Sampson

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.

Would be interested to see what happened if the LibDems and Greens formed an election pact and stood down for each other what would happen. Most polls show their combined number of votes would be enough to win, but how that would translate to seats I don't know. Also whether their very differing views on the economy would be too much to of a gap to bridge to form an alliance, despite agreeing on a lot of social policy and both wanting to reject the US and get closer to Europe. I think with both parties very in favour of PR and both fiercely anti-Farage, I do think an anti-Reform election pact and then first thing first is pushing through PR for future elections could actually be feasible though.

You can't. Which is why it's ridiculous the DG and head of news have resigned over 10 seconds in an externally made programme that it took anyone over a year to recognise there was anything wrong with.

Why are the Mail and Telegraph celebrating a foreign leader attacking our national broadcaster? Think what you like about the BBC, but it's the British state broadcaster not the American one. The right wing press have become so obsessed with American political culture it's like they want us to become a 51st state and have tied themselves so bizarrely to a foreign leader in Trump that they will happily attack Britain itself and British institutions if it feels like it's pro-Trump to do so. If the Guardian did this with a left-leaning world leader they'd be outcry of a foreign takeover of our press and rightly so.

It’s everywhere . Can barely go a week here without this kind of Farage-ist virtue signalling these days.

The thing that gets me is Reform call themselves conservatives but they’re extremely radical and the exact opposite of conservatives in many ways. Conservatism under Thatcher, Major, Cameron and May always used to be the strength of institutions, free trade and international cooperation, and about the individual taking responsibility for their actions, not blaming others if you’re unemployed or struggling for example but going out there, thinking positively, go and do some studies or taking any job you can and not relying on the state and doing anything you can to “pull yourself up from the bootstraps”. I didn’t always agree with it, but it was a perfectly understandable viewpoint. Farage-ism is the exact opposite of that - it’s about constantly telling Britain or British people that they don’t need to take responsibility, all the ever do is play the victim and virtue signal when someone says something bad about them and it’s always the fault of the EU, international institutions, courts, the lawyers etc. or if you’re unemployed it’s the immigrants taking your jobs etc. So much of their messaging is the exact opposite to telling people to go out there and make it happen themselves, it’s all about telling people to play the victim. I’m surprised by how many Tories voters have jumped ship to Reform because Reform represent everything the Tories used to hate.

Second this, doesn't have to be those games specifically but just tabletop or analogue games in general, be them card games, board games, pub games, parlour games, word games, tabletop RPGs or whatever. Getting back into board and card games since the pandemic has been a massive help for mentally. It also helped see my old university friends way more than I used to again as well as help me make new friends again (which is always way harder than it should be as an adult in modern times). We used to love playing games in our 20s but then people started settling down, having partners, kids etc. so we just got out the habit - and you know what happens, going to the pub and just talking gets boring because you run out of things to talk about in adult life because things don't really change fromm week to week and no one wants to talk about politics with how divisive it is these days. But we'd mentioned a few times over the years how missed it, so we just set up one night a week as a "boys games night" since 2021 and it's been great. We'd been seeing each other like once every few months for years and it's gone to once a week for some of us again and is always a good laugh, also gives you something to look forward to to break up the week after work. Started trying some meetups as well for different games and made some good friends there as well in recent years, and I'm sure we all know how tough it is to make friends after school and university for many of us, the games give you an automatic ice breaker and jumping off point.

So what do you guys reckon: The plan with this war in Venezuela is to be manafactured so MAGA can use it to cancel next years mid terms and the 2028 election or not?

If you put the LibDems and Green votes together they’d have the most votes in most polls. I wonder if we’ll start seeing them doing some informal anti-Reform coalition where they sit out of certain by elections/local elections over the next few years

Oh I cba to read through the last pages of this nonsense. I’m glad some of you still have the energy to debate this stuff, glad some of you are still in the bargaining phase. I’ve given up and am in the acceptance phase of grief for liberal democracy, scientific consensus and the international rules based order. Clear as day now that enough of the population want to ignore scientific reality on climate change and want Farage to rule them like a king and smash the checks, balances, institutions, legal systems and bureaucracy that thousands of years of European history have taught us are needed to hold up democracy. Sideshow Bob had it right all along when he running for mayor of Springfield.

Peston’s quote feels very optimistic and based on current AI and not what it will look like in 20 years though. Similar to what people thought about the internet when we were all getting those AOL CD-ROMs through our doors in the late 90s/early 00s - “it’s just a tool for communication”. Now 25 years later it’s literally profoundly affected just about every job, our news, our attention span, our travel, our politics, our legal system, how we talk to each other, the amount of sex or friends people have on average in ways no one could’ve even thought about when those AOL CD-ROMs were being sent through our letter boxes. AI feels like an even more society shifting example of that, in 10 years time if not sooner I reckon no one will be able to tell the difference between real videos, audio clips, documents and photos and fake ones, how do you have a legal and political system then when “proof” and “truth” are impossible to tell apart from lies and forgeries?

Plus it gives leaders a chance to dodge responsibility - which I would guess is a pretty natural thing to want to do if you’re leader of a country where you know many decisions mean life or death or splitting up of families for thousands of your people - “it was just the AI not me who came up with that idea”

How widespread do you reckon AI useage is in governments already? Even only a couple of years after its popularity. And how about in 5, 10 or 20 years time when AI is exponentially better? I know there was some articles a couple of months back where the Swedish prime minister admitted he and his colleagues ask AI for advice on difficult questions quite often. I would hazard a guess it’s pretty rampant already in the governments of most western countries. You do have to wonder what AI means for democracy long term if whoever is in power just governs by asking AI, we’re no longer then governed by humans. Feels like the computer game Deus Ex from 25 years ago where some billionaire adventure capitalists built up AI, originally releasing it as a funny carnival attraction because people liked being judged by some supposed objective being, but the goal was always that humans ended up giving up everything to the AI and let it govern them. And humans gave up those freedoms with very little pushback in the end.

This is still one of the most beautiful things I’ve seen about trying to hope within the darkness and when your brain chemistry is at its lowest. It’s about 20 minutes long but I’ve rewatched it quite a few times when I’m feeling down and it helps.