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Serious questions and musings

DiogoJ42 said:
My main reason for hating them is the introduction of tuition fees and student loans the year before I would have gone to uni. In my family, we always said "it's OK to be broke, but never get in to debt". So that scuppered my life plans.

Not to mention how authoritarian they are, as we are seeing right now.
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Good point well made. I come from a poor background and wasn’t discouraged from going to uni despite the tuition fee introduction but I can see why that would impact:

I suppose my only counter would be is there any political party that would do 100% of the what you agree with? Plus still convinced on authoritarianism, it’s too easy to throw about, worryingly close at time for sure but authoritarian governments don’t allow criticism and as far as I can see we can happily critique the government.
 
I have come to the conclusion, those who are putting the flags up. Have no idea why they are doing it.

It's the same thing when England play the world cup, Christmas lights, halloween, or banging pots and setting off a fireworks displant when we clapped the NHS to hide the 5G test signal or something. It's just folk trying to one up over there neighbours.

I'm tired off being English
 
Seems all a bit counter-intuitive anyway (asides from being a waste of time and deliberately making some folk uncomfortable).

Why would you put up flags which represent a country (and thereby government) who you claim is the cause of all your problems?

Also this "Must have A-Level equivalent" English thing to work here. Seriously gov? Are they aware of the huge percentage of NHS nurses with broken English who prop the thing up?

Maybe start building some proper social housing and actually put together a plan for a post-AGI economy when we run out of nonsense jobs to create or money to shift from place to place for arbitrary reasons.
 
That lovely Andrew Windsor.

Good to see him putting the effort in to turn this fine nation of ours into a decent republic.

Now can we arrange for all those spare bedrooms in Buck House to be used as temporary accommodation for asylum seekers?

Could save us a few million a year, and put Charlie back in the good books.

Possibly.
 
It won't be enough until they start paying inheritance tax like everyone else and they're also reduced to being left with one decent property each (the king/queen can have a bigger one). The rest of the Crown estate and any/all land/property should be totally taken into the ownership of the country with no allowance going to them at all. And they should think theirselves lucky.
 
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Give us back all of Cornwall for a start.
And the Trough of Bowland.
King should have one palace, and all the other royals can bunk up with him, there is more than enough room.
The rest asylum hostels and theme parks, with massive coasters in the gardens.

Our new duke can be put in charge, from the top of the hill.
 
So, even before his latest little payrise, our mate Elon could have literally sorted out world hunger through direct food aid before the end of the year.

But he prefers playing with skyrockets.

And backing Tommy Robinson.

Like they said on Spitting Image, all those years ago...never met a nice South African.
 
This is why the worlds economies are screwed. All of the money going to a relative few at the top so there's not enough disposable income for the average person so there's less tax take etc etc. Plus the fact that housing hasn't kept up with population growth so people spend more and more of their income on a roof over their heads instead of, again, spending money elsewhere in the economy. Just so people can play rockets and see how many zero's they can accrue on their bank account screen. This is why this AI shiz will be absolutely awful for human-kind. More zero's for computer screens and less jobs for humans.
 
BarryZola said:
This is why this AI shiz will be absolutely awful for human-kind. More zero's for computer screens and less jobs for humans.
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To be fair, AI does have a lot of long-term potential to be massive for the economy, it’s just a lot of the products on the market right now are indeed a bubble. A lot of services is a Large Language Model wrapper, that’s designed to regurgitate company information.

Then there’s the issue of a lot of companies using AI as a means of Cost Management, during a period of cost reduction. A lot of the successful and profitable AI ventures (and the ones that’ll see through the bubble) aren’t products that are meant to be cheap enough to replace human labour, it’s expensive software that can have massive productivity boosts when assisting high-skilled specialised work.

Think Health, Law and Bio-Tech, massive productivity gains are being seen in the industries, suggesting AI should be used with a more Keynesian approach to economics, rather than a Monetarist one. Although stuff like ChatGPT might have the potential to make outsourcing to countries like Vietnam and The Philippines cheaper. Which is where the real risk of mass redundancy comes from.
 
Anybody who's been around long enough will remember the dot-com bubble. Loads of eCommerce sites getting on the bandwagon, loads of investment, lots of big money made for some followed by big losses for others.

I think AI will be similar. We're going through a phase now where there's lots of slop and inappropriate use cases. It will settle down and we'll end up with it just getting used where it makes sense.
 
Alsty said:
Anybody who's been around long enough will remember the dot-com bubble. Loads of eCommerce sites getting on the bandwagon, loads of investment, lots of big money made for some followed by big losses for others.

I think AI will be similar. We're going through a phase now where there's lots of slop and inappropriate use cases. It will settle down and we'll end up with it just getting used where it makes sense.
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I don't think we'll quite see as catastrophic a collapse as the dot-com bubble, but I do think it'll be comparable to the Web 2.0 scene.

Lots of social media companies, with lots of fresh capital investment making big promises, all now mostly forgotten. The difference in this instance is that they either faded into existence, or were acquired and absorbed into one of the large players.

Digg, Pownce, Friendster, MySpace, Bebo, Dailybooth, Flickr, Foursquare, Gowala, Odeo, PodShow. May they all rest in peace.
 
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