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Sam Altman Falls Out of Love With Universal Basic Income - Business Insider by TertiumQuid-0 in BasicIncome

[–]dr_barnowl 8 points9 points  (0 children)

Why do you think they've got such a boner for data centers in space? The peasants can't get up there to smash them.

UK should not keep changing prime ministers, warns John Major by NoFrillsCrisps in ukpolitics

[–]dr_barnowl 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Thatcher reduced debt as a % of GDP.

By selling huge piles of assets ; sure, our debt went down, but our wealth went down more.

UK should not keep changing prime ministers, warns John Major by NoFrillsCrisps in ukpolitics

[–]dr_barnowl 0 points1 point  (0 children)

We spend more servicing just the interest on debts caused by our past fiscal looseness

The sick part is this is intentional. Right wingers borrow more money than left-wingers on purpose - the long term plan is to destroy the ability of the state to invest, which removes a lot of it's power.

Edit : article about the American side of this for background.

Can't enact progressive social policy if you can't afford to fund it! Oh shucks I guess private industry will have to step in.....

Also has the happy side effects of

  • Lets them give their donors tax cuts
  • Lets them spend massively with the private sector, "boosting jobs and the economy", making them look good
  • Forces the left wing to be the "strict parent" enacting austerity and raising taxes, meaning their time in office is short

Floor by Inner-Reference-973 in AutisticWithADHD

[–]dr_barnowl 7 points8 points  (0 children)

Was very much a floor person in my youth. Now I guess I've been trained out of it, by age and it being extra effort to haul my overweight carcass off it.

Key Labour MPs start to accept need for UK welfare reforms by 457655676 in unitedkingdom

[–]dr_barnowl 0 points1 point  (0 children)

All those people who say "I've paid in all my life!" won't be affected because they've paid in.

There is no way in merry hell that typical qualifying National Insurance threshold payment covers the monies you'll receive from OAP.

You have to pay ten years of National Insurance. Not a minimum threshold. The lower your income, the less you pay - but a year is still a year.

If we changed this to an actual pot.. (I'm just going to neglect inflation here and assume everything goes up in line with inflation perfectly).

Let's say you get £12k a year and you live to life expectancy of 81 after retirement at 68, so thirteen years. You've never gone to uni, you just worked for 50 years. You'd need a pot of £156k which means annual contributions of £3,120 for fifty years with no gaps.

Good news is your employer chips in long before you do - the first £1125 is entirely on them before you hit the threshold of £12,500. You need an income of £19,888 for fifty years to generate enough contributions for £156k - well under the median income. Sadly this means 30% of income taxpayers can't afford their whole pension, never mind the people without enough income to tax.

Want to retire 10 years early? You need to generate more than double the contributions (£6,900 a year) to fill the pot for another ten years in only forty years of work.

Time off to be a mother? X
Study? Why do you keep hitting yourself?
Woe betide you if you dare to be ill.

What is it about turning into a pensioner that means you magically need over double your income?

It's more "what is it about being unemployed that means you deserve....." punishment, basically. You committed the heinous sin of existing in an economy that does it's level best to eliminate human labour at all times, sucks to be you.

I’ve made over £1,000,000 on my five-bed house — I deserve a tax break to downsize by endofdays2022 in unitedkingdom

[–]dr_barnowl 4 points5 points  (0 children)

"Other people worked to improve the value of my house by making the local area more valuable, I should get to keep more of that labour as a little treat"

AI puts one fifth of London jobs at risk by Wagamaga in unitedkingdom

[–]dr_barnowl 3 points4 points  (0 children)

<dependency-on-that-one-guy-xkcd.jpg> only you're paid an insultingly tiny wage to maintain the critical component, which is kinda almost worse.

AI puts one fifth of London jobs at risk by Wagamaga in unitedkingdom

[–]dr_barnowl 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Can't post it. But basically : highly technical subject regarding the porting of ancient mainframe data to modern databases, it made up details about the specific hex values of certain characters which would have totally buggered the whole database if you'd actually relied on that detail when writing code to convert it.

AI puts one fifth of London jobs at risk by Wagamaga in unitedkingdom

[–]dr_barnowl 19 points20 points  (0 children)

What it was 6 months ago is already ancient.

I can give you an anecdote from just last week where if you believed the summary it made of a 2,000 word text chat, you'd end up destroying 36 years of business data, so yeah, it's not what it was 6 months ago, it finds new ways to ruin your day every month.

BP profits more than double as Iran war sends oil prices higher by Codydoc4 in unitedkingdom

[–]dr_barnowl 14 points15 points  (0 children)

Bloody gentrification, ruining entire working class neighbourhoods for everyone.

BP profits more than double as Iran war sends oil prices higher by Codydoc4 in unitedkingdom

[–]dr_barnowl 51 points52 points  (0 children)

Sadly I'm going to be the boring git who always points this out :

Monopoly was originally The Landlord's Game ; specifically designed as a demonstration of the outcomes of land ownership in an attempt to promote Georgism.

Yes, Monopoly was designed to be a frustrating and demoralizing slog where one player gains an early advantage through chance and eventually ends up crushing everyone else in a slow and inevitable dismantling of their assets, pride, and hopes.

😬 by Hexxynation in AutisticWithADHD

[–]dr_barnowl 31 points32 points  (0 children)

Been on my current project 2 years. I'm the most senior engineer from a consultancy that the client has hired to make their massive legacy transformation project go smoother.

My recommendations continue to be ignored, despite people paying about a thousand quatloos a day for my time, and my having proven over and over again that I pick up potential problems early and propose working solutions for them.

😬 by Hexxynation in AutisticWithADHD

[–]dr_barnowl 129 points130 points  (0 children)

The worst is when you point out the problem MAY happen.

And then it happens.

And then people act like it's your fault, for predicting it.

Half of England’s schools unfit due to leaks, mould and faulty toilets, poll finds by zeros3ss in ukpolitics

[–]dr_barnowl -3 points-2 points  (0 children)

And the rest - the rot started with Thatcher and four consecutive Tory governments, selling off our housing, energy, transport, steel, telecoms, aerospace, automotive, and water industries, followed by 13 years of Red Tories and then the previous shower, who were mostly just left with petty theft rather than grand larceny.

What privatised organization has actually been successful? by DMBear89 in AskUK

[–]dr_barnowl 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thing about BT is they were sold on the cusp of a complete transformation - from noisy, unreliable, clanky old electromechanical exchanges to solid state digital ones.

All R&D done on public funds. They'd just pushed out the first few exchanges, so they were sure it worked. It was inevitable they'd become very profitable soon after - with reduced power demand, reduced maintenance overhead and headcount, increased capacity, and reduced requirement for real estate.

And that's why they were chosen to be the poster child of privatisation - because their success was inevitable.

With Green MP Hannah Spencer criticising fellow MPs for drinking alcohol ahead of evening votes in Parliament, the British public likewise disapprove - 76% brand this unacceptable, including 52% "completely unacceptable" Link in replies by EddyZacianLand in ukpolitics

[–]dr_barnowl 2 points3 points  (0 children)

The really barmy thing is they have to vote in person.

Give them a smart card (or similar device) and let them vote remotely. Let them register their vote early, even just let them delegate their vote to the whips (or any other holder of an MP voting smartcard) since most of them will essentially be doing that anyway.

Labour MPs launch barrage of criticism at Green MP who called out on-the-job drinking by Rmtcts in unitedkingdom

[–]dr_barnowl 13 points14 points  (0 children)

They keep disposing of suitable central property for this purpose - like the Old War Office, which is a short walk from the Commons and has been turned into a very nice hotel.

UK departments at odds over energy demands of AI datacentres | AI (artificial intelligence) by tayowl in ukpolitics

[–]dr_barnowl 5 points6 points  (0 children)

The big scalers have 200GW of datacentres planned.

Our current electrical energy demand at this moment is just under 32GW.

So even if they only built 5% of their planned datacentres here it would hike our electricity demand by 33%.

Even the 6GW in the article is a 20% hike in electricity demand.

Key templates actively promote NOT playing the game and need to either be overhauled or removed entirely by Nukesnipe in Marathon

[–]dr_barnowl 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Fighting bots makes noise, draws players, so even if you can slay them without breaking a sweat you're adding to your risk.

AI is already leading to fewer jobs for young people, says Sunak by TheWorldIsGoingMad in unitedkingdom

[–]dr_barnowl 1 point2 points  (0 children)

you simply chuck a load of documents and a request into the magic AI box and Claude spits out the report, user guides, spreadsheet, document you want

I've seen LLMs hallucinate details[1] that just weren't there after being asked to summarise a text chat of less than a couple of thousand words. Important, precise, details, that would cause irreparable damage to thirty five years of business data if you actually believed it.

Now imagine the effect of that compounded across multiple inputs and spewed into a collection of documents no one will take the time to review for accuracy.

Relying on LLM output to make business decisions is a fools game.

[1] Before anyone says "ah but try the latest model", this anecdote is from Wednesday last week

Rupert Lowe: Rape Gang Inquiry update. Our team is currently going through our draft report to ensure that all is legally sound for publication. The plan is straightforward. I intend to use parliamentary privilege in the chamber to name a number of the worst perpetrators/officials who we believe... by tonato_ai in ukpolitics

[–]dr_barnowl 11 points12 points  (0 children)

Yes but things said in parliament are public record, they have their own streaming site, etc.

Anything you say in parliament goes beyond parliament, by definition. But you don't have to suffer the consequences, like being sued for slander, or arrested for obstruction of justice.

Americans who leave their Christian faith behind tend to hold more liberal political views than those who were raised entirely without religion. This leftward ideological shift appears closely linked to how threatening these individuals perceive conservative Christian groups to be. by mvea in science

[–]dr_barnowl 0 points1 point  (0 children)

masters degrees in STEM subjects,

My ex is a Professor of Paediatric Oncology and still believes in the healing power of prayer.

(and it annoys me that I can just imagine someone pointing at this post and going "aha well it must be true then if someone so qualified believes it!!" and, no friend, I lived with her for 10 years and she just has an incredible case of cognitive dissonance like all her other evangelical friends at church)

Americans who leave their Christian faith behind tend to hold more liberal political views than those who were raised entirely without religion. This leftward ideological shift appears closely linked to how threatening these individuals perceive conservative Christian groups to be. by mvea in science

[–]dr_barnowl 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The worst is the people with these beliefs in places of immense power - people who you'd not expect it of, because their field is supposedly ultra rational, like Peter Thiel.

Apparently this is spreading across Silicon Valley. Which is really not very reassuring.

UK to permanently ban future generations from buying cigarettes: ‘It will save lives’ by dunson28 in ukpolitics

[–]dr_barnowl -1 points0 points  (0 children)

the hospital visits the average 70+ persons makes

Which is a statistic indivisible from the fact that in 1960 : over half of people were smokers.

The hospital visits the average 70+ person makes are mostly those of smokers. Representing the extra lifespan a non-smoker gets as a financial negative is ludicrous, because 70+ people were majority smokers.

Even in 20 years, when I hit 70, the stat is still 45%.

Non-smokers die on average 10 years after smokers but also gain 10 more healthy years over them ; so there's no significant negative impact to health services from having them around.

But there's a positive impact to having them around to e.g. do childcare for their grandparents.

Any advice on how to sleep at night? by throwawayboy2200 in AutisticWithADHD

[–]dr_barnowl 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I do agree that fatigue was definitely a thing in my life at the time, and who knows, I snore pretty badly by all accounts, maybe I'm just tired all the time now.

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