That’s it. We should hand back our “developed country” card.

What’s his negotiating stance with doctors again?

What’s funny about all of this is everyone is obsessed with the funding model instead of the delivery model.

If you choose to fund it privately, please keep in mind that they need to make a profit - which means that if a publicly funded service could do things within the same cost envelope they would be cheaper as they wouldn’t need to add the profit margin on top. There is no more cost effective solution than single payer, public sector service.

So. Why does no one talk about how healthcare is actually delivered?

In Liz we Truss. Amen.

That’s right. Let’s totally fail to consider arguments on their merits, one way or the other (and recognise that his party has been holding down doctors pay for over a decade while demanding more of them, not to mention the whole pandemic thing), and instead worry about “sending a message”.

I wonder if he has a bet riding on the outcome of this?

“Government does not understand” - standard current-era (c.2010 onwards) Tory.

Cancelling a chunk of HS2 in a way that at the time and increasingly since comes across as “on a whim” suggests a total lack of understanding not just of rail but of national infrastructure, our economy and our people.

HS2 never had to be some kind of souped up bullet train service. All HS2 had to be was an increase in capacity, with any added speed as a bonus. Four track instead of two track - so that fast trains didn’t get stuck behind stopping services. That’s all that was needed.

This country is ridiculous. We are a tiny island. How hard is it to connect up all the bits with road and rail? The roads are falling apart and our once world-leading and world-beating railways are outdated, poorly routed/connected and economically constrictive.

Predictably it’s the 15-minute-city conspiracy crap.

The inside of the right-wing brain must be a fearful place; ripe for radicalisation and manipulation.

I don’t see the £50m in quite same way as you do; I see it as the “opportunity cost” of the strikes - and it often seems to be the case that the opportunity cost is much higher than what it would cost to negotiate and settle (by extension, it also seems that employers / governments playing hardball with workers is probably based more on ideology than on financial sense).

I believe we share the same sentiment though; these RMT folks are critical to the economy and they should be treated (and compensated) as such.

Gray. Wheeler. Who next? If these people didn’t have excellent reputations for what they do, it could almost be trolling.

The pure ChatGPT output would probably be garbage. The dataset will be full of all manner of sources (together with their inherent biases) together with spin, untruths and outright parody and it’s not apparent that there is any kind of curation or quality assurance on the dataset (please correct me if I’m wrong).

I don’t think it’s a good tool for extracting factual information from. It does seem to be good at synthesising prose and helping with writing ideas.

I am quite interested in things like this where the output from a “knowledge engine” is paired with something like ChatGPT - but it would be for eg writing a science paper rather than news.

Exactly. The data harvest has had years in the making.

That’s Brexit Britain for you. We always exceed expectations.

These “Sunak is set to consider / scrap / ban” any old crap headlines just keep on coming. Something will stick to the wall eventually I guess.

Enshittification intensifies.

Yes and no. This lot have been in power long enough that cans that were kicked down the road are being caught up with / balls kicked into the long grass are being found / chickens are home to roost.

You can see it with crises as diverse as public sector pay and RAAC in schools.

“They’re right to say that it creates a vulnerability. The promise of end-to-end encryption is that it’s only you and intended recipients that see the message. I’ve not seen a solution yet that doesn’t break that promise”

The people who proposed this bill and targeted encryption in this way are, sincerely, morons. They may be other things too, but that moronic streak cuts through all of it.

If you create a weakness or back door into something, you must realise that you’re not the only entity that is going to be able to find it and exploit it.

Breaking encryption is basically the end of online security and privacy. Forget banking, forget shopping, forget bookings for restaurants and travel, forget filing or paying taxes, forget seeking legal, medical or financial advice - without encryption none of that is safe. You can create all the exemptions you like but the balance will be impossible to achieve without undermining the bill itself or leaving out key areas.

If providing safety is the real goal here, spend the money on educating the public on good practices and safe habits. Spend the money on tracking down the people involved in creating heinous material and rescuing those being exploited.

Don’t do it by destroying the privacy and security of an entire nation and further wrecking the economy while you’re at it.

Morons.

Every day is a school day; I had no idea.

For those who like me are wondering why folk are sucking sand out of the sea in the first place - the TL;DR bot missed this bit:

"Sand and gravel makes up half of all the materials mined in the world. Globally, 50bn tonnes of sand and gravel are used every year – the equivalent of a wall 27 metres high and 27 metres wide stretching round the equator. It is the key ingredient of concrete and asphalt.

“Our entire society is built on sand, the floor of your building is probably concrete, the glass on the windows, the asphalt on roads is made of sand,” said Peduzzi. “We can’t stop doing it because we need lots of concrete for the green transition, for wind turbines and other things.”"

Not quite nothing…

On the one hand, the SNP would argue that there was a material change of circumstances since the first referendum (Brexit, basically) and that a second referendum would only be fair.

On the other hand the Supreme Court has ruled that the Scottish Parliament does not have the power to legislate for a referendum on Scottish independence. The only way it is going to happen is if the Westminster Parliament allows it to happen. Those fateful words - “once in a generation” - are likely to prove binding rather than advisory.

In short, the SNP have more or less got nothing.

There is one more thing though. Brexit might be a complicating factor in more ways than one. How soon should a vote to rejoin the EU be permitted? Would the timescale for another EU referendum affect or be affected by the timescale for any further votes on Scottish Independence?

Well let’s hope that this quango doesn’t find out that while I know loads about the nutritional value of ducks I know next to nothing about their nutritional needs.

On a more serious note, I suspect that over time these things will settle themselves as increasing numbers of users opt for different communities over time. We’re at the point now where there are more posts and comments in my subscribed communities than I can reasonably keep up with, which is a new thing (and a good thing).