Mark Carroll's Journal

I see many ordinary older people on British television who have retired and are enjoying their lives of leisure. I suspect that many bought their house decades ago, they enjoy some workplace pension provided on rather better terms than any we get now, we still have plenty of working taxpayers left to fund the system, etc.

Given that Britain has been seeing many years of slow growth, cost-of-living crisis, lack of affordable housing, a population that is growing older, etc., I wonder if these happy everyday retirees are a dying breed, if increasingly many people are on course for retirement poverty. If younger people have a hard time making ends meet now and we're shooing all the immigrants away and anything else that might light the tunnel's mouth, how on Earth will people put aside enough to retire on pleasantly?

A bit of searching online suggests that some people hope that their cryptocurrency holdings will help, oh dear.

My recent entries make it easy to predict what I think of His Majesty's Government's proposals surrounding indefinite leave to remain. Perhaps I should have been clearer: it's not just that we need immigrants, it's that we are already hostile to them, they were never the real problem, yet the government seems happy to go along with the narrative that they are, perhaps because they make for a convenient scapegoat. I can understand that, in a democracy, the government might be a bit leery of trying to introduce sections of the electorate to reality but, inconveniently, reality has a way of determining the outcomes of policies so it would be responsible to face it anyway. In the meantime, innocent people suffer.

A more general theme of incompetence is emerging. For instance, this nonsense about digital identity cards for proving right to work. Could we have a clear problem statement please and an explanation of how this fixes it? There are already largely adequate procedures in place for checking one's right to work, R. and I have enjoyed them again in recent months in starting with a new employer. Is Starmer seriously suggesting that people come over in overcrowded dinghies then produce a convincingly forged birth certificate, or what? There is certainly a black economy issue that needs solving but how this proposal makes a whit of difference to it remains far from clear to me.

Is the government meant to be sounding this clueless, this soon into a term in which it has a large majority? If only any of them had the spine of, say, the late Robin Cook. At least Corbyn seemed to care more about people than votes. Could we perhaps swap the current lot for any group that has the courage to admit what the actual problems are (apart from, that the right-wing media has the bigots riled up again) and suggest anything that might usefully address them? Bonus points for having some compassion. I may have had some scorn for Labour at times but I didn't expect their pandering to fools to make me angry enough to consider relegating them off the worth considering list. Starmer is turning out to be like Badenoch: the more they say things, the less I like them.

After the EU passed the General Data Protection Regulation, many smaller US organizations took the simple option of blocking the EU from their websites. It's for that reason I have a US-based web proxy in my back pocket for checking US news from local sources.

Now, the UK's passed the Online Safety Act which seems to be at least as onerous. I was chatting with a creative British person today. There is some website (I didn't ask which) that hosts their writing and art, and it's become inaccessible to them. So, like so many other British people in recent days, they've now subscribed to a VPN service.

The OSA seems to be a deleteriously blunt instrument. Children now seem to be barred (by easily bypassed means) from seeing all kinds of information that, frankly, it's good if they can see.

I am curious to know how this got so far without being stopped. It certainly says something poor about the powers that be, that pressure to do something resulted in pushing through legislation that had been widely warned about by many. It's not at all unique, we even had the Clinton administration trying to push the Clipper chip, but this example seems to be turning out unusually badly.

The Labour government had already burned up its honeymoon period but they still make unforced errors that the Conservatives make hay from. Amid all this, we also get to watch the Chancellor square the circle they've painted themselves into (with the Conservatives' help). An outbreak of political competence would make a welcome change.

Update: Very shortly after posting this, I read of moves in the EU to resurrect efforts to prevent communications from being wholly private.

This morning there were police and drumming. Wondering if we were already having some celebration of Glasgow's 850th anniversary, I wandered out into the neighbourhood and found myself witnessing another Orange Order march. They are very pro-Protestant pro-UK and I remain surprised by just how many people around here of all ages feel strongly enough to march with uniforms and bands and suchlike. We appear to have a few lodges around here, I think they report up to a grand Glasgow-wide lodge that reports up to an even grander Scottish one.

I think it silly of His Majesty's Government to have switched from issuing physical visas to virtual "eVisas" that one checks by typing an alphanumeric code into a government website. It assumes far too much of mobile data connectivity when one is in some random place where one's documents are being checked. Further, what actually happens is absurd: people get you to show them your visa details in the web browser on your own mobile telephone, something easily faked.

Presumably thrilled with this success, apparently the Government is now moving on to introducing digital driving licences. For the moment, these are to be an optional add-on beyond the physical photocard, presumably most welcomed by those non-immigrants who would also like an easy way to fake their details. I suppose that I can imagine a version that shows a QR code bearing cryptographically signed data that can be verified by some reader, even printed out as insurance against device failure, but, given the eVisa implementation, I am not holding my breath for such.

At work, I am on a project that uses large language models (LLMs), an instance of the modern AI fad that brought us ChatGPT and, relatedly, image generators and suchlike. Personally, I am not into gaming and I don't own computers that have reasonable GPUs, and I have little use for systems that can deliver me results that are rather more plausible than they are trustworthy. My preference remains for the more traditional kind of AI centered on knowledge-based reasoning, though I concede that deep learning boasts some impressive successes.

Now that I am digging into modern AI a little for my day job, it becomes more obvious to me what everybody else probably realized years ago. First, I find myself tempted to use it for inane questions like recommendations from restaurant menus for kinds of people. That would be a lot of pointless computation: with each of us using LLMs for whatever comes to mind, just as we might ask our friends what they think, it sounds about as bad as proof of work for accelerating climate catastrophe.

Secondly, in reviewing various available models it became apparent that uncensored models are readily available, there can be guards and such applied subsequently. Many models are probably trained on all manner of material from the Internet, some of it from the sewer. Perhaps one can buy oneself decent graphics hardware, download uncensored models, then privately indulge whatever interactive fantasies come to mind. This goes back to previous questions on the effect of people being able to play violent video games or watch extreme pornography. Are we approaching a world in which anybody can immerse themselves in the particular virtual depravity of their choosing and, if so, what does that mean for society? I suppose that we will find out.

The election results provide plenty to talk about, especially ( given our lack of proportional representation. )

I wonder how the Conservatives will respond to their loss. ( I don't see how they recover easily. )

Here in Glasgow, Labour took all the seats from the SNP. I didn't expect the SNP to do quite so badly, ( and I don't know what they should do about it. )

( Northern Ireland is even more of a mystery to me. )

A few years ago here, I summarized some of my political preferences. In the UK, we have an election this Thursday so it's about time for me to notice more of what is going on, what the candidates and parties stand for.

My local constituency used to be Glasgow Central which was eliminated recently, we are now in Glasgow South West. The profile's around the same, Labour and the SNP are the plausible winners. At the moment, I might naturally tend toward the Liberal Democrats.

In the case of the US, since Trump's ascendancy I find the Republicans so repugnant that I am obliged to vote for whoever can keep them out of office. Still, it would have been agreeable if Biden hadn't seemed to lose some marbles since the State of the Union. Years ago, in Ohio I even felt safe to risk a Green vote, not now though. Of course, these days my votes count in Eastern Tennessee, where most contests are not close.

Here, in our constituency, I have to decide if either Labour or the SNP are unacceptable, or if I can vote for somebody less likely as an investment for the future. Naturally, the SNP have resumed their tedious tendency to consider every vote for them as being a vote for Scottish independence, rather than that maybe we are simply happy they handled the COVID crisis reasonably or somesuch.

As usual, it requires some work to figure out how the parties are interestingly different. The first level is typically an insultingly unhelpful these are the shiny things with rather less and this is how they will be caused and funded. Admittedly, in the case of some of the more right-leaning parties at the moment, their definition of shiny things already somewhat disqualifies them.

As it happens, now I have a busy few days that climax in a different kind of tedium at a consulate, so I'll circle back to the election when necessary. And, goodness, the polling cards have grown since they needed to include ID requirements.

( Work remains busy, bringing my first project nearer delivery. )

( British unemployment benefit isn't generous. )

( I filed my US taxes but am not holding my breath for the refund. )

( Tax paperwork for charity donation irritated me. )

( Me and our dog are both heavier. )

( We are looking to move just a little south. )

I am not managing to read others' journals anywhere near as completely as I once did. Perhaps if I post rather more briefly, I will get around to posting at all. It's been very many weeks. I will try to mention the occasional random things, even if the picture of things as a whole is left even more incomplete than before.