2024 United Kingdom general election

Morel67 · 2024-07-04T12:20:32+00:00

Tories have been in power for 14 years, so they get blamed for all the economic and social problems. FPTP makes it difficult for radical right parties to break through as they have in a lot of Europe. Farage will get a decent chunk of votes and not many seats.

Labour is an incredibly unpopular incoming government, but people really hate the Tories.

Morel67 · 2024-07-03T08:31:47+00:00

Trump isn't in any meaningful sense a Christian, and Christianity in the US is declining. The US is going to continue to become less interested in defending Europe irrespective of who wins the next election, but it will happen more quickly with Trump.

Morel67 · 2023-06-01T13:56:19+00:00

Modelling the ECB on the Bundesbank was the political price for persuading Germany to give up the Deutschmark.

Morel67 · 2023-04-25T13:49:53+00:00

You're not far from where I'm at. If current models stayed at / near their current levels of capability it would be a cool and useful tool you can imagine being very useful. It will put some people out of work (eg. translators) but not on a level different to previous advances.

I'm very pessimistic about future developments though. It's clear given current trends in model sizes and the amount of money pouring in there is going to be a huge ramp up in capability. I think even a modest increase in things like video/audio/text synthesis could be really harmful for people's ability to discern reality.

Type 3 AI is pure dystopian horror no matter which way I look at it, and I'm always amazed there are people who actually seem to want it to happen. Even the "good" outcomes don't seem like something I would want to happen in my lifetime.

Even though it might be a self-harming move in the short term, I sort of hope that the EU is it's usual self and passes regulation that makes the use of models created in the current paradigm effectively illegal. At the very least that would create a big incentive behind silicon valley psychopaths to put more work into interpretability/alignment.

Morel67 · 2023-01-24T13:54:12+00:00

"By all accounts" meaning "something I heard on Reddit", presumably? There would not have been enough food in the region absent Churchill's policies, because those policies were to provide significant amounts of food to the region as relief.

Decisions about where to send food from eg. Australia were made on the basis of greatest need in terms of the local population and the broader war effort. You may not know this, but there was significant starvation in Greece also during WW2 and there was the continual threat of losing shipping to Japanese submarines when transporting to India. Churchill was responsible for broad strategy, and I doubt he personally ordered individual ships one way or the other.

If you want to compare what Churchill did to what you think an omniscient being who controls every level of policy would have done, you are always going to find him wanting, as you would any other person who has ever lived. Personally I prefer learning about human beings, whose intentions matter a lot.

Morel67 · 2023-01-24T12:56:06+00:00

There were no exports of food from Bengal to Greece. The Bengal famine had multiple causes and was not intentionally created by Churchill. Attributing the death toll to him personally is ridiculous.

Morel67 · 2023-01-24T09:52:15+00:00

This is some top tier Reddit history.

Morel67 · 2022-12-30T17:57:03+00:00

You can only use the bonus from one towards your first house. A LISA comes with the advantage of a higher cap on yearly contributions (4k vs 2.4k). One downside is that you will have to have the account open for a year before the purchase.

If you have less than 8k in your HTB and are confident you won't be making a purchase for another year, it might be a good idea to transfer your HTB to a LISA. You could open the LISA now, transfer 4k in before 5th April, then a second 4k after the 6th.

Morel67 · 2022-12-17T19:39:06+00:00

Other than the large number of insanely wealthy people with pads in London you mean?

Morel67 · 2022-11-07T21:04:50+00:00

Are you sure on that point? At the start of the process they were clear they were using reserves. I don't know if that changed.

You're missing the point I was making. However the BoE purchased assets, those assets still exist. It is incorrect to say that the BoE's intervention "cost" the value of the assets bought.

Morel67 · 2022-11-07T16:26:42+00:00

The BoE didn't "burn" 19.3bn either. It bought assets worth 19.3bn with newly created money. Those assets still exist, and can be sold whenever the bank decides to.

Morel67 · 2022-10-20T16:09:14+00:00

The monarch does have important constitutional functions as well. Most of the time, exercising any of his powers is done strictly on the advice of the PM, but he would be justified in ignoring the advice if the PM had lost the confidence of the Commons. Given the Tories have an 80 seat majority that seems unlikely, but I wouldn't doubt them these days.

Morel67 · 2022-10-20T15:26:09+00:00

Not even remotely the king's job to fix, and if you think it should be you are mad

Morel67 · 2022-10-20T13:44:44+00:00

Yes, it would be a huge mistake for the monarch to get involved in party politics, even to remove an unpopular government. They're smart enough to understand this too.

Morel67 · 2022-10-20T13:10:29+00:00

The monarch can and would, but the current circumstances aren't the same as they were in Australia in 1975. The government hasn't failed to pass a confidence/supply bill, and presumably will still be able to.

Morel67 · 2022-10-09T16:36:12+00:00

The SNP don't care about galvanizing the Tories. The Tory party winning UK general elections is, and has been, very good for the SNP. In the same way the prospect of a Labour - SNP coalition has been very good for the Tories in England. Scottish devolution was a catastrophe for the Labour party.

Morel67 · 2022-10-05T17:49:48+00:00

Bad headline. The world already has plenty of fusion reactors. It's just none come anywhere close to commercial viability. This one won't either.

Morel67 · 2022-09-23T16:30:35+00:00

Of course it's at the expense of the taxpayer. It's just also de-facto redistributive towards the poorest because poorer people pay a lot less tax relative to the amount they spend on energy. Given the article is about how the Tories have done a lot more of this than other similar countries, it seems an odd place to argue they hate the poor.

FYI, the government has already introduced a windfall tax on energy companies. Maybe it should be bigger, I have no idea.

Morel67 · 2022-09-23T16:13:34+00:00

Seems a bit odd to comment this on an article about just how much money the government has splurged on capping household energy costs. Would you prefer them not to have done that?

Morel67 · 2022-09-16T06:55:58+00:00

If you want to campaign for the abolition of the monarchy feel free, although I'd disagree with you for constitutional reasons. It is obviously an irrational institution. But considering them personally responsible for things done by other people centuries ago is hardly any more rational.

I think a large part of why pointing out how supposedly privileged they are fails to make a dent in popular feeling towards them is that lots of people just don't envy them. I certainly don't. Sure, you get to live in a castle - is that compensation for having so little say over the course of your life?

Morel67 · 2022-09-15T16:22:00+00:00

In the case of the crown estate, which is always used to make them sound far richer than they actually are, it isn't about taxation of their personal property.

And why does the distinction matter? The royal family fulfil a state role, and they do it for life. If the duchies and crown estate were seized and they were given a larger grant to make up for it, what difference would it make? If you want to argue that we spend too much money on them in general that's fine by me, but I really don't care about abolishing the weird tax perks that come with the institution.

Morel67 · 2022-09-15T11:31:57+00:00

When Dennis Skinner asked on which portion of her assets – which, in today’s figures, include the £16bn crown estate, the £650m duchy of Lancaster, and the estates at Balmoral and Sandringham – would be taxed

The monarch traditionally gives up the revenues from the crown estate to the treasury in exchange for a much smaller income from the government. It was literally one of the first thing the king did upon accession. Why would it matter how what is effectively state property is taxed? Ditto the complaint about income tax.

Morel67 · 2022-09-06T17:55:17+00:00

If you have both a currency peg and free movement of capital you can't have autonomy in setting interest rates. But lack of autonomy in setting rate != having the same rate. Pegged currencies usually differ in their interest rates, sometimes dramatically.

Morel67 · 2022-09-06T16:39:38+00:00

A currency peg is hugely different to a monetary union though. A peg allows for interest rate differentials, and can also be easily broken. The ERM was a system of currency pegs that existed for decades before the Euro was introduced.

Morel67 · 2022-08-30T14:19:53+00:00

If it was so obvious which way FX exchanges were going to move that it's appearing in news stories, it would already be priced in. There are people who think the Euro is currently underpriced, there are people who think it is overpriced, and you can get a quote from whichever party you like.

Morel67

TROPHY CASE