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#11

Off the Record / Re: Brexit and the waning days...

Last post by crazy canuck - Today at 09:39:25 AM

Sheilbh, you have often commented that the UK Conservatives are fascinated by our own PP. Are the Reform folks there trying to do what the Reformers did here?

#12

Off the Record / Re: The Off Topic Topic

Last post by crazy canuck - Today at 09:36:05 AM

It would be interesting to see regional differences. I think the Northern parts of Italy bring up it's average

I'd guess the opposite to be honest. Just thinking of places I've been in the north like Piedmont, Liguria and Milan v places I've been in the south like Sicily, Naples and Puglia. No evidence though.

Yeah.
Places with good walkability and transit and spare time and wealth to spend on fitness vs. Deprived rural areas where you have to drive absolutely everywhere.
The south being far more of a "feeder" culture will also hurt without the long back baking farm labour to burn it off.


Here's such a map for England and Wales.
Would be surprised if the Italian media hasnt reported on similar?
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/health-fitness/0/englands-obesity-hotspots-does-area-compare/

Turns out central Italy is the area of the mainland that is the most fit, then the North, then the South.

#13

Off the Record / Re: Brexit and the waning days...

Last post by Josquius - Today at 09:32:49 AM

The only reason I know Canvey Island.

Love the Judean Peoples Front vibes of the two parties there.
These XXXXX independents are usually Tory fronts so very curious.

Incidentally. At risk of turning this into the youtube thread, I meant to share this one before reading that...Had this channel recommended lately and a lot of what it says does make sense. Scary sense.

think this goes back to Confucianist Britain a little bit. So first of all most Further Education Colleges also offer degrees now. The barriers between "vocational" and "academic" education are pretty blurred now.

Similarly three quarters of students are doing what I'd call vocational subjects: medical professions, law, accountancy, business. That's excluding the creative degrees, so it'll be even higher than 75%. But those are not academia for academia's sake courses. And all the evidence is the expansion of universities has been demand led - it is what young people and parents want.

And again - not to get all Marxist - but I think that reflects our economic structure. We are services dominated economy and we have an awful lots of students studying services vocational subjects. The economic structure of some other European countries (particularly Germany) includes a lot more manufacturing (and a lot higher skilled manufacturing) - and their education system has people studying those vocationally. I think those structural factors matter more than anything else like attitude.

I think there could be an argument for a government basically saying that we, as a country, strategically need a certain industry and will commit to supporting the industry so there are jobs which, in turn, could support specialised education for the industry. I think there's been a recent proposal for that in relation to the nuclear sector which makes sense to me. But if you're just looking for growth and productivity I'd look at higher education and I'd look at the economy we've got, not what we wish we had.

Maybe. But at the same time we've we're rapidly toppling over the pit into a trades black hole. The last people to qualify over the apprenticeship system are hitting retirement age right now. Over the 80s we were training basically nobody and then when we realised this and started it again the numbers just weren't enough.

Fair enough to say we're a services economy so lots of people with humanities degrees is exactly what we need... but we also need builders.
And when many of these degree educated people are earning 30k a year in call centres vs. 70k a year for a decent plumber....It is in the best interest of many of them for this to be more of an even choice.

This is one of the big challenges and bluntly there's no obvious solution - read a really interesting piece by an education wonk on this and it's really difficult.

Tuition fees worked - they did what they were supposed to do. They doubled funding per student in real terms (when the rest of the public sector was facing austerity) and saw a big increase in student numbers - particularly working class and minority students (where Scotland is a sharp contrast). But they were always based on a lie because basically the repayments were pretty progressive - they only kicked in at a decent wage, they weren't really "debt" and they'd be written off after 30 years. So built in to tuition fees was the fact that a large proportion (well over 50%) would not be repaid ever. The universities got the money and the government would write a lot off eventually. The ONS (technically correctly but unhelpfully) basically said this is a loophole and a fiction that keeps debt of the government's books - so they're now counted as borrowing. The government has since made it far less progressive - it kicks in at a lower wages, only gets written off after 40 years, there's higher interest (collectively, this means women pay more than men). In part, that's because the alternative was to put a cap on numbers which would be even less popular - but you still see it circulating on the right about "shit degrees".

As you say, especially the more prestigious universities, have focused on expanding their international students because they pay a lot more (UCL for example earns more from funding grants, research grants and contracts and international students than from domestic tuition). The impact of tuition fees not increasing with inflation is mainly felt by lower tier universities who earn more money (up to about 50%) from domestic tuition and less from research, international students etc. Plus there have been impacts from marketisation.

It's unsustainable and a university is going to bust at some point, but the problem is none of the solutions are particularly attractive. You could put a cap on student numbers which'd be very unpopular with parents and young people (as I say, expansion has been demand driven and actually they're mainly doing vocational courses as you say). You could go back to funding universities from direct taxation - but this goes back to why tuition fees were created which is that there's limited resources and when universities have to fight for funding with the NHS or schools, they normally lose. You could have a graduate tax but you'd have the same issue because unlike tuition fees it would just go into general taxation and not be hypothecated for universities.

I think the best you can do is probably try to restore the proressiveness to the tuition fee system (with extra loans and grants for lower income students) - but that all of that probably needs to be linked to inflation. You probably need to have some level of protection of say, I don't know, two thirds of places on any course being for domestic students - in part so especially the prestigious institutions don't squeeze domestic students, but also so, say, a financial crisis in Asia doesn't lead to UCL collapsing. And I think without going back to a cap, there probably needs to be some degree of central planning on places and courses.

Honestly I'd go further than domestic students and have spots for local students. The town and gown divide you see in places like Durham is just insane.
I loved that in Uppsala going to one of the top universities in Scandinavia was something locals would just casually decide to do without much stress over it.
But yes. More help for poorer students is needed.

Incidentally another place I think the UK system sucks and needs smashing- the way you broadly decide what you're going to study at 16 and then are really railroaded into it at 18 and then after you've left uni going back and doing any education is a really weird and special thing to do.
We should have things a lot more open to do a course here and there and cobble together degrees.

Then there's the British obsession with grades....

I think this is the main area where my hatred for the British system and envy for the continent . Our system is such a one way tight rope.

#14

Off the Record / Re: Dead Pool 2024

Last post by Grey Fox - Today at 08:32:54 AM

 

#15

Off the Record / Re: Brexit and the waning days...

Last post by Sheilbh - Today at 08:29:03 AM

Separately just saw this and think it may be unique. Caney Island council has no Tories, Greens, Lib Dems, Labour or Reform councillors. The Tories had 9 councillors, but they lost. So it is entirely dominated by the People's Independent Party and the Canvey Island Independent Party, who are in coalition


I've not been there but I think I've been to a wetland/mudflat reserve nearby and feel confident in saying it's a weird place

Edit: Clarification on that image from the PIP (shocked to discover that it sounds like they're NIMBYs ):

Peoples Independent Party
@PIPCastlePoint
1/2.The chart is the wrong way around. PIP has 24 seats and CIIP 15. The parties have been in coalition administration since May 22 during which time they have transformed the council structure saving £500k per annum, closed inherited funding gap, frozen council tax, plus
2/2. Maintained all services and even took on more services defunded by Essex County Council. Are bring forward a new local plan in April 2025 which is based on the boroughs needs rather than developers wants.

[increased]

#16

Off the Record / Re: The China Thread

Last post by Sheilbh - Today at 08:21:30 AM

The astonishing progress needs to be put into perspective. Solar is growing fast in China but (as elsewhere) from a small base. And in the context of still growing overall energy consumption.

In 2023, coal still accounted for over 60% of energy production in China.  That share was down somewhat on the year but in absolute terms energy from coal production increased on the year. That is, all that massive investment and build out in solar still wasn't enough to absorb the entire absolute increase in energy demand, much less displace existing plant.

Yes - and as you say coal is still growing and well over 90% of the world's new coal is China.

But at the same time they're on course to hit their 2030 targets next year. In the first quarter of this year (not according to Chinese stats but Western climate nerds studying satellite images) it looks like China has installed more new renewable capacity (mainly solar) than the rest of the world combined.

It's the rapid growth and the falling costs (especially of storage) that makes me think it could be about to kick on to a whole other level.

I think it's really important because of the impact for the rest of the world. But I think it's an example of one of the many areas when looking at China where you need to be able to hold two or three often contradictory facts or ideas (that may all be true) in your head at once - I think the same often goes for the US too.

If you can (economically) devote 10 times the energy (arbitrary number) to your economy (and military) than your competitors can, that seems to be a pretty big advantage in industry and manufacturing (at least the bits that are require significant energy inputs) as well as any data-related industries (AI is famously energy intensive, as is the internet).

Or did you mean something else?

Yeah - net zero is another industrial revolution. Adding in AI/the energy heavy uses of a data driven state - perhaps particularly China - is interesting, and I hadn't thought of it before. I think in previous industrial revolutions the countries who led the way tended to have a very strong position in the world as it was re-shaped by that revolution, I can't think of any reason why this time would be any different.

#17

Gaming HQ / Re: News from the lovely world...

Last post by viper37 - Today at 08:21:11 AM

EA is looking at putting in-game ads in AAA games — 'We'll be very thoughtful as we move into that,' says CEO


EA, thoughtful.  Hmm.

EA CEO Andrew Wilson confirmed the company is considering putting ads in traditional AAA games — titles that players purchase up-front for around $70 apiece. In the Q&A part of EA's latest earnings call, Eric Sheridan from Goldman Sachs asked Wilson about dynamic ad insertion in traditional AAA games. Wilson said, "...Advertising has an opportunity to be a meaningful driver of growth for us." He then continued, "...we have teams internally in the company right now looking at how we do very thoughtful implementations inside of our game experiences."

In-game ads are a natural progression of advertising, especially as the gaming industry is expected to grow to $583 billion by 2030. Some players deem this a distraction, but others accept it as a fact of life as long as the ads are placed naturally and unobtrusively — not going loudly in your face, blocking in-game content, or interrupting your gameplay just to tell you that you should buy this product or subscribe to this service.

Unfortunately, EA has had a few instances of poor in-game ads. In 2020, the company placed full-screen in-game ads for the TV show The Boys in UFC 4. Its player base poorly received this placement, especially as it disrupted the game. This backlash led to EA removing the ad soon after.

In-game advertising is not new in the gaming industry. In fact, Adventureland, published in 1978, is the first recorded title to have ads baked in-game — although it was for promoting its sequel, Pirate Adventure. In 1983, Anheuser-Busch sponsored the arcade game Tapper, which featured a giant Budweiser logo right in the game and was designed for bars. Root Beer eventually replaced the Budweiser logo in 1984 so it could be placed in arcades where minors could play.

As the market for gaming titles increased in the 90s and 2000s, many companies wanted to tap into its potential — some games, like Zool and Push-Over, heavily featured products that sponsored their titles, like Chupa Chups and Quavers. In contrast, others were blatant advertisements, like Pepsi Man.

EA's Need for Speed: Underground 2 from 2004 is famously known for its in-game ads placed on billboards all over the open world. Some would argue that EA did that for realism, as the brands in the game featured real-world companies like Best Buy, Burger King, and Cingular.

But it was in 2006 when GameSpot confirmed that EA was going all-in with dynamic ads in its titles, with Need for Speed Carbon and Battlefield 2142 among the first games to try it. In 2008, Burnout Paradise, another popular EA title, featured political ads for then-Senator Barack Obama's 2008 US Presidential election bid.
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More recently, SCS Software, the company behind the American Truck Simulator and Euro Truck Simulator 2 titles, sold ad space to trucking company Schneider National for hiring drivers. However, most of these in-game ads are placed on billboards by the side of the road, where you would naturally see them in real life.

In-game ads are an understandable side-effect of the free-to-play format. However, it leaves a bad taste, especially if the ads are served in a AAA game you've paid good money for upfront. While the development cost of AAA titles has skyrocketed, with titles like Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, Cyberpunk 2077, and Star Citizen costing hundreds of millions to make, their developers have also sold plenty of copies.

If EA adds dynamic in-game ads in its titles, let's hope the company sticks to its promise of "thoughtful implementation" and "community building beyond the bounds of our games." Otherwise, its community might rise in arms and force a change, just like how the uproar over the Helldivers 2 PSN account linking forced Sony to reconsider the requirement.

#18

Off the Record / Re: The Off Topic Topic

Last post by Josquius - Today at 08:16:56 AM

Mind just blown
This emoji :
🤟

It doesn't mean rock on.
It is actually American sign language and means I love you....

#19

Off the Record / Re: The China Thread

Last post by The Minsky Moment - Today at 08:05:14 AM

The leverage that control of rare earths grants I can see.  The case for panel production is not nearly as clear.  the case for energy *use* is baffling.

If the US reached the stage of 25%+ of energy from solar generation, that would require a very large and steady supply just to maintain and replace existing capacity. If the sole source of panels was a single country foreign supplier, that would put the US energy infrastructure at risk. In the case of an embargo there wouldn't be enough time to replace with domestic capacity - the economic damage would be severe.

[increased]

#20

Off the Record / Re: The China Thread

Last post by The Minsky Moment - Today at 08:00:51 AM

But at the same time, China is doing it and making genuinely astonishing progress which might be good for the world but also building in dominance in key sectors that is bad for the West and our order.

The astonishing progress needs to be put into perspective. Solar is growing fast in China but (as elsewhere) from a small base. And in the context of still growing overall energy consumption.

In 2023, coal still accounted for over 60% of energy production in China.  That share was down somewhat on the year but in absolute terms energy from coal production increased on the year. That is, all that massive investment and build out in solar still wasn't enough to absorb the entire absolute increase in energy demand, much less displace existing plant.