Noit

My eldest (3) went through some kind of development stage over new year, decided she didn’t want to wear nappies any more, and went from full time nappies to doing toilets in her potty without even telling us first. We’ve has a few accidents but all things considered she’s smashing it.

You can’t afford it now. This tech is going to be something people can do in their sheds within a decade.

I’ve set up a play-money prediction market if people want to join in.

IMO this is within Labour’s grasp, it’s in the range of their recent by-election wins and given it was Skidmore who took it from them, one has to speculate that a local MP of nearly 20 years, standing down in protest of the government, isn’t going to encourage the party faithful out to vote for his replacement.

This prediction market has May at 50%, and that’s mainly because I keep buying it off he back of news like this. Seems like a lot of people are May doubters.

Reasons I think May is the most likely candidate are:

• expected polling bounce off a giveaway budget in March
• small boat numbers are at their natural minimum and only rise as Summer begin
• later in the year you start running into things like party conference, which you don’t want to miss, and fuel bills, which are going to be a bad news story again. Even if you rank “holding on to power above all else” as the most important thing, a late Q4 election looks a terrible mistake.

How dare you “two YouTubers” unname then when one is Ashens, king of tat, lord of the brown sofa.

It’s on his second channel for those interested.

Wild that the government thought this needed to be a vote. Embarrassing that they then lost it, just for the chance to try and shunt some costs off their administration and into Labour’s. Now it’s just one more crack in the foundation of the party.

This is insane. Right now I’m reading The Coming Wave by Mustafa Suleyman (formerly of DeepMind) and I’d been a bit concerned that he was all hype, but giving humanity a 45-fold increase in materials we know about? That’s enormous. The future is going to be a crazy place.

Fixed, thanks! Voyager auto title letting me down smh

I’d love to see a poll of millionaires to see what the split is of in favour vs not in favour of them being taxed more.

It is, constitutionally, an enormous hot potato. MPs are elected by their constituents. Any body that can fire an MP is a threat to democracy. It’s easy to say that rapists should be kicked out. But sex crime is often a crime with no direct supporting evidence. False abuse claims are an overblown threat in the general population, IMO, but if “Parliament HR” was a real thing then there’s a very obvious and easy route to force out MPs who aren’t toeing the line.

It also has to be balanced against lawbreaking as legitimate protest. Imagine an MP rejected by their constituents to legalise cannabis. If that MP smoked a fat dooby in public it’d be entirely consistent with their political mandate, but they’d be at risk of most HR policies as well as possible arrest. That’s why the current process is that an MP had to be sentenced to now than a year in prison before a recall petition, they have to have done something really quite bad.

Or, put another way, if a Berlusconi type was elected tomorrow and everyone knew they were a gropey sex pest at point of election, what right would any political body have to deny the voters specifically what they have requested?

Morals shift over time, politicians often drive those shifts, there has to be space for politicians to shift those morals even if you don’t approve of them.

Having said all that I think the best answer is a more aggressive approach to recalling MPs, we should be able to hold our MPs to account more than once every five years if their electorate desires it. And we should also have proportional representation so that unpopular views don’t get into parliament because of First Past The Post split vote nonsense.

With Cameron seen walking in, this looks more like he’s setting up an election cabinet.

Honestly I’m surprised it’s still so uncertain at this point. I can’t see how Braverman can stay in post after this. But prediction markets still have her at only around 65% chance of leaving this year. Which is wild to me!