Sampson

Just watching a YouTube video with people in it. Checked the comments and googled and found it was AI. I wouldn't have guessed, honestly it's a bit chilling that the technology is too good to tell apart from real life now. I just don't see how the legal system, administrstion/beaurocratic systems etc. will be able to cope with it really. What's stopping someone just manufacturing evidence to frame people or manufacturing alibis with this stuff, or politicians manufacturing reasons to discredit their opponents, push through legislation or reasons to go to war?

This culture wars thing is why I find the Reform thing so weird. I think there's understandable reasons why people dislike the rapid cultural change, we can discuss it and about the causes be they immigration, technology, capitalism or whatever but that feels like a pretty basic evolutionary human emotion, but I think personally that started with the Americanisation and de-Europeanisation of the British economy, industry, political system and culture starting from when Thatcher got into power in 1979 and turned Britain into America's lapdog with an America-style tycoon economic system. And I think Farage clearly represents such a radical cultural change himself and this weird Americanisation and de-Europianisation of our culture and politics. Reform and Farage just feel so Americanised and un-British to me. All this stuff about the flag, strong man leaders whon"say it like it is" and demanding we say the Lords prayer in council meetings and this weird stuff about "Judeo-Christian values" is so Americanised to me. The traditionalist symbol of Britain has always been the monarchy, we always used to say the Americans had that weird reverence to the flag and presidents because they didn't have a monarchy as a patriotic symbol. And since when has any British person born after about 1940 cared about this Jesus stuff? I remember how when the Simpsons was one of the big symbols of Americanisation in the 90s it being a topic of discussion how weird it was for Brits to see "the average family" they were supposed to represent still going to church every Sunday in the 1990s.

My favourite was the 2nd book - that was a really great book, a proper page turner from beginning to end with a fantastic ending. (I know book 6 is supposed to be a favourite of many too though). The 1st book I really enjoyed the opening and final quarters but found the middling quarters a little hard to follow at times. I could never fully get my head round Pierce Brown's writing style in the first book of the short, sort of poetic, staccato sentences - I understand that it makes it nicer to read in your head and gets across the feeling, but I found it wasn't descriptive enough at times for me and I lost track of what was happening. He kind of abandoned that writing style after the first book. Plus I prefer the full galaxy space opera of books 2 onwards that the Martian battle royale style scenario of the first (although I know he said, the only way he could ever get the book published was to promise to do it that way due to the popularity of Hunger Games at the time). I think I would probably appreciate the 1st book more on a re-read now I know the characters, basic plot etc.

Finished Red Rising book 3 and Dungeon Crawler Carl book 8 in the past couple of weeks, both fantastic! The endings of both books really didn't go the way I expected. Currently on Red Rising book 4 about halfway through.

I've said all along Labour will lose far more voters than they gain with this anti-immigration stuff. They are chasing a demographic who hasn't voted them for 20 years with this anti-immigration stuff and is pissing off the demographics that actually have voted for them in the past decade in doing this. Farage will always change the goalpost on this - first it was 5 figure net migration, then net zero migration, then net negative migration and then it will be re-migration. The net migration figures probably will be quite small by 2029, but Farage will have moved the goalposts to being remigration by then, meanwhile Labour will have pissed off all the university educated, pro-EU, liberal gen z and millenial voters who the anti-immigration stuff doesn't play with and who were the voters who actually voted them in.

Not to mention their housing is an endless cycle of 6-month rental contracts in shared houses with strangers with shared kitchens and shared bathrooms which still take 50% of your monthly wage and then you lose a further £500 deposit every 6 months when they have to leave the house share to find a new one because of pedantic landlords finding a tiny scratch on a skirting board - which is actually what make it impossible to save, along with student loan increases on earning increases making career progression of possible not even pay. That is how most university-educated under 40s I know live, I have no idea where all these foreign holidays come from either.. What Raj describes sounds like a young 20 or 30-something adult in 2006 - pre the 2008 financial crisis - not a young 20 or 30-something adult in 2026 and sounds incredibly out of touch.

Yes, plus AI technology which humans don’t understand how it works and the ageing population - huge issues humanity has never faced before in its existence . And I still think a lot of issues and mental health problems ultimately come down to the internet creating a society which is much less social when human brains are evolutionary wired to crave social situations they way we are evolutionary wired to crave food, because that’s what helped us survive, working with and caring for other humans around us. I too fear more of the world the children today will grow up in, and what it will look like in the 2050s or 2060s

Wordle 1 786 6/6 ⬜🟨🟨⬜⬜ 🟨🟩🟨⬜⬜ 🟩🟩🟩⬜⬜ 🟩🟩🟩⬜⬜ 🟩🟩🟩⬜⬜ 🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

Connections Puzzle #1064 🟨🟨🟨🟨 🟪🟦🟦🟦 🟪🟦🟪🟦 🟩🟩🟩🟩 🟪🟦🟦🟦 🟪🟪🟪🟪 🟦🟦🟦🟦 Just about got there

Wordle 1 785 3/6 ⬜⬜🟨🟨⬜ 🟩⬜🟨🟩🟩 🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

But you can’t even do that anymore because technology and AI affects every career on earth and changes every 5 years that has meant no career is long-term viable and university riddles you with so much extra debt the more you earn that getting a good education doesn’t pay anymore. 5-10 years ago everyone was told to train and go into engineering and data analysis and all those jobs will now be gone from AI within less than a decade. Not to mention every job and cv has AI screening and is just about having a few key words on your cv nowadays I see my niece and nephew and wonder what the hell kind of jobs and education opportunities are even going to be left for them in the future.

Connections Puzzle #1063 🟨🟨🟨🟨 🟩🟦🟦🟪 🟪🟩🟩🟩 🟩🟩🟩🟩 🟦🟦🟪🟦 🟦🟦🟦🟦 🟪🟪🟪🟪

I don’t think it’s about looking incompetent more than them abandoning their core voter demographics to chase a voter demographic that hasn’t voted for them in a generation and was never going to vote for them. The flat-cap Yorkshireman hasn’t voted Labour in a generation. Labour voters have primarily been younger, university educated, white collar urbanite liberals for decades. And the stricter immigration rhetoric, the red-lines over rejoining the European market, the refusal to properly vocally distance ourselves from the US and the red lines on taxes on the wealthy are all massive turn offs for core Labour voters. Meanwhile even if Labour get net immigration down to 0 by 2029, it’s not going to be enough for Reform voters as Farage will just move the goalposts and say we need to kick out loads with permenant residency or even citizenship who’ve lived in the uk for decades. It was always a fools game trying to win back voters on immigration. Just reading the John Curtice analysis and it’s still very clear that despite Labour constituencies going to Reform, very few voters actually go directly to Reform. Reform instead have largely captured the former Tory over 60s vote and many who were former “do not votes”, whereas far more Labour voters have gone over to the Greens and LibDems and therefore split that vote 3 ways.

If we had PR it might mean something and we could adjust our hyperbole, but in a FPTP system, all the hyperbole is justified tbh.

This is outdated. They’re trillionaires nowadays, since Covid let them corner the world economy.

The polls show the country already had the mother of all buyer regrets after Brexit and their solution was to vote even more Brexity. Voters solution to feeling annoyed at Reform tacking a hatchet to the NHS would probably to vote for Restore Britain because they are saying 3rd generation immigrants on benefits are sponging off the system and we didn’t go far enough on kicking out anyone who has a non-British parent or grandparent.

We’re all just dungeon crawlers while the US tech bro class are all Scolopendra Club regulars from The Inner Systems’ Enhancement Zone.

But isn’t this the problem? People feel like they’re being attacked and get defensive when people are making economic arguments and not moral ones. so it’s been easier for politicians and the the fast food media to blame immigrants and NHS ineffeciency when these are economic issues and rising political populism are just as big an issue in the US, Japan, Korea, Denmark, the Netherlands, Germany as they are in the UK with all their different types of healthcare systems and immigration levels? But all the solutions are intolerable - isn’t that the point? I mean it is - tax all the rich and let them leave the country and try and start again with a different economy system, cut pensions or just keep going with a system everyone can feel has making them feel worse for a good 20 years now until we inevitably end up with some war or rebellion?

How do you support an economy where 2/3rds of the population is on its pension and 2/3rds the tax payer money goes on pensions or health care for the over 65s because that’s the way the world is going either way generations of below replacement birth rates? The pension was designed for a small percentage of the population for a few years at the end of their life rather than 1/3rd of the population for 25 years of their life. It’s not that the pension rate should be cut, it’s that the state pension age never increased in the post-war years along with rising life expectancy and if you want a realistic level of burden then the pension age would realistically be around 80 or 85 these days. But people in their 50s 60s and 70s who make up a large amount of the voting population aren’t going to vote for that - I’m not talking about the morals of it, but just the realistic cost of it. I mean you saw the riots in France when they tried to raise the pension age by 2 years a few years back. Everyone complains but they don’t want to live with the decisions that are needed to fix it. And it’s easier to blame immigrants and government inefficiency when in Farage’s own words “it’s common sense politics” that you can afford spending 1/2 of your national budget on pensions and healthcare for an ageing population (when over 65s make up the overwhelming majority of healthcare costs) and where you’re ratio ends up being more pensioners to working age people

The issues in the uk are the same in every western country - capitalism stopped working in 2008 for the average working or middle class westerner and since Covid the west been morphing into a Putin-inspired Oligarchism where a small number of US tech firms are cornering the western or even world economy and are becoming richer and more powerful than countries like the UK, France and Germany and probably within 10 years will be richer and more powerful than the US or China. Capitalism was great for a couple of generations in helping grow the economy for most people but as in football or F1, eventually the highest get so much money that they can squeeze the middle classes back down to the working classes and you’re now in a position where a couple of well educated middle-class engineers with Masters degrees in their 30s can’t afford a house or to have children and are probably going to have their jobs replaced by computers within a decade. Now the population has become old that people’s taxes are largely just spent propping up the pensions and healthcare system as well because it’s a closed feedback loop in democracy where politicians will just go after the grey vote as that’s where most of the votes are in an ageing economy. So they just say all our money is going on immigrants and disabled benefits when they money on pensions and healthcare largely used by those 65+ massively dwarves those things. But away from the economy, the internet has been a net negative for society and AI will be even worse - it’s the most sophisticated technology humans have come up with and so much of the social internet been designed to make people get addicted and feel angry or like shit. Not only that but it’s massively increased the surveillance state, bureaucracy and the amount of data we have on everyone and people naively voted for this thinking “being tough on crime and immigrantion” in the 2020s meant more police and not the creation of AI facial recognition, data scraping algorithms which all employers will do quick AI searches of your entire digital footprint soon and god knows what else. And people are now made unemployable because of a post they made 10 years ago while half asleep on auto-pilot they don’t even remember. Regardless of the economic side, I think the balance of technology has now become more oppressive than helpful in every day life. And your average person just feels more anxious and on edge all the time because of it. I know so many people who feel frustrated with how addicted they are to the social internet nowadays as well.

Just about got there today Connections Puzzle #1062 🟨🟨🟨🟨 🟦🟦🟦🟦 🟩🟪🟩🟩 🟪🟩🟩🟩 🟩🟩🟩🟪 🟩🟩🟩🟩 🟪🟪🟪🟪

Yeah. China also doesn’t want tens of millions of refugees fleeing over its borders and is allegedly extremely brutal in handling those escaping North Korea across its border, which has always been one of the arguments why they don’t want to topple the Kim dynasty.

Wordle 1 783 4/6 ⬜⬜⬜⬜🟩 ⬜⬜⬜⬜🟩 ⬜⬜🟩🟩🟩 🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

Gettable but got too tunnel visioned on trying to get the blue straight away Connections Puzzle #1061 🟦🟦🟦🟨 🟦🟨🟦🟨 🟦🟨🟦🟦 🟦🟦🟦🟦 🟨🟨🟨🟨 🟪🟪🟩🟩

Hantavirus is not even a particularly transmissible virus via humans. Genuinely saying sink a boat and kill thousands of innocent people is nuts.