Sampson

I’m sorry, but he has picked a side and drawn a line in the sand and been very open about it on multiple occasions, and he picked it before he was even elected. This latest formal openness of hostility towards the UK and Europe is just the formal end of Project 2025 which is something that was widely shared and known about before the election. Farage seems to have picked the same side and has been pretty clear about his alignment with Trump as well. A major problem has been we’ve been told we’re not allowed to use the f word or call a spade a spade for years, or that we’ve been told “he just says these things for attention he doesn’t mean them or follow through” even when he’s been extremely consistent about his viewpoint, because people wanted to bury their heads in the sand about it.

No offense (actually some offense intended) but you really do sound like Russian bot most of the time on here.. Literally all you ever do is rant about the UK, Europe, Starmer, Merz and Macron or the “Liberal dictators” as you called them. Even with the Trumpian esque capitals on “their populations HATE them” (also fishy you’re saying “their” and not “our”) The 28 point peace plan literally says that Europe has to pay to rebuild part of Ukraine and give the prophits to the US. It also literally says that Europe cannot have planes and defences in Poland or near the border and Ukraine has to massively limit its army, leaving it liable to be rolled over in the future. The peace plan is the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact part 2 between Trump and Putin - it’s designed so America and Russia can carve Ukraine up for profit in a few years and make the UK and the rest of Europe pay for it. It’d be absolutely absurd for Europe to just sign up to this. It’s all well and good Trump and Vance saying Europe needs to defend themselves, but this isn’t even throwing us in the river and saying “learn to swim”, it’s throwing us in the river rolled in a carpet with a 500tonne lead weight attached and then turning to the media and saying “we’re just giving them swimming lessons, it’s for their own good”, it is solely about Trump making money (as most of his intentions are). This peace treaty doesn’t even allow us to grow a defence and it makes us do all the rebuilding work and America gets all the money of that rebuilding for some reason, so we can’t even pay for our defence at a time when Russia is literally sending threatening drones and making very thinly veiled threats as far west as Denmark This isn’t a plan which allows Europe to build up a defence network in Europe - it’s a plan which actively *stops* and *hinders* Europe building a defence network, that’s why we will obviously never support it if Ukraine itself actively rejects it and I find it a bit odd that you seek to come on here every week demanding that we should just do that tbh. Wasn’t only a few months ago you were chiding anyone saying Putin is the new Hitler because Putin can’t even take Ukraine? Now you’re saying he is going to roll through Ukraine and changing your tune about how it’s suddenly over for them?

I understand the argument, but my gut feeling is more that the reasons for the low birth rates that seem impossible to shift are far more cultural than economic. They’re far more about society becoming inherently less face-to-face social and humans are social pack animals like wolves, penguins or ants, that’s how our brains are wired and how we survived. I mean it’s one thing saying people spend too much money on small things like coffees or Netflix subscriptions mean they don’t have money so choose not to have children, but that doesn’t explain why all the research shows that younger generations have way less friends and have way less sex and way less close relationships (be it romantic or platonic) than they used to, and why you constantly hear adults (and I feel this myself) say how hard it is to make genuine long lasting friendships after school and university these days (which is also probably a major reason for the mental health crisis) when making friends was a rudimentarily easy thing to do for most of human history - but we’ve almost created a society where saying “I wish I had more friends” or asking other adults if they want to meet up in the evening is almost an embarrassing thing to do. I’m not religious in the slightest, but losing that meeting space where everyone went to church every Sunday to meet each other in different parts of society is a big part of that I think. Pubs are almost losing their importance as social meeting places as people drink much less too.

I think you’re missing the point. These are decades old trends of low birth rates that exist from the old Soviet Union days. The point is, child mortality rates and life expectancy also grew rapidly in many countries over the past 50 years which means the low birth rates aren’t going to show in population crashes yet, but before that they absolutely are starting to show in ageing populations where you’re going to have to expect a small number of tax payers to support both economically, politically and culturally a population of majority of elderly people all who naturally need way more healthcare and support than the average 30-something. Look in South Korea for example, in 1950, 75 years ago its population was around 20 million, now it’s around 50milliom. In 75 years in 2100 it will back down to 20million as if stands, but in 1950 the average age was 18, in 2100 it will be above 60 (and probably only a couple of million women left of child bearing age) Because this is exponential by 2175 it will probably be only a couple of million people left. While South Korea is the most drastic example, the general pattern exists pretty much uniformly across the non-Africa, India and the Middle Eastern world.

Then why are the birth rates in Nordic countries with the high child benefits and very good maternity and paternity benefits on the floor? And when they even increased these it only increased birth rates in first generation immigrants from Africa but barely moved the needle in 2nd-3rd generation immigrants or people whose grandparents were all from the country? What you have suggested is exactly the kind of thing governments also thought was going to be common sense over the past decades but just hasn’t worked in practice in modern industrialised or post-industrialised countries.

These demographics exist everywhere except for Africa, India and the Middle East though that’s the problem. I know you love to rant against the Liberal establishment and think everything is about individual “leaders”, but the low birth rates are pretty much universal across all industrialised nations in Europe, Asia, North, Central & South America, Australia and New Zealand, regardless of dictatorships or institution led democracies, regardless of type or “strength” of leadership, regardless of capitalist economy, command socialist economy or Latin American populist black market and bung economies. That’s the exact problem - different types of governments, different economic systems, different leaders have all tried to solve the demographic problems and nothing works. If we found a model that had we could use it and say “yes it’s the fault of weak leaders or capitalism or liberalism” but we haven’t and it isn’t, it just seems to be an inherent by-product of our industrialised world. The worst problems are actually in Asia because they are so strictly anti-immigration. I mean South Korea, which has the single most devastating demographic train about to hit it of any county with very little immigration and a birth rate of about 0.7 children per woman, in 20-40 years you’ll probably have half the population living in retirement homes and the average worker having to pay more in tax than their average wages to support the countries incredible healthcare and pension costs. China is a couple of decades behind because it industrialised later but it’s already ageing rapidly and starting to see its pension funds running huge deficits.

I’m not sure you’re right, I mean there are alternatives that very clearly would work - inhumane ones of course that we would consider horrific today, but that’s never stopped some nutjobs trying these things before and then trying to convince the world that’s the only option. We’re already at the point where 30+ years of many different countries trying many different and opposing policies have been unable to successfully reverse birth rates and natural population decline and population ageing, and certain people see defending their tribe as their ultimately responsiblity, surely history shows us that we’re unfortunately bound to get nutjobs who’ll go down the path of forced pregnancy of every woman and forced euthanasia after a certain age? I mean, Pol Pot just one day decided to start society again from day x and killed 1/4 of his county’s population in 4 years including allegedly killing people who wore glasses because he felt they were a sign of the old world before day x or something, why do you think there wouldn’t be dictators who’d go to those lengths to keep their “Civilization” going in their heads?

https://www.bbc.com/news/live/c4gpzep9n8et Interesting statement by Putin on the bbc. I do wonder how much of this war and the Trump administration rather bizarre statement “Civilization erasure of Europe” ultimately comes down to some nationalistic panic over population ageing and the fact despite all the different types of policies tried over the past few decades that no country seems to be able to do anything to successfully reverse it. I do wonder how far we are from some nutjob leaders in some parts of the world trying forced pregnancies or withdrawal of any form of state support, benefits or state healthcare after your 65th birthday (or just straight up euthanasia after a certain age). 'Our long-term task is to preserve and increase our people' - Putin on population declinepublished at 15:40 15:40 Vladimir Putin, pictured during a visit to India last week In Russia, meanwhile, President Vladimir Putin, says efforts to stop the population decline in Russia have so far not borne fruit. "Unfortunately, negative tendencies prevail and the birth rate continues to fall," he said at a meeting of the Council for Strategic Development and National Projects. "Our long-term historic task is to preserve and increase our people. Despite the current situation and objective difficulties, we must maintain focus on this objective," he said. According to the World Bank, external, Russia's population has shrunk from 145.4m in 2019 to 143.5 in 2024. Independent researchers and BBC Russian have identified more than 150,000 Russians, externalkilled in Ukraine since the start of the full-scale invasion in February 2022 - although the total number is thought to be much higher.

I’m not sure what that really means. My point is it feels like all the major parties have been avoiding the debate like ostriches burying their heads in the sand since Covid kicked it out the news in early 2020 because “it will just open up old divisions”; even though even though it looms over the country like a giant elephant in the room even more now that the US is openly abandoning the European continent as allies and the past few days quite brazenly and openly expressed what many of us having been saying for months - that under Trump the US favours Russia over us and the EU (and countries like Canada and Australia) and is actively antagonistic towards us and our values .

I think all this shows that regardless of the what people thought about the rights and wrongs of the political institutions of the EU, the timing of Brexit was really catastrophic in hindsight. To uncouple our economy and create antagonistic relationships with the rest of Europe a few years before the US decided to completely abandon us and decide to instead favour Russia like this (and to be frank absolutely no one would’ve believed you of all of this if you’d told them back in 2016) was pretty horrendous timing. We were sold it would cause “Global Britain” and allowed us to trade with the world exactly the moment just before the world decided to become protectionist. The fact the media and country still feels like it’s still all too wounded to even have a debate about it and we all feel that we still have to pussyfoot around a referendum result from a decade ago when the whole point of democracy is you can change course if something isn’t working and aren’t at the whims of a guy dictating, when every poll for a good 4 or 5 years now has shown overwhelming support of favouring Europe is what to do seems weird to me. I think UK and the rest of Europe seem to be desperately holding onto to the hope it’s just a blip and if we can just hold out until 2028… but Trump moves the goalposts so much and successfully takes on the checks and balances that I’m not even sure a Democrat government would looks much different by then.

They don’t. Most of the UK is much more pro-Europe than the US, it’s just because how our voting system designed for 2 parties has now complete broken down now it’s a 5 party system instead, and means the pro-Trump party is currently on about 25% of the vote and would get 100% of the power with that, so they are getting way more media attention then the LibDems used to get when they had had better support under Kennedy and Clegg For reference https://yougov.co.uk/topics/international/trackers/should-britain-have-a-stronger-relationship-with-europe-of-the-us?crossBreak=1824

That’s a really interesting insight to me thank you. It’s the “Darren mode” as you say and the AI patently lying against its own programming and Google guys just shrugging the shoulders bit that scares me though. Nevermind about your bank would use it, I’m frightened governments, judges and lawyers will use it and decide the fates of people’s lives and the direction society goes in based on AI that openly makes stuff up and lies despite being programmed not to and we don’t understand why.

On the flip side, if AI does create a world with no jobs as AI can do everything and where everyone is essentially just on a welfare state being cared for by AI, what’s the point even of money and nations at that point? If we don’t need to pay anyone because AI does everything for us.

https://www.bbc.com/news/live/cn0g0xnr7klt Net Migration dropped massively to around 200,000 after being up at 1mil only a year or two before. Let’s see if all of a sudden these Reform voters will jump back to Labour and Tories as we were told they would do once they reduce net migration (my guess is obviously not because Farage will always push the goalposts and say “we need to be net negative immigration”).

WTF?

I think Reform starting to decline a bit in the polls now. Latest yougov has them at 25% which is the lowest they’ve been since the spring. Really shows the ridiculousness of the fptp voting system designed for a 2 party system when we’re very much in a 5 party system nowadays though. Said or before but if LibDems and Greens could work out some election pact they’d likely win. Also only 8% of people who voted Labour last election say they will vote Reform compared to the 29% who will vote Green or LibDems. Just shows how ridiculous this “Labour just need to reduce immigration then they’ll win voters from Reform” nonsense is really. It’s the Tories who’ve leaked voters to Reform not Labour, Labour have leaked voters to Green and LibDem. https://d3nkl3psvxxpe9.cloudfront.net/documents/VotingIntention_MRP_Results_251124_w.pdf Reform UK 25% Labour 19% Conservatives 18% Green 16% Liberal Democrat 15%

Thought this was quite interesting. Seems like our brains peak around age 32. I think calling it the end of adolescence is a bit click baity, but its still interesting, it’s more that’s when the brain stops going through its rewriting efficiency stage and begins to slowly decline. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cgl6klez226o Adolescence lasts into 30s - new study shows four pivotal ages for your brain The brain goes through five distinct phases in life, with key turning points at ages nine, 32, 66 and 83, scientists have revealed. Around 4,000 people up to the age of 90 had scans to reveal the connections between their brain cells. Researchers at the University of Cambridge showed that the brain stays in the adolescent phase until our early thirties when we "peak". They say the results could help us understand why the risk of mental health disorders and dementia varies through life. The brain is constantly changing in response to new knowledge and experience – but the research shows this is not one smooth pattern from birth to death. Instead, these are the five brain phases: Childhood - from birth to age nine Adolescence - from nine to 32 Adulthood - from 32 to 66 Early ageing - from 66 to 83 Late ageing - from 83 onwards "The brain rewires across the lifespan. It's always strengthening and weakening connections and it's not one steady pattern - there are fluctuations and phases of brain rewiring," Dr Alexa Mousley told the BBC. Some people will reach these landmarks earlier or later than others – but the researchers said it was striking how clearly these ages stood out in the data. These patterns have only now been revealed due to the quantity of brain scans available in the study, which was published in the journal Nature Communications. The five brain phases Childhood - The first period is when the brain is rapidly increasing in size but also thinning out the overabundance of connections between brain cells, called synapses, created at the start of life. The brain gets less efficient during this stage. It works like a child meandering around a park, going wherever takes their fancy, rather than heading straight from A to B. Adolescence - That changes abruptly from the age of nine when the connections in the brain go through a period of ruthless efficiency. "It's a huge shift," said Dr Mousley, describing the most profound change between brain phases. This is also the time when there is the greatest risk of mental health disorders beginning. Unsurprisingly adolescence starts around the onset of puberty, but this is the latest evidence suggesting it ends much later than we assumed. It was once thought to be confined to the teenage years, before neuroscience suggested it continued into your 20s and now early 30s. This phase is the brain's only period when its network of neurons gets more efficient. Dr Mousely said this backs up many measures of brain function suggesting it peaks in your early thirties, but added it was "very interesting" that the brain stays in the same phase between nine and 32. Adulthood - Next comes a period of stability for the brain as it enters its longest era, lasting three decades. Change is slower during this time compared with the fireworks before, but here we see the improvements in brain efficiency flip into reverse. Dr Mousely said this "aligns with a plateau of intelligence and personality" that many of us will have witnessed or experienced. Early ageing - This kicks in at 66, but it is not an abrupt and sudden decline. Instead there are shifts in the patterns of connections in the brain. Instead of coordinating as one whole brain, the organ becomes increasingly separated into regions that work tightly together - like band members starting their own solo projects. Although the study looked at healthy brains, this is also the age at which dementia and high blood pressure, which affects brain health, are starting to show. Late ageing - Then, at the age of 83, we enter the final stage. There is less data than for the other groups as finding healthy brains to scan was more challenging. The brain changes are similar to early ageing, but even more pronounced. Dr Mousely said what really surprised her was how well the different "ages align with a lot of important milestones" such as puberty, health concerns later in life and even the pretty big social shifts in your early 30s such as parenthood. 'A very cool study' The study did not look at men and women separately, but there will be questions such as the impact of menopause. Duncan Astle, professor of neuroinformatics at the University of Cambridge, said: "Many neurodevelopmental, mental health and neurological conditions are linked to the way the brain is wired. Indeed, differences in brain wiring predict difficulties with attention, language, memory, and a whole host of different behaviours." Prof Tara Spires-Jones, director of the centre for discovery brain sciences at the University of Edinburgh, said: "This is a very cool study highlighting how much our brains change over our lifetimes." She said the results "fit well" with our understanding of brain ageing, but cautioned "not everyone will experience these network changes at exactly the same ages".

I believe the NHS have said it’s the worst flu season since 2017 (and I was bed bound for a week with probably the worst flu I’ve ever had back then), so it’s probably this nasty flu and not Covid.

Americans are totally right on apartment though tbf. Flat is an ugly word for the place you live.

I’m sorry but what does this even mean? Why is it like a liberal dictatorship? Why do we mostly follow them on geopolitical issues? I’m really unsure what your trying to get at here, it feels like weirdly coded language. The overwhelming majority of British people fervently support Ukraine because they are uncontroversially the defenders in this war, and most of us think it’s frightening that one European country should just be allowed to invade another like that, iirc Europe has had a pretty long, scarring and bloody history with things like that. On the flip side it’s obvious Trump just doesn’t care at best, if not is much more on Russia’s side than Ukraine’s. It’s obvious though that Europe doesn’t have the military to defend itself and is too reliant on the US, I hope we ween ourself off US support and UK, France, Germany, Poland and the rest of Western and Central Europe create a military alliance which can hold up against US, China and Russia, and I’d love for the UK to break off from its over reliance on the US, but it’s not going to happen overnight, so this peace treaty thing is obviously just optics. It probably won’t achieve much but I think it’s good to see us looking different from the US in this world, I just hope we take military build up seriously. im with you on your point B though, was the same with the pandemic and it feels very much the same with AI - why are we not planning this? Why are we not planning and letting the public know for the potentially economic and civilization ending issues of AI? Even if it’s a 0.1% chance we should plan for it and be sending “in case of emergency” pamphlets explaining the dangers through every door.

They’ve always been god tier food tbh. Up there with custard and pepperoni pizza as 10/10 foods.

I think it almost feels a lot longer. Everything pre-pandemic feels like almost a different world to me, so much has changed since. The world changes so much nowadays that there are so many comparison points to look back on. Like the Cameron government and EU and Scotland independence referendums feel about 20 years ago now to me, not only 10.

My guess is that it’s perfectly realistic that AI companies will create gig economy jobs where people get paid just enough to keep going and buying stuff to sit in front of a computer for 14 hours a day to train the AI itself by giving feedback to different types of consumable media and getting endless dopamine hits until it makes us all brainless and even more starved of the social interaction and living life in ways that makes us feel human. Im not criticising btw because I absolutely feel trapped by it all as much as anyone, I and I don’t want to be yelling at clouds, but I remember asking my great uncle as a kid what they used to do in the evenings after work in the early 20th century before the radio and tv and he said they’d go to the pub, play cards, go to dances, meet people… almost every night they’d do actual social activities with friends and/or family. Humans are social creatures, we evolved that way to survive by working together, but since the radio, tv, then the internet we’ve created progressively more and more anti-social ways we get our dopamine hits from instead from telling stories, doing things like playing games or dancing or physical activities with others. I sincerely hope I’m wrong, but I can only see AI being another more aggressive step in killing humanity’s inherent socialness after radio, tv, and the internet I’ve said it before but I honestly think one of the biggest causes of the mental health crisis is how our society is no longer social - how it feels ridiculously difficult to make friends as an adult nowadays, which is such an absurd place to be in for pack animals who’ve spent millions of years where making friends was previously extremely easy, you’d just start playing and chatting with the other humans about, that’s the biggest thing about technology for me, it gives us these small micro anti-boredom hits throughout the day, but over time its kills our societies ability to be a social one. Where AI takes that is scary to me.

We disagree on a lot but I’m completely with you on this one. I think a lot of people just think too short-term in AI as well - like how it will take certain jobs within the next 5 years and not how it will utterly restructure our society over the next 25 years in weird ways it’s impossible to predict. Like if told someone how the internet would change almost every job, our attention spans, lead to research suggesting people have less friends, less sex, feel like they have less meaningful relationships, completely change politics, society, how when and where we work and everything when we were all getting those AOL CD-ROMs through our door and the common line back then was “it’s just a communication tool, it won’t change that many jobs”. Yet it’s so integrated in all our lives that it’s almost impossible to go internet free nowadays - like you can barely buy food with physical cash or use your banking in plenty of western countries nowadays even. AI I think will more likely than not have multiple times more incredible profound and weird, unthinkable effects on society than even the internet did. Like, I think most of society nowadays is seriously addicted to the internet in a way that does both individuals and society more harm than good, but AI will be able to quite easily create way more addictive and destructive algorithms to each individual person. Almost to the point where people will find it chemically extremely hard not to doomscroll for hours upon end (and how will powerful people take advantage of that - and how companies and governments will make it such an integrated a part of our life it’s almost impossible to go AI free from). I saw this Hank Green video recently which did a good explanation of it too. That we just can’t predict the profound changes AI will actually have in society because everyone only thinks short-term and the effect it will have on certain jobs within the next few years and not how it will affect our social relationships in 20-30 years.

If there's one thing this BBC thing has shown me it's that despite claiming to be patriots, it's clear the right in Britain are actually hitching themselves to an international MAGA movement and care more about supporting Trump's America than they do Britain and British values - genuinely can't believe the shadow foreign secretary saying our state broadcasted should "grovel" and bend over to a foreign leader - wtf? It''s one of the most bizarre and anti-patriotic things ever said in parliament but it's been completely normalised. I fully expect Reform (and the Tories if they still have Badenoch or Jenrick at the top but I'm less sure about the direction they'll go) to be full MAGA by 2029, probably after having a load of American money pumped in and social media spamming.