Re: LLMs can never explain themselves
Yes. The politician is an artificial construct grown in a clone vat.
4574 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Jul 2009
An ethics question would presumably ask 'should' rather than 'could'. But it turns out that it certainly can.
Ah, Vogon poetry, the quintessence of literary torture! Nevertheless, I shall endeavor to produce a suitable specimen:
Oh, to gronkle in the glee of gloom,
With snarfled noses and flailing flumes.
A cacophony of wibbling woes,
In the cosmic sea, our despair flows.
Behold the wretchedness of space,
Where stars weep and galaxies embrace.
Each verse a dagger to the soul,
As misery's flag unfurls its dole.
In murky swamps of sorrow's song,
We trudge along, oh so woebegone.
With every stanza, hearts doth bleed,
In Vogon verse, we find no reprieve.
So let the universe shudder and sigh,
As Vogon poets make angels cry.
For in the realm of rhyme and rhyme,
We revel in the depths of sublime grime.
If there's not hot, meat-based food at the event, we won't be going
I got stuck working on a European Social Fund project back in the late 90s, where the working practice was considerably more hippy-dippy than anything I'd previously experienced. The initial icebreaker/team-building event that I was obliged to attend for a full day did not suit my utterly introverted self; the only friend I made was when I got chatting with one of the admin assistants over the buffet lunch table. Neither of us could identify as much as 10% of the oddly-shaped processed vegetarian products on offer so we legged it for the chippie.
An interesting contribution, and no doubt frustrating in trying to deal with all that convoluted paperwork, but your experience does not address my clear qualifier of 'explicit intent'. I think you are very well aware that there are people who are tax cheats and that there are people who are victims of bureaucracy and a particular government's preference for going after the small and simple cases rather than the large and complex cases.
Your pig ignorance is showing.
An ISA isn't tax avoidance: it's one of the special rules that successive governments have implemented and continued to support in order to encourage personal long-term saving. If its avowed intent were to be subverted by some unscrupulous entity in order to avoid paying employer contributions on national insurance or to manipulate income tax boundaries, that would be tax avoidance.
Fucking grow up! Tax dodgers are not heroes. They are selfish shitstains thieving from the rest of us who want essential services like roads and environmental protection and government and emergency services to be functional as a reasonable shared outlay. If you want to declare yourself as not part of a reasonable society, as a grifter and a cheat, please stand up and do so. I know of a sewage tank I'd like to drop you into.
I remember similar events. But neither your subjective recall nor mine necessarily fully and accurately describes the situation. The reason why I said that money ended up being wasted on consultants was because that was the conclusion of multiple Select Committees over three decades. If you remain convinced that your memory trumps their published analyses, feel free to climb the Elizabeth Tower and balance on one leg on top of the spire whilst crowing your irrefutable convictions to the Great British Public. Or you could just stop and think about what you said and why you felt the need to say it.
Tax avoidance is acting legally. Its following the law and being a good person.
Tax avoidance is the act of structuring your affairs in such a way, however convoluted, that tax liability is minimised. It stays within the letter of the law by not doing anything explicitly illegal, but it can and frequently does involve exploiting rules designed for one circumstance being made to apply in an artificially created situation that would not normally be part of standard business practice. Given that the explicit intent is to avoid paying tax, the person doing so is definitionally not being a good person.
But where are these people? Certainly not in ministerial office and probably fairly fe[w] in ministerial offices. Long term dependence on outsourcing is liable to end up in a lack of the knowledge to manage the outsourcing effectively.
This was the warning given in the early 90s when the government decided that slimming down the Civil Service was the path to victory and that it would be far more cost effective to just buy in the services of consultants on a per project basis. The loss of the specialist expertise of those made redundant was duly proclaimed a triumph of cutting out waste, and the fact that Permanent Secretaries would no longer have in-house experts they knew and trusted to advise on defining a project's scope and with the ability to hold private partners to account was glossed over in favour of chucking huge sums of money at consultants who eventually came to tell the government what the industry that had captured them wanted the government to hear.
Now here we are.
My dad was a projectionist in the base theatre when he did his national service in the RAF. They used to put a coin in the film reels so that when they heard it fall to the floor they knew they had two minutes to check the second projector was ready to go. When you've already watched Quo Vadis five times that week and know the script by heart*, you can't guarantee not dozing off and letting the reel run out.
*His party trick, even twenty years later.
I've given you my exact personal experience, from every Wednesday morning during school term, in Boston's Strait Bargate when I was 11 and 12 years old. Traffic usually ran slowly but smoothly enough through the centre of town, if unpleasantly, four days of the week, but on market days it was a nightmare. Once enough of John Adams Way had been built I could cycle along the stretches they weren't still working on (vehicles were excluded by the concrete blocks placed at each junction), but before that the construction traffic made the side roads as risky as the town centre.
A college professor's salary at the time was about $4000 on average, but since Kistiakowsky had been at Harvard he'd likely have earned more there. He also headed the Explosives Research Lab before joining the Manhattan Project, so the government was probably paying him more than Harvard. A monthly pay of about $500-$600 seems likely.
That's already explained by quantum fluctuations. Gravity doesn't really come into it at that early point. If Oppenheim's hypothesis turns out to be true (well, a better theory than nothing until something else pops up, as is the way of things) it might offer a more exact description but not a new explanation.
Now that's some proper gaslighting. Markets were "twatted" by BoE slow reaction to FED raising interest rates. This happened in many countries. However, in the UK this was twisted as a Truss's fault, a convenient scape goat and great opportunity to install man of the rich and incompetent at that - Sunak.
Congratulations. You've combined gaslighting with conspiracist thinking while complaining about gaslighting. Very original.
I'd ask you why Kwarteng and Truss tried to bypass the OBR, why civil servants raising the alarm were briefed against and then fired, why Cabinet ministers announced that 'global factors' were the true cause of the crisis, why the BoE had to issue MPs with charts showing why that was untrue, why the Governor of the BoE had to go and explain it all very slowly to senior ministers until they finally grasped the problem, why Truss decided to sack Kwarteng, and why she then installed a chancellor who undid everything she'd previously desired and supported, but I've heard enough fairy stories for one day.
Blair and Brown did have a boom, from 2002 to 2006, but they spent a good chunk of it on the insanity of the Iraq War and didn't have enough left to throw at the 2007/08 crisis (arguably there wouldn't have been enough anyway to sort out the long under-regulated and over-exposed international banks and their CDO gambling addiction). Cameron and Osbourne were urged to borrow to invest by all the main economic institutes but they chose austerity instead, which was a purely ideological response in pursuit of shrinking the state that had no guarantee of fixing the problem; we're still paying for the consequences of that, both in lost services and money still having to be spent on debt servicing rather than on much-needed investment to maintain the services we do have.
It's frankly idiotic to suggest that Brown from 2008 (or Blair from 2006) didn't save up because they thought the next government would be a Conservative one. Not only were there no opportunities to save after 2007 but they didn't think the Tories would win. The 2010 election did not result in a clear victory and led to a coalition government, remember.
The traditional explanation of the cause of much inflation is 'too much money chasing too few goods'. Not that both elements have to be in place for every contributor to inflation, but it's one driver. The housing market is an example where there's a vicious feedback loop caused by the ongoing lack of affordable housing, pushing up house prices (from 1992 until very recently, anyway) along with the cost of renting because houses are a necessity: people need to have somewhere to live, however much it costs them (this is an example of internal policy failure). These last two years we've had fuel prices being forced up by a reduction in supply, again because people need fuel for heat and power, however much it costs them (an example of external circumstance, which is usually only avoidable -- if at all -- by having a good foreign policy). This leaves people with less money so they either go on strike if there are no better paying jobs within their reach or they cut back on other purchases. Either way, producers cut back on production, which depresses the economy.
The traditional way of getting out of a slump is investment, the Keynesian idea of governments saving during the boom so that they can spend during the inevitable bust, but Cameron showed us in 2010 just how anathema that idea is to modern Conservatism and we're still paying for that mistake (although since the end of the post-war consensus in 1979, Tory governments have mostly financed investment and tax cuts by selling the family silver, but there's not much of that left now -- remember the dismal attempt a decade ago to sell our woodlands?). Some businesses would undoubtedly like to borrow money so they can invest their way out of inefficient production, but the cost of money is high because inflation is high because Liz Truss and Kwasi Karteng twatted the markets like a pair of total twats and the Bank of England had to step in to protect sterling (without which action trade and government borrowing would have become more expensive, even on top of the Brexit footbullet).
Giving people more money to spend would help the economy pick up again, but giving too much at once would swamp the producers with a demand they'd take time to ramp up to meet, which would push up inflation (if only in the short term, but with inevitable knock-on effects). For example, if you gave every household £500 and half the country decided to spend it on replacing whichever white goods in their kitchen are closest to falling apart, the white goods manufacturers (and importers) wouldn't be able to cope. It could take them six months to meet demand, and they would put their prices up to pay for overtime, the additional energy, raw materials, transport capacity, etc, required until everything -- in both supply and demand -- stabilised. And if you give the wrong people money, like by proposing an inheritance tax cut, they are more likely to spend it in a different country or just squirrel it away offshore.
The trick you want to see happen is the 'but stuff costs less' bit, which usually happens as a result of an increase in productivity. The UK has been particularly bad at improving productivity for the last 20 years, mostly due to a short-termist attitude amongst government (obsessed with headlines) and across much of business (obsessed with share prices). Businesses haven't been investing in people to anything like the degree that they should: supporting local education (secondary and tertiary), proper apprenticeships and worthwhile re-training, decent wages and pension schemes (instead of relying on tax credits and City fucking con artists to make up the shortfall), good career progression and flexible working to match a changing world, etc. All of which they could put just as much time and effort into lobbying government to support or provide a level playing field as they have in looking to cut regulations in pursuit of another penny on the dividends. When companies treat people like shit, people aren't motivated to work hard, and will also do things the government doesn't like, such as jacking in work by the million when in sight of retirement and living off savings and/or a partner's income until they can draw their pension.,
Sorry, I may have got off topic a bit there. I've probably also got a few bits wrong or missed something important out but, in my defence, my Economics O-Level was quite a long time ago...
Really? Then you have to wonder why the pilots of all those spy planes and stealth bombers didn't have the nous to stay well away from known passenger flight lanes, nor spot any straying commercial or private aircraft first and avoid them. Wouldn't that precise behaviour form a significant part of their mission profiles in a hot war?