That might be true, but the votes (not seats, first past the post, almost guarantees people aren't represented):
Labour: 9.7M
Conservatives 6.8M
Reform: 4.1M
Liberal Democrats 3.5M
The point clearly stands that had Reform not been a thing, 2024 would have been a conservative landslide.
What we got was a Labour landslide, what we should have got was some coalition.
As the sibling comment said. You are making the assumption that every Reform voter would have held their nose and voted Conservative instead. A lot more people would have stayed home I think. I don't think anyone thought the Conservatives could win and that includes the Conservatives themselves.
Yes, though I'd be careful about assuming that votes are Conservatives <-> Reform on a left-right median voter model. The other aspect that Reform has (and will have at least until it forms a government) is anti-system/populist credentials. Labour had a little of that last time (they are a deeply establishment party, especially under current leadership, but they were coming off a period as very public opposition to the government and the current state of things) but will have very little next time.
It's certainly not a given that all the 2024 Reform vote would have gone to the Conservatives: a good chunk of it would have likely been disgusted abstention, another chunk to other anti-system parties (mostly of the right fringe, I suspect, but not excluding the Greens despite wild ideological differences), and likely a further (if smaller) chunk to other parties which were simply not the Conservatives (including Labour and the Lib Dems).
Edit: the best analysis on this is likely to be in the latest volume of the long-standing The British General Election of XXXX series, which has just been published online[0]. I haven't had time to look at it yet, though.
Wait a news channel gave more air time to the current prime minister and his cabinet, the guy and team with the power, than someone else. Consider me shocked!
Have you considered that by choosing different time periods you get different results.
Maybe the BBC bends the knee to whoever is calling the shots, that's what it looks like to me.
As far as it is known, Kelly walked a mile (1.6 km) from his house to Harrowdown Hill. It appears he ingested up to 29 tablets of co-proxamol, an analgesic drug; he also cut his left wrist with a pruning knife he had owned since his youth, severing his ulnar artery. Forensic analysis established that neither the knife nor the blister packs showed Kelly's fingerprints on their surfaces [0].
and a letter to the editor:
As specialist medical professionals, we do not consider the evidence given at the Hutton inquiry has demonstrated that Dr David Kelly committed suicide.
Dr Nicholas Hunt, the forensic pathologist at the Hutton inquiry, concluded that Dr Kelly bled to death from a self-inflicted wound to his left wrist. We view this as highly improbable. Arteries in the wrist are of matchstick thickness and severing them does not lead to life-threatening blood loss. Dr Hunt stated that the only artery that had been cut - the ulnar artery - had been completely transected. Complete transection causes the artery to quickly retract and close down, and this promotes clotting of the blood.
The ambulance team reported that the quantity of blood at the scene was minimal and surprisingly small. It is extremely difficult to lose significant amounts of blood at a pressure below 50-60 systolic in a subject who is compensating by vasoconstricting. To have died from haemorrhage, Dr Kelly would have had to lose about five pints of blood - it is unlikely that he would have lost more than a pint.
Alexander Allan, the forensic toxicologist at the inquiry, considered the amount ingested of Co-Proxamol insufficient to have caused death. Allan could not show that Dr Kelly had ingested the 29 tablets said to be missing from the packets found. Only a fifth of one tablet was found in his stomach. Although levels of Co-Proxamol in the blood were higher than therapeutic levels, Allan conceded that the blood level of each of the drug's two components was less than a third of what would normally be found in a fatal overdose.
We dispute that Dr Kelly could have died from haemorrhage or from Co-Proxamol ingestion or from both. The coroner, Nicholas Gardiner, has spoken recently of resuming the inquest into his death. If it re-opens, as in our opinion it should, a clear need exists to scrutinise more closely Dr Hunt's conclusions as to the cause of death.
David Halpin - Specialist in trauma and orthopaedic surgery
C Stephen Frost - Specialist in diagnostic radiology Searle Sennett [1]
I guess it depends on what you mean by English.
England is a country, but you can't have an English passport, you can only get a UK passport.
so, English is a kinda-sorta a non-nationality, but it is very much an ethnic group.
I don't think anyone is claiming that Rishi Sunak isn't a UK citizen, but he certainly isn't a member of the English ethnic group, or any of the Celtic ethnic groups that also make up the UK's native population.
If we go by the explanation from wikipedia [0], Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage would not be considered English, as their families are not part of the English or Celtic ethnic groups. Their ancestors are Turkish and German who came to the UK after 1850. Do you believe they are not English? I mean even the current King of the UK would not be considered English by your definition! He is descended from Greek, Danish and German people [1].
I agree, they are not ethnically English, they are British citizens and have all the rights that come with citizenship, the same as every other UK citizen including those that would call themselves English. You think there's some kind of gotcha there, but there isn't.
England hasn't had an English king since 1066, that's not controversial, and even then the inbreeding between the European royal houses was creating a pan-european elite that made world world 1 more of a really bad family argument than anything else.
What's really odd is that Rishi Sunak is extremely proud of his ethnicity and heritage, it's unfortunate that we've made it almost impossible for other people's to have that same pride.
The usual meaning of English. Say, roughly the criteria that would make someone eligible to play for the England football team. Skin color has nothing to do with it, and I can assure you that very few English people either know or care whether they have any ‘Celtic’ ancestry.
No-one questions the Englishness of white men born in England to two non-English parents. People raising the absurd non-issue of Rishi Sunak’s Englishness are just concealing their rather obvious prejudices with a lot of bafflegab about ‘English ethnicity’ (a concept which not even they can really take at all seriously, if they at least have some acquaintance with English history).
There are Ethnic groups in England that have been present for several thousand years. Some people clearly mean this and can't articulate it better.
Rushi Sunak ancestry is obviously Indian. I don't really care about his ethnicity (he another politician in a suit to me), but I can understand what people mean when they say he isn't English without automatically assuming they are Racist.
Sports teams aren't a particularly good criteria, I could be Scottish or Welsh and play for England, it's one of those idiocracies of living in a country that pretends to be 4.
Denying the existence of an ethic group is extremely racist, and is often considered a precursor to other much more serious issues.
If you have any acquaintance with English history you would be well aware that there are native ethnic groups that have been in the UK since approximately the end of the younger dryas around 11,000 years ago.
The last major migration was the anglo-saxons around 1500 years ago.
These groups still exist and the majority of the UK population can still trace their origin back to one of these groups.
>If you have any acquaintance with English history you would be well aware that there are native ethnic groups that have been in the UK since approximately the end of the younger dryas around 11,000 years ago.
And you'd be aware that nothing even vaguely corresponding to 'England' existed 11,000 years ago. If you are willing to lump the descendants of Romans, Normans, Jutes, Durotriges, Iceni, Vikings, etc. together into one group and call them all 'English' just because they happened to live in the territory of what is now England, then you've already conceded the point that the identity is national, not ethnic.
But hey, over in the other thread you are denying that Boris Johnson is English, so it's clear that you have a rather eccentric concept of the category.
It's interesting that other native groups, all of which have intermixed with others over thousands of years don't have to defend their right to their ethnic identity.
The English ethnic group is defined by a shared genetics and culture, the English enthic group isn't just political it is biological and can be identified via DNA.
I wouldn't consider my definition eccentric, it's based on the UN defintion: Ethnic group or ethnicity refers to a group of people whose members claim a common heritage or common ancestry and usually speak a common language and may have some common cultural practices.
The other thread argued that Boris Johnson is ethnically Turkic (I have no idea if that is true) on the assumption it is true, Boris Johnson may meet the requirement of a common language, but does not meet the requirement of a shared ancestry to be ethnically English.
Many of the groups that you mentioned existed in the UK over 1000 years ago, and shared in the same invasions, same issues, and developed a shared culture due to that shared history and closeness of relations, and of course as evidenced by DNA analysis interbreeding.
So yeah I would say that in the space of a millennium multiple groups can become one group.
Maybe this is the key takeaway of GenAI: that some access to data, even partially hallucinated data, is better than the hoops that the security theatre puts in place that prevents average Joe doing their job.
This might just be a golden age for getting access to the data you need for getting the job done.
Next security will catch up and there'll be a good balance between access and control.
Then, as always security goes to far and nobody can get anything done.
"GenAI" is nothing new. "AI" is just software. It's not intelligent, or alive, or sentient, or aware. People can scifi sentimentalize it if they want.
It might simulate parts of things, hopefully more reliably.
It's however a different category of software which requires management that doesn't exist yet how it should.
Cybersecurity security theatre for me is using a web browser to secure and administer what was previously already done and creating new security holes from a web interface.
Then, bypassing it to allow unmanaged MCP access to internal data moats creating it's own universe of security vulnerabilities, full stop. In a secured and contained environment, using an MCP to access data to unlock insight is one thing.
It doesn't mean dont' use MCPs. It means the AI won't figure out what the user doesn't know about security around securing MCPs which is a far more massive vulnerability because users of AI have delegated their thinking to a statistics formula ("GenAI"), because it is so impressive on the surface, but no one is checking the work to make sure it stays that way. Managing quality however, is improving.
My comment is calling out effectively letting external paths have unadulterated access to your private and corporate data.
Data is the new moat. Not UI/UX/Software.
A wormhole that exposes your data makes it available for someone to put it into their data moat far too commonly, and also for it to be mis-interpretted.
I have it connected to a local Gemma model running in ollama and use it to quickly summarize webpages, nobody really wants to read 15 minutes worth of personal anecdotes before getting to that one paragraph that actually has relevant information, and for finding information within a page, kinda like ctrl-f on steroids.
The machine is sitting there anyway and the extra cost in electricity is buried in the hours of gaming that gpu is also used for, so i haven't noticed yet, and if you game, the graphics card is going to be obsolete long before the small amount of extra wear is obvious. YMMV if you dont already have a gaming rig laying around
Something like this I wouldn't mind, privacy focused local only models that allow you to use your own existing services. Can you give a quick pointer on how to connect Firefox to Ollama?
The default AI integration doesn't seem to support this. The only thing I could find that does is called PageAssist, and it's a third-party extension. Is that what you're using?
The tests done on the buses showed that they can be stopped as well as otherwise controlled remotely from China. This is way more than diagnostics, and remote control is _not_ something which is common in road vehicles.
International politics does matter. So, yes, a country that is historically hostile, or allied with countries that are hostile, towards yours, gets different treatment.
I really dislike how Antropic half reports on its "science".
They run a bunch of experiments, for some they report partial metrics, for other's no metrics at all.
For example when a thought is injected the model correctly identified the thought 20% of the time.
That's great, but how many times did it suggest there was an injected thought when there wasn't?
When distinguishing thoughts from text: why no metrics? Was this behaviour found in every test? Was this behaviour only found 20% of the time? How often did the model try to defend the text?
The point clearly stands that had Reform not been a thing, 2024 would have been a conservative landslide.
What we got was a Labour landslide, what we should have got was some coalition.
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