Sampson

It's one of my favourites. Still need to try the last 2 expansions at some point.

If you're talking about music, then Davy Graham, a legendary folk guitarist from the 60s was from Bosworth. Not that popular but loads of the big guitarists of that era cite him as an influence. RayDavis of the Kinks called him the best guitarist he'd ever seen, Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin wrote a song about him. He's often cited as popularising that kind of finger plucking and tge DADGAD string tuning style. His most famous song is probably the instrumental Angi which Simon & Garfunkel, Bert Jansch and many others have covered.

They're fantastic so far. Really easy to read and gripping, I'm not usually that big on mafia stories but this is done in a really great way. I know the 3rd book especially I a big favourite of many scifi/fantasy book channels on YouTube so looking forward to that one. Can't decide if I'll do the Expanse or Mistborn after this trilogy, but seeing some on here praise the Expanse makes me lean towards that.

I think the triple lock is more of an optics thing on the generational divide, I think a lot of gen z and millennial voters concentrate on the pension system because they endlessly hear the Tories and Reform telling them that they are workshy and faking mental health issues in order to not work and claim benefits when the overwhelming majority of social spending is actually on pension benefits and the healthcare system which is overwhelmingly used by older baby boomers. I think there's a feeling amongst younger people that they're often attacked for being too costly to the state when in reality the baby boomers cost the state far more, but they're too big a voter base because of population ageing that no one dares say it. Going after the triplelock is a bit of a tacit nod towards gen z and millennial voters that Burnham recognises that I think. I thought Burnham's speech was fantastic - all the things we were told Starmer had to avoid but which many of us really wanted him to talk about in 2024 - the clearly nonsensical voting system, the problems of Thatcherism and de-industrialisation, finally being allowed to talk about Brexit again and recognising the clear majority opinion, especially amongst working aged people, that it's been a disaster, meanwhile he didnt mention Reform or the Tories once trying to just say "well vote for me because I'm not them". People dont have to agree with him, as you might not like general left of centre politics which is fine, but It felt like the speech of an actual proper Labour leader who actually stood for progressive politics and was actually trying to engage in top-level political and philosophical arguments and not just "manage by focus groups" under Starmer where no one knew where he even stood on the political spectrum and he just floated in the wind of what the latest focus group told him to do.

To be fair, I'm generally left leaning, but I think inherentance tax is a bit silly in this day and age where thd birth rate is on the floor and young people cant get jobs or buy houses and 40-50% of 25 year olds still live with their parents and a lot of younger people do need "the bank of mum and dad". I don't think it helps the feelings of intergenerational unfairness. I mean, if you want people to actually have children again with the birthrate on the floor like it is, youve got to increase incentives to be able to make a good life for your children and pass it on to them. Even the high tax nordic countries have scrapped inheritance taxes.

Jade war. Book 2 of Fonda Lee's Green Bones trilogy.

Absolutely. Lived in Portsmouth for many years until recently and still go back regularly as still have very good friends there. Supposedly the city with the 3rd highest crime rate in the UK and plenty of these thugs protesting against the RNLI been about recently. And now, don't get me wrong, of course there's more rough sleepers and the like since the 2008 financial crisis, but it's still a fantastic city with largely great people where I never felt remotely unsafe even when walking home alone at 3am and people don't half exaggerate about how society is crumbling there. You go round the city and all you actually see are friends and family enjoying each others company, laughing, sharing meals with each other. The seafront, Southsea common and the South Downs to the North of the city are still beautiful places where you can relax and enjoy the atmosphere and theyve rebuilt the pedestrianised are on the seafront in recent years and it looks great and they council have done a great job there. But people only moan about the construction going on, as if no construction can ever happen and the city should remain stagnant. I think a lot of it is just we see everything now. Every 3am scrap that has always gone on is now filmed and plastered over local Facebook groups and people say it shoes how young adults have no respect anymore? But Britain is still a beautiful country with beautiful nature and still great and social people and certainly isn't close to being "finished" or "a failed state" or whatever the latest buzzword to shit on the country abd put it down is. Also find it hard to get my head round are those that constantly go on about what a shithole Britain is are often the ones who claim they're the most patriotic.

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?