The Greens have called for a ÂŁ1,000-a-month basic income for some agricultural workers
is set to deliver a stark warning about the UK's food system, describing it as "close to collapse" and asserting that food workers' contributions are "sneered at." He will use a speech on Monday to call for greater support for farmers.
Mr Polanski will advocate for robust regulation of supermarkets to ensure growers receive a fair deal for their produce. He is also expected to demand that the Government present a "real plan" to bolster the struggling agricultural sector.
Among the Greens' proposals are extending free school meals to all primary and secondary pupils. They also suggest a ÂŁ1,000-a-month basic income for some agricultural workers, which they state would be financed through a levy on the wealthiest landowners.
Furthermore, the party pledges a universal ÂŁ15 per hour minimum wage for all workers, irrespective of age, with the costs for small businesses mitigated by reductions in their National Insurance contributions.
Speaking to the Bakers, Food and Allied Workers Union on Monday, Mr Polanski will say: âJust a couple of weeks ago, we saw the hottest May day ever recorded in the UK.
âBy the beginning of May, the UK had received 23% less rain than average. The Climate Change Committee warns that within 25 years we could see temperatures above 40C.
âThat doesnât just mean more people getting sick from extreme heat, or more pressure on infrastructure that just isnât built for these temperatures. As many of you in this room well know, it has terrifying implications for the most fundamental need we all have â food.â
One time when I was a kid a group of girls and I had to treat another student for hypothermia by ourselves because she had so many invisible health issues that the adults we asked for help didn't believe us. The student in question was actively hallucinating. When I finally ran for help the people I grabbed were slow as shit to respond, casually joking about how "dramatic" the person in question was.
The kid was picked up by an ambulance 30 minutes later.
Now as an adult working in security I get SO MANY folks- upper-middle aged mostly- coming to me to 'rat out' people they think are faking it.
I was once sent into a bathroom because a client demanded that the "fucker won't get out, so good drag them out"- I was NEVER going to do that, so I did a wellness check instead. You know who it was? A person recently released from the hospital after a car accident. They had a hole in their skull and major hearing loss. They couldn't answer the owner because they couldn't HEAR the owner.
Another time about a homeless man who got around town by kicking the ground from his wheelchair. "You know he doesn't actually need that thing, his legs work fine, it's just for pity points"- Oh, so he's not paralyzed, his wheelchair is performative? Funny story Dale, I actually know that guy, he was backed over by a truck and has chronic pain from his shattered pelvis. But sure, let's make him stand up and walk everywhere so nobody feels too bad for him and tries to help him or something.
"She doesn't need that scooter, I've seen her get out of it."
"Look how fat he is, because he just rides around and refuses to get up."
"She doesn't really need that cane- she comes here without it all the time"
Sincerely, truly, from the bottom of my heart- as someone who isn't physically disabled but hears this shit all the time- fuck off
The assholes openly admit it. The whole point of college is to enforce the hierarchy. When those who were supposed to be low on the hierarchy started going to college, the assholes get angry and want to make them suffer for challenging the hierarchy.
Yet another reason this is insanely revisionist is that it pretends the whole reason millennials felt so much pressure to go to college wasn't that conservative politicians had spent the eighties and nineties wrecking the shit out of labor unions to the point that by the time millennials turned eighteen, it was suddenly a lot harder to count on being able to work at a working-class job all your life and still have a good living.
College, all of a sudden, went from "something I'd like to do if I can get in" to "a lifeline in an economy where blue collar jobs are going to shit."
The wheel's turned long enough that now college students are being treated the way union workers and union-adjacent workers were treated in the eighties and nineties, so now college grads are the ones that it's fashionable to shit on, and the new fix-all solution is supposed to be "go into the trades!" Which means that by the 2050s at the latest, we'll be coming up with some new lie to blame people in the trades for the fact that now they're in trouble. And we'll have some new job that everyone should have been doing instead.
UK proposals for mandatory age verification will not mitigate childrenâs exposure to harmful content and âaddictiveâ app design, and risks e
The Foundation for Information Policy Research (FIPR) warned that many of the proposed solutions for age verification will exacerbate the harms they are trying to prevent, and could expose children to risks of blackmail and abuse.
The warning follows comments from technology secretary Liz Kendall that âdrasticâ action was needed to protect young people from social media, with nine out of 10 parents saying they are in favour of a ban in response to a government consultation.
FIPR said in evidence to the Department of Science, Innovation and Technology that mandatory age verification does not address harmful content on social media and could lead to many adults in the UK being excluded from digital services.
âWhile it is tempting to rely on âmagicâ technological fixes for online harm, these will not work, will concentrate even more power in the hands of large tech platforms, and will risk letting them off the hook for the wider social harms to which they contribute,â said Ben Collier, FIPR chair and senior lecturer at the University of Edinburgh.
[...]
The think tank points out that many of the more technically focused approaches to age verification do not effectively mitigate childrenâs exposure to harmful content, âaddictiveâ app design, and risks to childrenâs privacy and security of their data, and could increase childrenâs exposure to them.
For age verification to be effective, both children and adults may be required to prove their age to use online services, for example, by providing biometric information, credit cards or government-issued identification to verification services or online sites.
This poses security and privacy risks for both adults and children, and requires users to trust the verification service will store their data securely and will not misuse or profit from the data provided, as Facebook did in 2018 when it came under fire for reusing phone numbers provided for account verification for advertising purposes.
Technology that detects the age of people from their face is trained on data from an average population, and tends to perform poorly with minority, ethnic, disabled, LGBT and other âstructurally disadvantaged groupsâ at risk of being excluded from social media and other internet sites, and could be further marginalised.
Such systems risk normalising repeated age checking across the internet, making it easier for hostile actors or criminals to use age verification to steal biometric data or credit card information.
"Clearly I wasn't talking about disabled people-" yeah part of the problem is that the existence of disabled people just isn't considered in your worldview like that's the problem we're criticizing not a get out of jail free card
âBecause the truth is, tech doesnât have an image problem. It doesnât have a message problem. It has an intention problem. Whatâs wrong with the axe murderer who broke into my house is not that he hasnât successfully persuaded me to buy into his narrative. Whatâs wrong is that heâs trying to kill me with an axe. Similarly, when you launch a product thatâs designed to put millions of people out of work, block access to sources of verifiable truth, replace human creativity with slop, and lower the barriers to every sort of atrocity, the problem isnât that you havenât told the public a good story about those things. The problem is that you are trying to do them.â
I have no evidence to back this up, so, đ§đ§đ§; but:
I work in tech, and any time I see a precipitous and incorrect decision like this â ESPECIALLY if itâs made by a technology company â the explanation that seems most plausible to me us that the management of that company has decided to implement an âAgenticâ AI â i.e. a large-language model, attached to a program whose instructions are âDo whatever the large language model spits outâ.
The problem is that large language models only care about spitting out an answer that sounds syntactically plausible. Theyâre designed to provide a response that is a reasonable simulacrum of human language, within a reasonably short timeout, but there is absolutely zero actual understanding behind it. It is basically a bullshit machine. There is no evaluation of veracity or reasonableness happening â thatâs not a thing itâs capable of. Itâs just trying to spit out a plausible answer before you get impatient and give up interacting with it.
Without doxxing myself, Iâve recently seen a case exactly like this in telecom.
A third -party project manager (not me, I was just a witness) put in a request like âPlaceholder - port date to be determined for this toll-free number, belonging to Customer XYZ. I will update this ticket when the date is determine, and provide the required paperwork. For now, please just assign to the correct porting coordinator and hold.â
Instead of doing that, Carrier Aâs customer support department immediately sent a port order to Carrier B, with the authorizer listed as [random person in customerâs call centre who wasnât a manager and wouldnât be listed as a signing authority on Carrier Bâs billing record].
And then Carrier B, rather than being like âWho the fuck is Tragedeigh Molyneux? Our billing record clearly says that for Customer XYZ, the signing authority is Humperdink Snufflebuggerâ , instead just went ahead and released the toll-free number to Carrier A.
This was a couple months ago, and I canât remember if callers were getting a busy signal, or just an infinite gentle-music hold loop, but it was a fucking shitshow, and the customer was furious.
We hurriedly implemented a workaround (a weird hairpin-routing-loopback to get callers to agents whose phones were still connected to Carrier Bâs system), but the customer was absolutely furious about the outage; like âHow TF could this have happened??? We never set a port date, and in any case, Ms. Molyneux never had signing authority to authorize changes with either Carrier A or Carrier B???â
And the poor project manager is getting absolutely excoriated, even though she never asked for this number to be ported immediately. She was just trying to give Carrier A lots of notice, because they are usually very behind on their port requests. And sheâs just like âI donât know, weâll have to ask Carrier A and Carrier B to investigate how that decision was made within their support organizations.â
And like⊠to me, the technician watching this unfold, it seems that either:
A) Both Carrier A and Carrier B suddenly have customer support staff who are extremely eager to help, and also extremely lacking in critical thinking, or else
B) One (or both) of these carriers (one of whom is a large, publicly-traded company) has recently offloaded their first-pass ticket handling to an âagentic AIâ (i.e. an LLM / syntactically-plausible bullshit machine, hooked directlyinto a system that just blindly implements any instructions the LLM sends to it).
I strongly suspect itâs Option B, because Iâve worked in this industry for over a decade, and Iâve never encountered a human person whose impulse to help wasnât thoroughly outweighed by their fear of making a mistake that brings down an entire call centre.
An internal Microsoft strategy document says that the plan for its just-announced âScoutâ personal assistant AI is to âmake people addictedâ to the tool before rolling out additional functionality, 404 Media has learned. âThree phases from addictive app to agentic platform,â the documentation.
Microsoft has been piloting Scout as an internal tool for employees it was calling âClawPilot,â since March. ClawPilotâand now Scoutâare part of âProject Lobster,â which is a Microsoft plan to bring the popular OpenClaw AI tool to its Microsoft 365 suite of products in a way that nontechnical people can use. It is not particularly notable that Microsoft is developing new AI toolsâthe company has reoriented almost everything it does to focus on AI, and every major AI company has tried to figure out how to bring AI agents into their products after OpenClaw went viral earlier this year. OpenClaw allows users to create AI agents that can act on behalf of the person using it; it can send emails, edit calendars, publish blog posts, and more. What is notable is that the explicit goal of the people developing the product is to addict its users. Microsoft officially announced Scout Tuesday as an âalways-on personal agentâ that runs on OpenClaw and is integrated into Microsoft 365.Â
The internal Microsoft document, called âClawPilot: Overview and Plan with Project Lobster,â seen by 404 Media has a subheading called âClawPilot Overall Plan,â which notes âthree phasesâ to its launch plan. The first phase is âMake people addicted.â
âContinue shipping the standalone ClawPilot experience. Pilot the UX, grow the user base, and build the skill and tool ecosystem that makes people depend on it daily. This is already happening organically,â the document says. Omar Shahine, the Microsoft executive leading the project, adds that in its pilot with Microsoft employees, they have seen âDaily Usage with High Retention and intensity of usage (chats, queries, workflows, skills).â The additional phases of the plan involve connecting ClawPilot to other AI tools and eventually adding new features.Â
I lowkey hate when programs talk to me in a friendly way. "don't worry, nearly there!" Shut up. It should say "loading 64.3% completed. Do not turn off device" and absolutely nothing else. You arent my friend you are computer. Act like it
