less costly Chinese one is narrowing all the time. Also, OpenAI and Anthropic are basically producing gold plated models, where they spend crazy money to enhance the model's capabilities by small amounts.
But, the Chinese method does nothing for inference costs, and that's the big killer. These days the amount of money required to run the datacentres for AI is gigantic and growing constantly. That's why the American companies can't just offer big discounts for access to their older models.
I think we're at the beginning of a race to the bottom, because the single biggest attribute of an LLM model is no longer capability but cost. They're becoming a commodity. Which is death for the US developers because of their financial position.
I've maintained for some time that the future of corporate AI is not vast, billion dollar datacentres but a server that sits in the corner and runs a couple of useful models. No monthly token charges and your data never leaves the building. Home users will still mostly use the cloud (although hardware prices coming down will make local hosting more attractive for heavy users) but that's nowhere near enough of a market to keep the big AI vendors in business.
I run Qwen 3.6 35bn MOE at home, and it's incredibly capable and decently quick. It's basically Sonnet from 12 months ago.
Fable in Claude Code is awesome. I used to be a pretty good developer and it's as good as me at the things I was good at, and MUCH better than me at all the bits I hated. Every time I think I'll save some Fable tokens and drop back to Opus or Sonnet I start shouting at it "You're so STUPID".
I'm also using Qwen 3.6. I only have a 16G video card but it still runs acceptably (for me). I do have 192G of main memory tho.
It might not be as good as Claude but the function/price ratio is clearly better. There's always some manual tweaking anyway.
If you were purely vibe coding then I guess the more advanced model might be worth the cost.
I run Qwen 3.6 35bn MoE, which is extremely fast and pretty decent
Fable goes from "acceptable" and "decent" to really excellent. I'd say its up there with the best programmers I met in forty years in IT in the City. I reckon I've done two years serious work in the last month. And it costs £20 a week.
I don't see anything that has suddenly made the Tories more competent, or looking more competent, since they were turfed out in 2024?
The only real change has been that Reform has been foolish enough to relieve the Tories of some of their most incompetent ministers, such that both of them risk being seen as not up to the job of government.
History suggests that when parties are decisively thrown out of government for negative reasons, it takes more than one GE before people forget and their reputation recovers. I see nothing different, this time.
I think Mr Meeks yesterday had a better analysis on the Tories - basically they have very few seats they can win and a lot of the seats they currently have are likely to be lost in the next election to the Lib Dems thanks to their shift to the right towards Reform.
Basically if Reform sits at 20% and Burnham consolidates the left wing vote (as he will) the Tories are doomed whenever the next election is..
My take on Meeks is that he is likely influenced to some extent by dislike of the Tories. The other take is that Badenoch is polling way ahead of the party and that gets more important at election time. Once again, those of us on PB, obsessed by test cricket, pizza, radiohead, F1, politics and betting tend to forget that the vast, vast majority of the country cares little for politics, and many cannot even tell you who is the leader of the Liberal Democrats. We should also remember that at the next election every seat starts from scratch. Yes there is an incumbency effect, yes local performance of councils and councillors matters and yes the activist base is important, but I think its simply wrong to say that there are very few seats where the Tories can win. Why? In 2019 they won many of them, and those voters can return.
I remember people saying the same thing in 2022-2024 when he was predicting an epochal defeat for the Tories.
Which is a totally fair point, but I think my point about leaders vs party ratings, and the general public is true too.
I wouldn't be surprised by (a) further Tory decline to sub 100 seats or (b) a modest recovery to near or just over 200.
Hard to see more than that.
If you look at Mr Meek's analysis he doesn't and I don't see any seats that the Tories don't already have where they have a chance of winning.
I think keeping 100 seats will take a miracle for the Tory party - and that's ignoring the current insane plan of removing anyone without the "right viewpoint" on a single issue - which when mentioned at an election will cost the Tory party some votes to the Lib Dems...
You need seats that are narrowly held by Labour, but
a) aren't nice enough to be Lib Dem b) are too nice and have too many people with actual jobs to go Reform.
There are a few, I suspect. Central London, some of the NW London fringes like Hendon and Finchley. There must be similar demographics elsewhere.
But not many.
Which I think is the effect @MoonRabbit identifies in her analysis: Milton Keynes, Trafford, plus the London fringes. Swindon maybe too much Reform. I think the effect also requires Labour to lose votes to the Greens.
The Barratt Home seats?
If Ref crashes then some of the ex-mining and steel seats (Balsover, Peniston) might be worth watching as well.
The other part of the Tories' wait for Reform to collapse calculation then kicks in. Will the dispossessed Reform voter switch to the Conservatives at that point? Andy Burnham seems keen to win them over and these are seats that voted Labour for a century. There's still plenty of muscle memory.
Kemi's unyielding right-wing posture and straight-talking schtik is designed to make her, and the party, palatable to trad Tories who have drifted to Reform. And who, at the end of the day, don't really see Reform as fit to run the country. You won't ever get the Lee Andersons back tho.
The Meeks prognosis is bleak, and has some truth to it, but Conservatives will be encouraged by Kemi's ratings - miles better than Farage's - and that the LibDems really don't seem to be doing much nationally. If the Home Counties middle classes want rid of Labour badly enough they will revert back to the Tories.
Trad Tories who have drifted to Reform. And who, at the end of the day, don't really see Reform as fit to run the country
Suspect this intersection in the Venn diagram is small. ie Trad Tories who don't see Reform as fit to run the country are within the 19% that are sticking with the Tories in current polls and didn't drift to Reform in the first place.
We'll see.
+1 - if you don't trust Reform to run the country you are never going to be voting for Reform, so you are going to be reporting as one of those 18% who are voting Tory.
I think Badenoch's strategy is that when Reform collapses, voters who entirely thought Reform was fit to run the country have no choice but to vote Conservative instead.
That this might actually be her best strategy shows the dire straits the party is in. She's making two big assumptions: (a) Reform will collapse; (b) Reform voters will switch to the Conservatives when it does.
Is she not also coping (or trying to) with the loss of the centrist Tories, the one Nation Tories etc that Johnson gave the heave-ho to?
While many on the left hate the Tories, there is a strand of conservatism (small c) in the country. Sound money (stop laughing at the back), fiscal responsibility, self-reliance, state support for those in genuine need, defence of the realm, pro-business, small government.
That case can be made again, but the 14 years from 2010-2024 make it harder to say why.
I fervently believe that Farage is finally reaping what he has sown and that Reform is his latest vessel. May the ship go down with him. When it does (assuming it does) there will be plenty able to return to the Tories if they can be shown a valid reason.
This is why Badenoch's ECHR stuff is politically inept... she is keeping the Lib Dems alive to eat the previously Tory shires...
I’d have thought ECHR is a minuscule issue compared with Badenoch’s views on the switch to electricity and renewables.
Almost everyone sensible knows the current refugee system is insane for the 21st century. But a very large majority of people are pro-Green energy, Lib Dems even more so.
The Tory ECHR policy is using a nuclear bomb to fix a single issue.
It would add us to a list that contains just Russia and Belarus which isn’t really somewhere you want to be.
It’s also just a tick box exercise when comparing against Reform that will please reform favouring Tory voters but disgust Lib Dem tending ones.
Again what is Kemi doing beyond creating a Reform lite party that is still in no man’s land with no clear reason for existence
“Reform the ECHR/Refugee Convention or leave in 12 months”
“O&G revenues to fund renewables”
I think a large majority of people could support those variances on her policies.
Hmm. The first is just saying leave ECHR in 12 months without a debate about its merits. There is zero possibility of the UK unilaterally demanding and getting significant revisions to the treaty, even if it knew what specific revisions it wanted.
O&G revenues to fund renewables doesn't make much sense either. It's hypothecation where energy sources are subsidised anyway. ie we're paying for them somehow or or other. Making electricity cheaper is a good goal. Ed Miliband has been doing some work correcting the previous government allowing costs to get out of control but not enough. Basically I think it's stop nuclear, which is the really big money sink - probably have to see Hinckley Point and Sizewell through to their (very) bitter ends, and finish up current wind projects. Investments from now on are batteries, grid upgrade and solar.
You've missed off the critical bit if this is your strategy - lots and lots of gas turbines. What you've described will work in summer, but living on solar at out latitude isn't going to work for the winter.
There's plenty of wind power under development as well as 6GW from the two new nuclear plants. These may, or may not, have been good investment decisions in hindsight but they contribute to a decent energy mix filled out with additional batteries, particularly, but also solar. But don't go for more wind in AR8 or any further nuclear including SMR if you want the cheapest electricity you can get from this point on
Most importantly, though:
Why is it a problem? If solar provides 100% of our summer daytime use; 70% of our spring and autumn, and 25% of our winter, it will have massively reduced the amount of gas we need to import, at pretty low costs. Now, sure, we use gas in winter, and during the night... but so what? And that will naturally -and gradually- decline as more and more batteries are added to the grid.
We're also fortunate in the UK that wind inversely correlates with sun. I have a basic model based on NESO data from 2024 that found that the challenge will be having enough storage in the autumn rather than the windy winter months.
It also found that there is rapidly diminishing marginal returns to battery investment - getting the UK to about 95% (350 days) renewables/battery coverage is relatively easy - but you'd need 4x as much to get to 99%, and 8x as much to get to 100%. It's complex though, depending on the exact mix of wind, solar and CCGT and gas storage you have - the main lesson is that after setting the appropropriate parameters, we should let the market make that efficient allocation.
At the moment industry/government instinct is the opposite (rent-seeking behaviour + regulatory capture, imo), so I think there's a good chance we throw this opportunity away. 77% of the potential energy produced by Seagreen last year was curtailed - that's 2.7 TWh of power that the people of Dundee and Angus should have had for free, about 5x as much as they actually used.
And which is why Net Zero is silly. You can get Net 90% for very little. So let's get there, and then we can worry about the next 10% later.
Well, why Gross Zero is silly. Though I appreciate the netting off bit remains a bit tricky - I have faith in human ingenuity to come up with something at scale over the next 25 years.
Net Zero is an ambition rather than a reality? Like Vision Zero etc You set out an ambitious target, hope to get most of the way there and to still have a target to meet.
Well quite. And in terms of wrecking the environment, far better to hit the low hanging fruit hard and fast now than fanny about waiting for a miracle for the rest of it.
It's why the EV transition drives me nuts. The technology exists. We have loads of excess energy overnight. The cost of the infratstucture for 85% of UK households is minimal. DO IT.
The Southport killer Axel Rudakubana has been moved from prison to a psychiatric hospital after clinical assessment, the Guardian can disclose.
He was transferred to Broadmoor high-security hospital from the category A prison Belmarsh this week after it was concluded that he could not be managed safely in a prison environment, sources confirmed.
Presumably he's being given drugs to knock him out most of the day.
Alphabet beat on every headline number tonight. Revenue up 24%. Cloud up 82%. EPS of $9.11. But $6.26 of that EPS came from paper gains on Alphabet's Anthropic stake*, not from operations. Strip that out and operating EPS is about $2.85. Free cash flow went negative for the first time in Alphabet's history. Long-term debt more than doubled in six months. Stock buybacks dropped to zero. https://x.com/HedgieMarkets/status/2080035162906390756
*Actually Anthropic and SpaceX. But SpaceX is also likely way overvalued if they don't get Starship to work.
AI is here to stay, obviously. What's not obvious is the value being given to all of the companies spending tens of billions to try and dominate the market.
What's certain is that some of them will fail to do so.
The other problem is that when customers are charged more realistic prices, they might walk away.
They're already doing so, which is a problem as both OpenAI and Anthropic have enormous financial commitments that require constant, rapid growth to sustain. Despite AI's numerous problems the biggest issue was never technical, but financial. It just costs too much for the benefits it provides.
Read an interesting article about the Chinese approach.
Basically they interrogate your AI to train theirs for a fraction of the price.
It's never as good as the latest model, but usually at least as good as the last one if not better and what's more oftena lot cheaper or even free.
Whether intentionall or not they may be bleeding the US dry.
The US spends 100's of millions on a new model and to pay for it need lots of customers to use it, either upgrade or pay more. The chineses make a copy for 10's of millions and sell it or charge a far lower fee or again even make it free.
Customers have choice;
1) Pay more for the new model and hope it gives them the edge and pays for itself. 2) Stick with the current model,paying the same but risk fall behind or missing out on savings or. 3) Switch to the far cheaper just as good chinese model, which might give a marginal improvement at lower cost?
At what point and how many existing users have to take option 3 and go Chinese for the US model to be finacially unsustainable?
Answers?
Peter.
The Chinese ethos of cheaply training 'trailing-edge' models is a sensible one I believe, because the performance of LLMs is starting the plateau. So the gap between a US frontier model and a less costly Chinese one is narrowing all the time. Also, OpenAI and Anthropic are basically producing gold plated models, where they spend crazy money to enhance the model's capabilities by small amounts.
But, the Chinese method does nothing for inference costs, and that's the big killer. These days the amount of money required to run the datacentres for AI is gigantic and growing constantly. That's why the American companies can't just offer big discounts for access to their older models.
I think we're at the beginning of a race to the bottom, because the single biggest attribute of an LLM model is no longer capability but cost. They're becoming a commodity. Which is death for the US developers because of their financial position.
I've maintained for some time that the future of corporate AI is not vast, billion dollar datacentres but a server that sits in the corner and runs a couple of useful models. No monthly token charges and your data never leaves the building. Home users will still mostly use the cloud (although hardware prices coming down will make local hosting more attractive for heavy users) but that's nowhere near enough of a market to keep the big AI vendors in business.
I run Qwen 3.6 35bn MOE at home, and it's incredibly capable and decently quick. It's basically Sonnet from 12 months ago.
Fable in Claude Code is awesome. I used to be a pretty good developer and it's as good as me at the things I was good at, and MUCH better than me at all the bits I hated. Every time I think I'll save some Fable tokens and drop back to Opus or Sonnet I start shouting at it "You're so STUPID".
I'm also using Qwen 3.6. I only have a 16G video card but it still runs acceptably (for me). I do have 192G of main memory tho.
It might not be as good as Claude but the function/price ratio is clearly better. There's always some manual tweaking anyway.
If you were purely vibe coding then I guess the more advanced model might be worth the cost.
I run Qwen 3.6 35bn MoE, which is extremely fast and pretty decent
Yes, that's the one I run. I was really surprised at how decent it was.
I think we are into the 'marginal gains' phase where the commercial models will improve but not at as high a rate as they have been.
If they are only a year or so ahead of what I can manage locally with a £2k machine from two years ago (well, OK, it would probably be more that now what with the price of memory today) then they really are stuffed.
I don't see anything that has suddenly made the Tories more competent, or looking more competent, since they were turfed out in 2024?
The only real change has been that Reform has been foolish enough to relieve the Tories of some of their most incompetent ministers, such that both of them risk being seen as not up to the job of government.
History suggests that when parties are decisively thrown out of government for negative reasons, it takes more than one GE before people forget and their reputation recovers. I see nothing different, this time.
I think Mr Meeks yesterday had a better analysis on the Tories - basically they have very few seats they can win and a lot of the seats they currently have are likely to be lost in the next election to the Lib Dems thanks to their shift to the right towards Reform.
Basically if Reform sits at 20% and Burnham consolidates the left wing vote (as he will) the Tories are doomed whenever the next election is..
My take on Meeks is that he is likely influenced to some extent by dislike of the Tories. The other take is that Badenoch is polling way ahead of the party and that gets more important at election time. Once again, those of us on PB, obsessed by test cricket, pizza, radiohead, F1, politics and betting tend to forget that the vast, vast majority of the country cares little for politics, and many cannot even tell you who is the leader of the Liberal Democrats. We should also remember that at the next election every seat starts from scratch. Yes there is an incumbency effect, yes local performance of councils and councillors matters and yes the activist base is important, but I think its simply wrong to say that there are very few seats where the Tories can win. Why? In 2019 they won many of them, and those voters can return.
I remember people saying the same thing in 2022-2024 when he was predicting an epochal defeat for the Tories.
Which is a totally fair point, but I think my point about leaders vs party ratings, and the general public is true too.
I wouldn't be surprised by (a) further Tory decline to sub 100 seats or (b) a modest recovery to near or just over 200.
Hard to see more than that.
If you look at Mr Meek's analysis he doesn't and I don't see any seats that the Tories don't already have where they have a chance of winning.
I think keeping 100 seats will take a miracle for the Tory party - and that's ignoring the current insane plan of removing anyone without the "right viewpoint" on a single issue - which when mentioned at an election will cost the Tory party some votes to the Lib Dems...
You need seats that are narrowly held by Labour, but
a) aren't nice enough to be Lib Dem b) are too nice and have too many people with actual jobs to go Reform.
There are a few, I suspect. Central London, some of the NW London fringes like Hendon and Finchley. There must be similar demographics elsewhere.
But not many.
Which I think is the effect @MoonRabbit identifies in her analysis: Milton Keynes, Trafford, plus the London fringes. Swindon maybe too much Reform. I think the effect also requires Labour to lose votes to the Greens.
The Barratt Home seats?
If Ref crashes then some of the ex-mining and steel seats (Balsover, Peniston) might be worth watching as well.
The other part of the Tories' wait for Reform to collapse calculation then kicks in. Will the dispossessed Reform voter switch to the Conservatives at that point? Andy Burnham seems keen to win them over and these are seats that voted Labour for a century. There's still plenty of muscle memory.
Kemi's unyielding right-wing posture and straight-talking schtik is designed to make her, and the party, palatable to trad Tories who have drifted to Reform. And who, at the end of the day, don't really see Reform as fit to run the country. You won't ever get the Lee Andersons back tho.
The Meeks prognosis is bleak, and has some truth to it, but Conservatives will be encouraged by Kemi's ratings - miles better than Farage's - and that the LibDems really don't seem to be doing much nationally. If the Home Counties middle classes want rid of Labour badly enough they will revert back to the Tories.
Trad Tories who have drifted to Reform. And who, at the end of the day, don't really see Reform as fit to run the country
Suspect this intersection in the Venn diagram is small. ie Trad Tories who don't see Reform as fit to run the country are within the 19% that are sticking with the Tories in current polls and didn't drift to Reform in the first place.
We'll see.
+1 - if you don't trust Reform to run the country you are never going to be voting for Reform, so you are going to be reporting as one of those 18% who are voting Tory.
I think Badenoch's strategy is that when Reform collapses, voters who entirely thought Reform was fit to run the country have no choice but to vote Conservative instead.
That this might actually be her best strategy shows the dire straits the party is in. She's making two big assumptions: (a) Reform will collapse; (b) Reform voters will switch to the Conservatives when it does.
Is she not also coping (or trying to) with the loss of the centrist Tories, the one Nation Tories etc that Johnson gave the heave-ho to?
While many on the left hate the Tories, there is a strand of conservatism (small c) in the country. Sound money (stop laughing at the back), fiscal responsibility, self-reliance, state support for those in genuine need, defence of the realm, pro-business, small government.
That case can be made again, but the 14 years from 2010-2024 make it harder to say why.
I fervently believe that Farage is finally reaping what he has sown and that Reform is his latest vessel. May the ship go down with him. When it does (assuming it does) there will be plenty able to return to the Tories if they can be shown a valid reason.
This is why Badenoch's ECHR stuff is politically inept... she is keeping the Lib Dems alive to eat the previously Tory shires...
I’d have thought ECHR is a minuscule issue compared with Badenoch’s views on the switch to electricity and renewables.
Almost everyone sensible knows the current refugee system is insane for the 21st century. But a very large majority of people are pro-Green energy, Lib Dems even more so.
The Tory ECHR policy is using a nuclear bomb to fix a single issue.
It would add us to a list that contains just Russia and Belarus which isn’t really somewhere you want to be.
It’s also just a tick box exercise when comparing against Reform that will please reform favouring Tory voters but disgust Lib Dem tending ones.
Again what is Kemi doing beyond creating a Reform lite party that is still in no man’s land with no clear reason for existence
“Reform the ECHR/Refugee Convention or leave in 12 months”
“O&G revenues to fund renewables”
I think a large majority of people could support those variances on her policies.
Hmm. The first is just saying leave ECHR in 12 months without a debate about its merits. There is zero possibility of the UK unilaterally demanding and getting significant revisions to the treaty, even if it knew what specific revisions it wanted.
O&G revenues to fund renewables doesn't make much sense either. It's hypothecation where energy sources are subsidised anyway. ie we're paying for them somehow or or other. Making electricity cheaper is a good goal. Ed Miliband has been doing some work correcting the previous government allowing costs to get out of control but not enough. Basically I think it's stop nuclear, which is the really big money sink - probably have to see Hinckley Point and Sizewell through to their (very) bitter ends, and finish up current wind projects. Investments from now on are batteries, grid upgrade and solar.
You've missed off the critical bit if this is your strategy - lots and lots of gas turbines. What you've described will work in summer, but living on solar at out latitude isn't going to work for the winter.
There's plenty of wind power under development as well as 6GW from the two new nuclear plants. These may, or may not, have been good investment decisions in hindsight but they contribute to a decent energy mix filled out with additional batteries, particularly, but also solar. But don't go for more wind in AR8 or any further nuclear including SMR if you want the cheapest electricity you can get from this point on
Most importantly, though:
Why is it a problem? If solar provides 100% of our summer daytime use; 70% of our spring and autumn, and 25% of our winter, it will have massively reduced the amount of gas we need to import, at pretty low costs. Now, sure, we use gas in winter, and during the night... but so what? And that will naturally -and gradually- decline as more and more batteries are added to the grid.
We're also fortunate in the UK that wind inversely correlates with sun. I have a basic model based on NESO data from 2024 that found that the challenge will be having enough storage in the autumn rather than the windy winter months.
It also found that there is rapidly diminishing marginal returns to battery investment - getting the UK to about 95% (350 days) renewables/battery coverage is relatively easy - but you'd need 4x as much to get to 99%, and 8x as much to get to 100%. It's complex though, depending on the exact mix of wind, solar and CCGT and gas storage you have - the main lesson is that after setting the appropropriate parameters, we should let the market make that efficient allocation.
At the moment industry/government instinct is the opposite (rent-seeking behaviour + regulatory capture, imo), so I think there's a good chance we throw this opportunity away. 77% of the potential energy produced by Seagreen last year was curtailed - that's 2.7 TWh of power that the people of Dundee and Angus should have had for free, about 5x as much as they actually used.
And which is why Net Zero is silly. You can get Net 90% for very little. So let's get there, and then we can worry about the next 10% later.
It's what's maddening and weird about the flip in the politics.
Go back about ten years, and Net Zero was seen as achievable, necessary, but difficult and expensive. There was basically consensus.
The science and engineering is way more favourable now than then. From here to Net Five Percent or so is stuff we probably want to do anyway. But the political opposition is greater.
Comments
And while we're on this I remember doing my spread betting by phone - I'd usually get "Clive" - and receiving a proper contract note in the post the next day.
If I lost - which sometimes happened - I could go down the local and torch my sorrows with a few ciggies.
We've lost such a lot.
Anyway, it is back to the 1950s all over again
I think it was the fifth time I called Scottish Power about an issue they were failing to fix, and I asked what guarantee there was that them saying they would do the thing they said they'd do the previous times would work this time* and I finally got an off-script response. Although it was them angrily demanding to know if I was calling them a liar.
If the call centre is just there to absorb customers' energy to complain, that's much more economically done with AI bots.
* It didn't work. Had to take it to the ombudsman.
But of course that's what people have paid for them - so good luck to the ECB. But it seems obvious there is no prospect of a commercial return any time soon - so it appears they have been bought as trophy assets and in the hope it takes off in the long run.
It would be very interesting if in the next ECB TV rights deal Sky said we'll have all England games and the T20 Blast but we will pass on the Hundred. I reckon the ECB may well have trouble getting a decent fee for the Hundred - I think they "allocated" about £40m per year of Sky's current £200m+ per year to the Hundred. Would anyone else pay £40m per year for it? I doubt it.
Gate receipts will be peanuts so without a substantial TV rights fee the whole thing is completely unviable.
They now "own" big stakes in IPL, MLC, CPL, Hundred, SA20, MiddleEast T20.
The why is of course the ECHR...
But we've seen what happened with LIV Golf. We can see what will happen with Mike Tindall's proposed international rugby league - so much so it may never even start.
Sky pays peanuts for the IPL (DAZN initially won UK rights then abandoned them).
The issue is how many people really care about any of these T20 teams? Sure it's huge in India but I can't see substantial revenues being generated anywhere else.
Just because the UK audience doesnt care, it isnt true elsewhere.
I've had a human conversation (eventually) with every operator I can recall getting through to, except HSBC.
Equally as with Brexit currently the Scottish Government can blame someone else - that falls apart when the buck stops at them
On reflection, even a row of houseplants would be an improvement, so that's not really saying much.
When I was sure that I’d posted, I refreshed rather than reposting
I had posted
Deeply impressed with briefing on Beehive 🚤
So much to learn from amazing speed of innovation by 🇬🇧Royal Navy
https://x.com/AmbJapanUK/status/2079695964743389249
Smoking in pubs - that should be up to the individual pub not some national right wing nanny state diktat.
I'm tired of right wing parties like the Conservatives, Reform and Restore interfering in people's lives, telling us all what we should do and where we can smoke or not smoke.
It's this kind of woke, namby pamby, cancel culture, snowflake politics that drives prople to the "left".
Some suspect that it’s because Sophie and Caitlin are white girls done good
I presume she’s safe to Google ?
Shake yo booty
Shake yo booty
Are they as bad as the Argentine footballers ?
On Trump seemingly adding new conditions to the US Saudi nuclear deal, including Saudi Israel normalization, a Saudi source says: “It was signed. So nothing to renegotiate.”
“Tweets don’t overturn signed agreements,” he added.
https://x.com/lrozen/status/2080306416317821360
Strange New Worlds is back.
Today was episode 1 of season 4, the final episode of this season which airs on the 24th of September has made me so exited simply by releasing title of that episode.
Tomorrow's Enterprise.
One can just hope this bunch of ****s never reach government. Although I suspect being hangers, floggers and racists, fags are the least of our worries.
At Sandown, it's the Ministry of Sound (Classical) tomorrow and Billy Ocean next Wednesday - you'll remember "when the going gets tough, the tough go racing".
York has Craig David tomorrow evening.
Newmarket have Aitch (I thought he was in Steps but I think it's someone else), Jessie J, Craig David and the Kaiser Chiefs still to come.
Lingfield, where money is more of an object, have Absolute Country, Abba Party and Rum & Reggae over the next three Saturday nights.
Throw in lager at £7.95 per pint and it's a licence to print money.
20:28 BST
Big cheers for the Falkland Islands contingent...
I'm with British Gas Lite, who are very fond of outsourcing their customer care/ online staff to India. Chat bots are purely a means to keep real human staff at arms length from customers
Needless to say, everything got put back to how it should be - I don't think they used the Guardian of Forever.
Try and cop a watch sometime.
Why is it a problem? If solar provides 100% of our summer daytime use; 70% of our spring and autumn, and 25% of our winter, it will have massively reduced the amount of gas we need to import, at pretty low costs. Now, sure, we use gas in winter, and during the night... but so what? And that will naturally -and gradually- decline as more and more batteries are added to the grid.
Boy, they were rude.
(runs to iPlayer)
Ratified agreements can be cancelled, this has not even been ratified yet.
Asked whether they would be willing to defend the country in the face of an “imminent invasion”, 52 per cent of people claimed that they would be ineligible to fight because of age or disability.
While 14 per cent said that they would agree to serve if called up, 17 per cent claimed they would refuse any order to defend their homeland."
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/07/23/few-britons-would-take-up-arms-to-defend-uk/
Add: batteries were majorly responsible for preventing a blackout in June along with some deft placing of interconnector supplies. At the moment in conjunction with gas generation, but batteries are already a critical part of the mix
https://bsky.app/profile/tomh-analyst.bsky.social/post/3mr5lif3jx226
It might not be as good as Claude but the function/price ratio is clearly better. There's always some manual tweaking anyway.
If you were purely vibe coding then I guess the more advanced model might be worth the cost.
It also found that there is rapidly diminishing marginal returns to battery investment - getting the UK to about 95% (350 days) renewables/battery coverage is relatively easy - but you'd need 4x as much to get to 99%, and 8x as much to get to 100%. It's complex though, depending on the exact mix of wind, solar and CCGT and gas storage you have - the main lesson is that after setting the appropropriate parameters, we should let the market make that efficient allocation.
At the moment industry/government instinct is the opposite (rent-seeking behaviour + regulatory capture, imo), so I think there's a good chance we throw this opportunity away. 77% of the potential energy produced by Seagreen last year was curtailed - that's 2.7 TWh of power that the people of Dundee and Angus should have had for free, about 5x as much as they actually used.
There are basically three costs: build, maintainance, fuel.
Gas: low, low, high
Coal: medium, medium, medium
Nuclear: high, high, low
Wind: high, low, none
Solar: high, very low, none
And historically only a small proportion of people are fit enough to actually fight - 10s of thousands of young people are rejected by the British Army each year on health grounds, and stuff like diabetes among young people is higher than ever. It's why the dichotomy made between active travel investment and defence spending was the most stupid one I've heard all year. Otoh, if you're good at COD you're probably good at flying a drone...
Like Vision Zero etc You set out an ambitious target, hope to get most of the way there and to still have a target to meet.
Like Vision Zero etc You set out an ambitious target, hope to get most of the way there and to still have a target to meet.
It's why the EV transition drives me nuts. The technology exists. We have loads of excess energy overnight. The cost of the infratstucture for 85% of UK households is minimal. DO IT.
The Southport killer Axel Rudakubana has been moved from prison to a psychiatric hospital after clinical assessment, the Guardian can disclose.
He was transferred to Broadmoor high-security hospital from the category A prison Belmarsh this week after it was concluded that he could not be managed safely in a prison environment, sources confirmed.
Presumably he's being given drugs to knock him out most of the day.
I think we are into the 'marginal gains' phase where the commercial models will improve but not at as high a rate as they have been.
If they are only a year or so ahead of what I can manage locally with a £2k machine from two years ago (well, OK, it would probably be more that now what with the price of memory today) then they really are stuffed.
Go back about ten years, and Net Zero was seen as achievable, necessary, but difficult and expensive. There was basically consensus.
The science and engineering is way more favourable now than then. From here to Net Five Percent or so is stuff we probably want to do anyway. But the political opposition is greater.