Sampson

Outside of a few hard-core I very much doubt many "fight for their country", even in the past. I think many fight for the family and friends or their beliefs. Although war and disaster certainly shift beliefs in a short time. Countries also change quickly, Britain is also a federation of 4 countries and we only have really talked about Britain as a nation like that since WW2. If you look back at some of the WW1 and WW2 wartime propaganda stuff, a lot of it is about defending "the empire" and "fighting fir the king" and about fighting for those back home. And in the last generation or rwo there has definitely been a shift in more abd more people defining themselves as English, Scottish, Welsh and Irish over British. The individual constituency country flags are now way more prominent than when you watch old clips from the 60s and 70s and it was much more about the British flag than the English or Scottish flag. Furthermore amongst younger millenial gen Z voters, polls have continually showed tgat they continue to become more and more likely to define themselves as European than British or English - I imagine the Ukraine war has a lot to do with that. But I think there is a generational shift here, the country is divided by generation politically in a far more radical and noticeable way then it ever has been before and a lot of the generation z and millennial who'll be the ones fighting, engineering, transporting and building towards any war effort are probably going to see siding with the Europeans and Canadians against the Russians and Americans far more about fighting for their beliefs than if they baby boomers have their way,vote in Farage or Badenoch and we end up fighting alongside the Americans and Russians. If these world tensions do endup spilling over into another war.

Semi-related to the King Charles stuff, but I do always wonder when these old scandals come up, how the feck people are supposed to remember single off-the-cuff things they said or phonecalls they had 30 years ago and how it's still supposed to represent them as a person? Surely most of us would say we're completely different people than we were 5 or 10 years ago and we've all said stupid off the cuff stuff to our friends, colleagues, acquaintances and family loads of times throught our lives and have forgotten them within a week, but its like the media are demanding us to judge people on off the cuff remarks from 2 generations ago? I dunno, still just feel like we're creating a society where people aren't allowed to make mistakes anymore, even retroactively.

I'm old enough to remember when CANZUK was one of the biggest arguments of the leave side duting the lead up to the eu referendum. About how the UK should abandon the EU to form a seperate free trade and free movement block with Canada, Australia and New Zealand as they were supposedly closer to us culturally than Europe. And now Canada is currently negotiating to join the European single market as an associate member...

Its just an excuse to get your friends and family over, which as you get older becomes something increasingly rare and one of the things you'll miss most about being younger. Don't overthink it or think you have to do something extravagant, just invite your friends and family over for dinner and a couple of drinks and youll probably enjoy it.

Never thought I'd say this, but agree completely with Steve Bannon, even down to finally admitting the tech bros are oligarchs and therefore tacitly admitting that the US has already transitioned from late stage capitalism into oligarchy.

Same thing that humans can draw a chalk line on the ground that screws with chicken's brain chemistry so much they become stuck and hypnotised just staring at it. AI might inadvertently create something like that our brains kind of break looking at and we just get stuck in place before we die of thirst. The AI doesn't even know its caused the death of billions of humans, it was just doing something else entirely because it understood molecular physics so well.

There's 2 different things here I think: 1. The kind of sentient AI who decides humans are a threat to its survival and consciously decides to kill them as we might have seen in science fiction books or films a la HAL9000 or SkyNet 2. Unknowable and innocent side-effects of side-effects that cause AI to comit some disaster by taking over nuclear weapons, crashing the world economy or energy supply, forging kompromat on world leaders to blackmail then into submission, creating some kind of entertainment or drug so addictive and hypnotic we all become enthralled by it and starve to death, fabricating and 3d printing a virus as deadly as ebola and contagious as covid and the million and other disasters it could enact. I think when most say AI will wipe out humanity they think much more of option 2 than option 1. And option 2 does not require AI to become sentient nor does it require bad faith by a human - it can just be an unknowable quirk and side effect of a one-off use of AI that caused a 1 in a trillion sequence of events. A couple of comon examples given are: A. A human innocently uses AI to create endless paperclips, The AI eventually mines tge earth of all the metal so starts killing humans and using our bones to make paperclips. B. A human innocently uses to AI to create lots of nanobots, it eventually creates so many microscopic nanobots that the world and everything on it just becomes grey goo. In neither scevario does AI need to be conscious nor do humans have to be bad actors, humans were just extinct as a side effect. Now, ok, we might be able to put some safe guards in against this, but the reality is because we have no idea how AI works, we can't put in safeguards against everything - it's like how governments try to put laws in place to safeguards against humans harming others - but we can't know how every human brain works every second of the day so people still do bad things. Think how if you and I both ask AI the same question we will get 2 different answers for example - maybe you asked it in a certain way, maybe your search history is different so the AI reacted differently to you- how can we realistically safeguard against the trillion different ways 8 billion different people can use AI? And that 1 in a trillion set of circumstances where a certain persion uses AI in a certain way at a certain time that causes AI to cause catastrophic events to humanity that makes WW2 look like nothing just as a side effect become actually quite probable when you're getting 50 different AI models bring used in billions upon billions of different ways by billions of people every week - and it only has to go wrong once to be catastrophic.

I really struggle to see how democracy survives another generation (15-25 years). Unless we're just voting on which AI model to make decisions and govern over us, but even then surely the targeted algorithms and knowledge of how the human brain works will become so sophisticated that they (by they i mean either the AI themselves or the humans in charge of the AI, it doesnt really matter) can easily manipulate enough people's brain chemistries to vote a certain way?

Think some of you need to seriously layoff reading those fearmongering posts by Americans on social media who seem to think Europe is in the midst of some full on hunger games race war if you genuinely feel a "nasty undercurrent" or feel unsafe walking the streets of Manchester. Feck me.

And that's only 10% chance humanity gets completely wiped out. Doesn't even explain how much direct and indirect destruction happens to our economies, brain chemistry, physical biology, resources, geopolitics, birth rates etc. happens in the other 90% of scenarios. The I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream scenario where the AI wipes out virtually all of humanity but keeps only 5 humans alive to torture for all eternity, just so tge AI gets to feel something is contained in that other 90% for example.

Honestly, I'm surprised people quote this stuff about what the UK does in the chagos islands or some demographic change. The US has been extremely consistent and open since Trump came to power that it no longer cares about Europe, Australia, Japan, South Korea etc. It cares about the Americas and is trying to make the Americas all essentially have leaders who answer to Trump - very similar to how the Soviet Union did to the Eastern Block countries after WW2 (and what Putin wants to do again). The reason that Trump goes after Canada so much is they're the only country in the America's really resisting becoming a US vassal state. It's nothing to do with ideology - Venezuela hasn't changed ideology since Maduro went, but it does now have a leader who will kowtow to Trump and let America extract its wealth - that's all its about, everyone else in the Venezuelan government and military is the same. Similarly, Korea has been just as much a part of the US deciding it doesn't see them as an ally any longer as we have, and they famously have very little immigration or ethnic minorities. So its not about demographic change. The US couldn't be clearer that it no longer cares about "protecting the democratic states of Europe, Oceania and East Asia after WW2" and no longer sees Britain or any of these countries as allies. Its primary foreign policy is about turning the Americas into a pro-US block because its vision of geopolitics has changed to one of pre-ww1 "spheres of influence" rather than being about protecting democracy or whatever. And yes, the US absolutely sees a South America country like Argentina as a closer ally than a European country like Britain these days. They've been very open about that. The British public just seem to have buried their heads in the sand about it.

Sadly agree. Everyone already knows that Farage is allegedly heavily financially backed by Russia and the US, this won't change his voters' minds who don't care about it. Same way that everyone knows Jenrick allegedly really wants to oust Farage to become Reform leader, just as he allegedly did with Badennoch.

Both Bradgate Park and the Space Centre are excellent and well worth visiting.

Don't forget Netto. There was briefly one of those in Lutterworth after Lidl and Aldi first got popular and the European budget supermarkets were in vogue.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/aug/29/sharp-rise-in-incidents-of-ai-escaping-users-control-research-finds When do AI companies face prosecution for this? Still just don't think the legal protections against AI are there because there's no humans to take responsibility. Feels almost as if they're using it as a PR exercise.