Yep. LLMs are great for bouncing ideas off, and for getting “soft answers”, but no-one should ever be looking for factual answers from them.

To be honest, I think your position is short-sighted, naïve and lacking in pragmatism.

Right now, in most constituencies, your choice is between Labour/Lib Dem and Tory/Reform. And anyone who thinks Labour getting into government wouldn’t be an improvement over the Tories hasn’t been paying attention for the last decade. Even if Labour had the exact same political stance as the Tories - which they don’t - the fact that they’re not nearly as likely to be corrupt, self-serving slime balls makes them an improvement by itself.

Labour needs to appeal to moderate, swing voters. There’s no steadfast left-wing voter base in the UK; if Labour can’t win over the swing voters they won’t get elected - it’s that simple. That doesn’t mean they’re sat there asking themselves how they can be more like the Tories, it just means they need to take positions that have broad appeal and don’t just go full-socialism. As much as socialism appeals to me, I’d rather see Labour actually get elected. There’s zero chance we go from our current government to a socialist government overnight.

And if I think about where I’d like to see our country in ten or fifteen years, Labour winning this election is the most realistic way for us to get there. Spoiling your ballot, not voting at all, or voting for some candidate who’s going to get <3% of the vote isn’t going to achieve anything other than a short-lived sense of self-satisfaction. The best thing any of us can do is to pick the least bad of the realistic options. I don’t like that that’s the system, but it’s the system we’ve got and we either have to work within it or have it imposed on us anyway.

I don’t think the Labour Party is perfect by any means. They have some ideas I like, and I’m hopeful they’ll unveil more policies I like in the next few weeks. And, of course, there are things I dislike about them. They’re certainly not my dream party. But I also think it’s important not to let perfect be the enemy of good. We have a chance to improve things, and squandering that chance just because things aren’t going to be perfect is fucking stupid.

I installed uBlock for someone recently. They complained about all the empty space where the ads used to be. So I removed the empty space by blocking that element with uBlock, which increased the width of the main body of the website, and they then complained that the website was too wide…

Some people are beyond help.

It certainly is a lot, although it’s the sort of thing where, when you really think about it, you’d kinda hope it’s something the government is willing to spend money on. You don’t want all the best and brightest just going to private companies because they can earn 3x as much as the government is willing to pay. (Whether the current SPADs are the best and brightest, I don’t know… If they are, it’s certainly not reflected in the government’s decision-making! But I think the point still stands that there needs to be a financial motivation for talented people to work in government rather than private businesses.)

Yeah, the diversity looks pretty bad…

I’d assume we’d have to wait until he was an actual government advisor before we got any figures (if at all). And yeah, advisors can do pretty well for themselves, although how much they get paid depends on how involved they are. Advisory roles can range from full-time consulting roles and helping with policy creation to “hey, can you just spend a couple of hours reading through these documents and give us your thoughts?” once every few months.

You can see the pay for the government’s special advisors (ie, the top tier of advisors) here if you’re interested. Bear in mind those are in the top, top tier of advisors so most aren’t necessarily going to be paid that much.

It’s worth noting he’s standing down at the general election:

He said he would not seek re-election to the House of Commons at the next general election. But, writing in the Observer, he says he envisages a role advising the Labour party on its policies on mental health while focusing more on his NHS work.

This one feels a little different. He stated previously that he was going to stand down at the next election, which is reiterated in the article:

He said he would not seek re-election to the House of Commons at the next general election. But, writing in the Observer, he says he envisages a role advising the Labour party on its policies on mental health while focusing more on his NHS work.

Defecting - and especially co-ordinating with Labour for months to time his defection and pre-arrange him joining Labour - isn’t just fleeing the sinking ship so much as hanging around a little longer and deliberately trying to make it sink faster. It represents something rather than just being about saving his own skin.

I don’t think it’s that, considering he’s standing down at the next election anyway:

He said he would not seek re-election to the House of Commons at the next general election. But, writing in the Observer, he says he envisages a role advising the Labour party on its policies on mental health while focusing more on his NHS work.

Whether that advisory role would be paid or not, I don’t know, but it certainly wouldn’t be to the tune of £90K!

As much as I disliked Cameron’s government at the time, I don’t think it was close to the levels of nationalism and right-wing ideals we see from today’s Conservative party. I rarely agreed with their approach, but I could at least understand that there were genuinely good-faith Tory MPs back then who simply had a different approach to things than what I would have wanted to see. Maybe they were just better at hiding it, but they did feel less sleazy and corrupt, and more like they actually wanted to work towards changing things for the better rather than just tearing everything down and lining their own pockets.

Speaking to Laura Kuenssberg and the BBC, Dr. Poulter said:

“I found it increasingly difficult to look my NHS colleagues in the eye and my patients in the eye and my constituents in the eye with good conscience.

“And I feel that the NHS deserves better than it has at the moment in terms of how it’s run and governed.

“The party I was elected into valued public services, it had a compassionate view about supporting the more disadvantaged in society. I think the Conservative Party today is in a very different place. Its focus is not on delivering or supporting high-quality public services.”

I could see Rishi Sunak’s takeaway from this being that of course, people should be paid less for days when they’re sick.

If a car can receive OTA updates from the manufacturer, then it can receive harmful OTA updates from an attacker who has compromised the car’s update mechanism or the manufacturer.

There’s potential for a very dystopian future where we see people assassinated, not via car bomb but via the their cars being hacked to remove braking functionality (or something similar). And then a constant game of security whack-a-mole like we see with anti-virus software. And then some brilliant entrepreneur will start selling firewalls for cars. And then it’ll be passed into law that it’s illegal to use a vehicle that doesn’t have an active firewall/anti-virus subscription.

It almost feels like the obvious path things will go down. Yay, capitalism…

I’m not totally opposed to software being used in cars (as long as it’s tested and can be trusted to the degree mechanical components are) but yeah, OTA updates just seem like a terrible idea just for a little convenience. I’d rather see updates delivered via plugging the car in (and not via the charging port - it would need to be a specific data transfer port for security reasons). Alert people when there’s an update, and even allow the car to “refuse to boot” if it detects it’s not on the latest version. But updates should absolutely be done manually and securely.

It’s the length of the combined total working lives of an entire football stadium full of people.

The reason it’s overwhelmingly called “climate change” instead of global warming now is because of language change pushed by billionaire foundations.

I do think “global warming” struggles to convince some more simple people anyway, unfortunately. Because while the average temperature of the globe is increasing and causing the changes in climate that we’re seeing, I’ve come across far too many comments from people saying things like “global warming must be a myth because it snows more than it used to” and things themselves smarter than all climate scientists combined for that observation.

Of course, those same people probably think global warming is good because they like their summer holidays so perhaps their opinions shouldn’t matter much either way!

I wouldn’t spoil my ballot personally unless I felt every party right now was actively bad. I think there are a few things you should consider:

Some of the parties aren’t necessarily the same, policy-wise or values-wise, as they were in the past. They might have the same name as they did ten years ago, but that doesn’t mean everything else about them is frozen in time. Parties evolve, and you should judge them as they are now and the direction they’re heading in rather than holding vendettas against them for things that aren’t representative of how they are now. This is particularly important when parties have new leadership and direction - Labour, in particular, feels like quite a different party to how it was in 2019. Is it better? In some ways yes, in other ways no, I think. But whether you think it’s better or not, I think it’s distinct enough, and tried to distance itself enough from what it perceived as issues it had in 2019, that holding it accountable still doesn’t achieve much. I don’t think it’s fair to blame Ed Davey’s Lib Dems for Nick Clegg’s coalition either (although I do think Clegg did a reasonable job of moderating the Tories during that time - things got so much worse once the Tories got full power).

I also think it’s important to think of every election as a stepping stone to the future, rather than hoping for perfection to happen overnight. Taking the Labour party as an example, because they’re the biggest rivals to the Tories on a national level: do I think things will be perfect if Labour get power? No. They don’t necessarily represent my views on some issues, and I actively disagree with them on others. In another voting system, they probably wouldn’t be my first choice. But I also think that if Labour gets in, things will move in a better direction. If I think about where I’d like things to be in ten or twenty years, Labour winning this election is probably what ensures the best (or at least most realistic) chance of getting there.

Don’t let “perfect” be the enemy of “good”. None of the options are perfect as far as I’m concerned. But Labour, Lib Dems, Greens and SNP are all good compared to the Tories, and doing what you can to help the one that gives the best chance of keeping the Tories out in your constituency is going to move things in a good direction. I think that having the chance to actually get rid of the Tories is not the time for apathy, also. I’d hate to see the Tories win again because the left gets complacent or apathetic, or starts splitting the vote because Starmer’s Labour isn’t perfect. Because do you know what else isn’t perfect? Another five fucking years of Tory government. It looks like they’re on their way out, but let’s not fumble it at the finish line.

Get these right-wing ghouls out of power, and then write to your MP telling them how you’d like to see things change. Because chances are it’ll achieve more than spoiling your ballot. Spoiling your ballot expresses that you’re angry but it doesn’t tell anyone why and it doesn’t do anything to bring about change.

This is known as the “Overton window” for anyone who wants to read into it further.

“He who controls the spice(y content) controls the universe” - Baron Harkonnen in Frank Herbert’s Dune

You can’t expect 30p Lee to stay with a party for a full government term, surely?

On the one hand, I do actually like that he puts personal values and policies over party loyalty; I wish we would see more politicians be willing to cross the aisle if their party shifts away from their own values. I’m not a fan of the party system in general. On the other hand, I despise his values and policies - and those of the Tory and Reform parties - and I hope he fades into irrelevance.

This is definitely a blow to Rishi Sunak. A little over a year ago he personally selected 30p Lee as vice-chairman of the Tory party and now he’s defected. That’s a huge political embarrassment - and Rishi was already looking weak.

Lastly, you would do well to cut down on “I” statements. They rarely engage the reader and can feel out of place when writing about a subject as universal and academic as voter apathy.

It also just sounds more authoritative if you state things as fact rather than as opinions that are subject to disagreement, or that perhaps suggest the author doesn’t have the full information and is simply interpreting the information that’s available to them. And if you write things confidently, too. For instance, if I began this paragraph with “I also think it tends to sound more authoritative…” then it sounds a lot more like I’m chiming into a conversation where I’m not trying to be too domineering. Starting it in a more assertive way (like I did) makes it sound like it’s something that’s universally acknowledged, like you know what you’re talking about, and will change the way people perceive your writing.

Ahh, that’s the same path Facebook went down a decade ago then. Yay, capitalism…