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#41

Off the Record / Re: Gen X suck

Last post by HVC - Today at 12:27:02 PM

Guess theyve become old enough to be the problem. Millennials are next. I'll be part of the first wave

#42

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

Last post by Tamas - Today at 12:25:30 PM

So have labour replaced prison officers en masse? Or drastically altered rules pertaining to prisoner release? No? Then this isn't their fault. Perhaps wardens and such are less motivated to keep the facade on now that there is no right-wing government to support.

#43

Off the Record / Re: Gen X suck

Last post by Valmy - Today at 12:17:10 PM

"Generation X? Oh their cool.

Are you being being sarcastic dude?

I don't even know anymore."

I miss when we were too cool for life and hated posers and sell outs. As it turns out we are just as lame as the boomers.

#44

Off the Record / Re: What does a TRUMP presiden...

Last post by Valmy - Today at 12:09:40 PM

Mellowed out? I am crashing out on a regular basis now 

But I love you all.

#45

Gaming HQ / Re: Europa Universalis V confi...

Last post by Valmy - Today at 12:04:53 PM

Can I raise all my levies and move them directly to one spot; like I think you could do in CK?

Yeah there is a button called gather to strongest army or something and all your levies will go to the same place and merge into one army.

#46

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

Last post by Sheilbh - Today at 11:58:47 AM

Yeah I'm not fully sure on that framing.

First of all there is a change from the first year under this government on this issue to previous years (even if it did hit a high in the last year of Sunak's premiership too):


I think it is right that this is largely because Labour have inherited a prison estate running at 99% capaciy, with outdate IT sytems so prison staff are calculating when someone should be released using the calendars and calculators on their desktops and the early release schemes are complicating those sums. That is exactly the argument David Lammy is making - I'm not sure that he's necessarily making it effectively, but that's his case. I'd just add that Shabana Mahmood's a very lucky general leaving the Ministry of Justice with her reputation enhanced for presiding over the prisons crisis and early release scheme without anything blowing up on her watch. Also the state of actual existing government IT infrastructure is a not insignificant part of why I am dubious about the capacity for the British state to build a digital ID system for anything less than hundreds of billions and many many years.

But on the broader point I often think of a Bagehot article by Duncan Robinson in the Economist a few years ago - just after Mr Bates came out. The basic argument he made was that chances are the next big scandal in British public life is already in the public domain. Most of the big scandals either of the "national scandal" frame or the individual political scandal relies on a lot of information that is already out there - in various statistics, official reports, declarations of earnings or conflicts etc. The thing that happens - and what's happened here - is how do you turn a dry as dust statistical report into a story - what's the line, what's the narrative (beginning, middle, end) or increasingly with fantastic reporting like you get from John Burn-Murdoch or Tom Calver turning the data into something visually arresting that can structure a story. I'd add that government does also do the document dump of releasing so much and trying to bury (perhaps not even noticing) the alarming stuff in the flood of data. There is a lot of noise and it takes either a data journalist, or a story to help identify the signal (incidentally this is where I think AI will actually be very helpful for journalists).

#47

Off the Record / Gen X suck

Last post by Josquius - Today at 11:56:26 AM

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/nov/07/gen-x-internet-radicalisation-populist

Meet gen X: middle-aged, enraged and radicalised by internet bile

Who is driving the populist insurgency? It's not grumpy pensioners or vulnerable teenagers – it's my routine bland nothings you exchange with strangers on the street. But something about the way we speak in public is changing.

A few days ago I was in Aldi, making the usual small talk at the checkout. When the cashier said she was exhausted from working extra shifts to make some money for Christmas, the man behind me chipped in that it would be worse once "she takes all our money" (in case Rachel Reeves was wondering, her budget pitch-rolling is definitely cutting through). Routine enough, if he hadn't gone on to add that she and the rest of the government needed taking out, and that there were plenty of ex-military men around who should know what to do, before continuing in more graphic fashion until the queue fell quiet and feet began shuffling. But the strangest thing was that he said it all quite calmly, as if political assassination was just another acceptable subject for casual conversation with strangers, such as football or how long the roadworks have gone on. It wasn't until later that it clicked: this was a Facebook conversation come to life. He was saying out loud, and in public, the kind of thing people say casually all the time on the internet, apparently without recognising that in the real world it's still shocking – at least for now.

I thought about him when the health secretary, Wes Streeting, voiced alarm this week that it was becoming "socially acceptable to be racist" again, with ethnic minority NHS staff fighting a demoralising tide of things people now apparently feel emboldened to say to them. What Streeting was describing – not just unabashed racism, but a sense of inhibitions disappearing out of the window more generally – goes well beyond hospital waiting rooms. You can feel it at bus stops, where polite inquiries about why the 44 doesn't stop here any more end up wheeling off at sudden wild tangents about chemtrails or the government spying on you; or in casual school-gate chats, where otherwise perfectly ordinary-seeming parents turn out to have some very odd ideas about vaccines.

A friend calls it "sauna politics", after the surreally conspiracy-laden conversations she overhears in her local leisure centre sauna. But whatever you want to call it, it's as if people are suddenly voicing their interior monologues – things that until recently they'd have been embarrassed to say in public, or sometimes even to admit to themselves that they thought – out loud. After all, they can say this stuff online and nobody bats an eyelid. Why not in a hospital waiting room? It's the conversational equivalent of young men trying out things they've seen in online porn on real-life girlfriends and being surprised when it goes badly – except this time the main culprits are less likely to be confused teenagers than their parents, unmoored by the dizzyingly fast collapse of social norms online and the return of slurs they haven't heard voiced out loud since childhood.

Middle-aged radicalisation sounds almost like a contradiction in terms, a reaction to all the stereotypes about settling comfortably into your rut. Besides, in our own heads, if nowhere else, gen X were always the mild-mannered peacekeepers of the culture wars: not old enough to be deemed reactionary or young enough to be woke, and instead occupying a kind of cheerfully moderate Goldilocks zone in-between. But something seems to have happened to us as we hit the midlife crisis years. Gen Xers are now old enough to start worrying that the world is changing and leaving us behind: that if we get made redundant we might not get hired again, that our marriages may not survive the shock of the kids leaving home, that our views are out of date and someone is out to get us for them, that people are laughing at us behind our backs. Though most of us get through it without a political meltdown, this time of life certainly has its casualties, seeking an outlet for bottled-up rage and disappointment that life hasn't turned out as planned.

It's gen Xers, not grumpy pensioners or teenage boys beguiled by rightwing influencers, who are powering the populist insurgency now. Only 19% of British fiftysomethings voted Reform UK at the last general election but a third of those aged between 50 and 64 would do so now, according to YouGov, which is a staggeringly fast turnaround for the "Cool Britannia" generation that put Tony Blair in Downing Street – and key to the party's move from fringe to mainstream. In the US, gen Xers have been dubbed the "Trumpiest generation", because they're more likely than any other to identify as Republican.

Yet with rare exceptions such as the Smidge project – a three-year ongoing international study of how conspiracy theories and disinformation spread among 45- to 65-year-olds, and how deradicalisation could work for this age group – we show amazingly little curiosity about how middle-aged minds have been shaped by living through the great unregulated free-speech experiment.

My generation likes to think we're above being influenced by what we see online: that we're more tech-savvy than our parents, less TikTok-addled than our kids, and mature enough to separate it all from real life. But the evidence suggests we're not nearly as capable of compartmentalising as we think. Perhaps the only surprise, given how thin the fourth wall separating online and offline discourse always was, is that it's taken this long to break.

It's a topic that has come up on here a fair bit so should be of interest.

Some aspects of it certainly hit some familiar notes.

#48

Off the Record / Re: The AI dooooooom thread

Last post by Sheilbh - Today at 11:42:54 AM

Just on that AI-powered personalised ad generation point I mentioned earlier to give a bit of a sense of scale.

Fantastic piece today by Reuters that around 10% of Meta's ads revenue comes from scam or fake ads. Basically Meta only bans fake/scam advertisers if they hit a 95% certainty that it's fraudulent or whatever. However they will charge more for advertising the more your "score" indicates you're a scam in some way or other. Which sort of makes sense for them (again dreadful for the publishers sellin advertising space or the readers seeing it but plus ca change).

10% of Meta's revenue is $16 billion. That means that the money they're making on fake/fraudulent/scam ads is more than the entire TV advertising revenue of the NFL.

I expect Meta to do both. So they'll sell to publishers an AI tool to help better screen fake/fraudulent ads which just means Meta need to increase their share of ad sales and they'll sell a tool to advertisers allowing them to AI generate personalised advertising and optimise both the targeting and the creative (which I can't help but think will be a gift for scam artists).

#49

Gaming HQ / Re: Europa Universalis V confi...

Last post by Josephus - Today at 10:41:01 AM

Can I raise all my levies and move them directly to one spot; like I think you could do in CK?

#50

Gaming HQ / Re: Europa Universalis V confi...

Last post by Tamas - Today at 09:27:34 AM

I wonder if I ran into a bug. I started a parliament session and then added as an additional agenda a law change request. This tanked the success chance of parliament, like to 5% and it failed eventually. But still, the implementation of the law has triggered, without the 99 stability hit that you'd get trying to push it through without parliamentary approval. I am pretty sure this isn't how it is supposed to work.

I think that's how it's supposed to work.  You use up your political capital on changing the law, and not enough was left for the original agenda item.  The additional items are not tied to the original agenda.  That was one of the few things I figured out in my 7 hours of playing.

Ah, makes more sense, thanks.