Part of me feels optimistic, the other part feels like silly accusations of anti-Semitism, misogyny, communism and chairman Moa bicycles etc etc, are already being prepared.

That’s semantics. I take it you understood the message I was trying to convey.

In principle, there’s nothing wrong with the right to buy.

The issue with right to buy is that sold off council stock is not replaced and that many people can’t get a council house in the first place.

Am I the only one that thinks this is a weird place to shoehorn in an entirely unrelated issue?

I understand that you feel strongly about the issues faced by trans kids, but I don’t see what it has to do with unaffordable house prices.

When you’re rich, you make your own rules. Laws are to protect the rich from the dirty poors, not the other way around!

Something being technically legal doesn’t make it technically OK.

If I had just started a new job and my CV was found to be “incredibly misleading”, I’d expect to be kicked out the door, not because I’d broken the law or commited gross misconduct, but because I’d been found to be unsuitable for the expectations of the company/customers.

This story is just another straw on the camels back of the privatised water industry that have been using the British tax payer as an ATM for fat cat shareholders for decades, with debts so huge that our children and our children’s children will be burdened.

It equates to about one in five hundred and fifty people, which is less than 0.5% of the population, so I can understand why the government feels content to overlook it.

Unfortunately, protests are largely inneffective until wide spread disruption is caused. If you want the government to take notice people need to feel strongly enough to the point that they’re willing to risk prison sentences and most people are far too comfortable to risk that.

If you say so

The mob is fickle, brother.

The hive mind has concluded AI=bad and any comment that doesn’t go along with the consensus is going to get downvotes.

It’s really not that different from the beginning of the industrial revolution, when cotton mills first started to implement the spinning jenny, leaving many workers out of a job who’d go in to the factories at night to smash the machines up.

No one wants to go back to spinning cotton all day now though and it will be the same with jobs taken by AI.

Well your comment sounded like you were implying that regulations are needed that currently aren’t there.

I used to be against losing the headphone jack, but now I’m without one, I honestly don’t miss it.

No more wires getting caught, tangled or damaged and the sound quality is just as good unless you’re an audio engineer.

This is the most pedantic reply so far.

Is the insinuation here that the AI industry is unregulated? Because I’m not against regulations that would drive these improvements.

I think it’s exactly what I’m thinking about, unless I’m missing something specific that you’d like to put forward?

If I own a bottled drinks company and the energy cost is 10p a bottle but a new, more efficient process is invented that would lower my energy cost to 5p a bottle, that’s going to be looking like a wise investment to make. A few pence over several thousand products adds up pretty quickly.

I could either pocket the difference as extra profit, lower my unit price to the consumer to make my product more competitive in the market, or a bit of both.

I think it’s fair to say that pretty much every industry is more efficient and cleaner than it used to be and I don’t see why AI would be an exception to that.

I don’t understand the hate for AI. It’s a new technology that has some teething issues, but it’s only going to get better and more efficient.

The first thought that comes to my mind is that the people in Twitter are just going to migrate to another social network. It won’t be problem solved, it’ll be problem moved.

The second thought I have is the amount of hate and comments full of misinformation on sites like Facebook. Should we ban Facebook too? And if so, where does it stop and who is it that gets to decide that a site is getting banned for “wrong think”.

Personally, I believe this isn’t so much a petition against X, but a petition against Musk, who I think wouldn’t be absolutely gutted even if X went out of business. I think he bought it with the aim of derailing anyway.

As with hate speech, the harm needs to be quantifiable. “I don’t like that people are sharing ideas and opinions that I personally disagree with” doesn’t cut it.

The price of freedom of speech is needing to hear things that make you uncomfortable every now and again. Deciding what people can and can’t write on the internet is a slippery slope.

If someone told me “I don’t like Musk, I’m going to stop using Twitter”, I’d say “good for you”. I think it’s great when people stand up for their beliefs and put their money where their mouth is.

If someone told me “I don’t like Musk, so you’re not allowed to use Twitter”, I’d tell them to go fuck themselves. It’s none of their business whether they personally like what it is that I want to do as long as I’m not hurting anyone.

Inb4: I’m not a Twitter user and probably never will be, but I believe very strongly in the freedom of expression, even when that means I have to hear things that I don’t like.

I actually can’t remember the last time I saw someone under 60 buy a newspaper. I think the cross over in the venn diagram is going to be pretty small.