Oh well if Will Geddes says “there might be all sorts of tricks and stunts … but this wouldn’t be one of them” then I guess that’s the truth sorted out.

Well most of that wealth is in the Tesla meme-stock (whose valuation he uses as collateral for credit), encompassing various nonsense-ventures, the roadster that never materialised, the electric articulated truck with thermonuclear-explosion-proof windscreen that doesn’t exist, a fake remote controlled robot, self-driving cars without the necessary sensors, not to mention a whole host of other stuff like a Mars colony that cannot possibly happen while observing the laws of physics as we understand them. Sorry but it was all such obvious bullshit to anybody that even paid a little bit of attention. How none of it was fraud is beyond me (free speech!). Instead of getting prosecuted governments (not limited to republicans) gave him contracts worth billions with which he extended and consolidated his burgeoning power.

There is a whole host of people who facilitated Musk’s rise to power, from billionaire-owned media outlets failing to question his bullshit, to $TSLA owners who have probably profited quite handsomely in the last few months. But I suppose that is the nature of capitalism laid bare - I’ll get mine and fuck you.

If it is true that one of China’s policies, with regard to beating America over the last and coming decades, was ‘do nothing and win’ we can see exactly why through Musk’s story.

I said direct me to a low carb plant based diet.

In response you told me you had, but that it didn’t need to be low carb. Then you suggested an Indian diet, as if everybody in the UK is going to adopt that. You are talking nonsense. This is an easy block for being a waste of time.

You didn’t say what diet your mum changed from. You could replace a lot of grains and root vegetables (very high in carbohydrate), (not to mention high sugar) with a lot of non-root vegetables and see a big reduction in diabetes symptoms, but that doesn’t mean the diet is particularly low carbohydrate.

Oh I see, it’s the angry non-factual person.

I am not wasting my time with this. Block it is.

Language evolves.

In this thread you have been inaccurate and argumentative. It is obstructive, unhelpful, boring. Take your anger out on somebody other than me, I am not playing.

"Working class is an outdated term (IMVHO). The people of the social class that used to be termed ‘working class’ (say, pre-Thatcher > Blair) no longer have the job and social security that term denoted. The social contract for those people has been eroded away. On zero-hours contracts or in precarious (often ‘essential worker’) jobs, those people are more ‘working poor’ or ‘underclass’ now depending on exactly how much money they have in their pocket from month to month.

Edit - deleted some stuff about home ownership and voting that was too convoluted.

Please direct me to a low carbohydrate plant-based diet.

Poor, formerly working class, people in the UK have benefited least from the decades of foreign and economic policy that have ultimately caused the migrant crisis, and are being harmed most by it: the market for low-skilled jobs is either much more difficult or impossible, and social services are stretched past breaking. But those people are not crying, they are turning to the far-right in the (probably vain) hope for a solution because everybody else have proved themselves non-credible.

Even though the current close-to-a-London-a-decade is simply unsustainable, it is absolutely nothing compared to the coming flood of climate refugees. The line will be drawn somewhere. The longer it goes on the stronger the response will ultimately be.

It is a disaster but that is the reality of the situation.

For context, the suffering migrants experience now is again nothing compared to the coming harm future migrants will experience due to climate change, and none of us can stop it, because if we don’t burn those fossil fuels somebody else is going to. It isn’t solvable under capitalism because the cooperation required isn’t possible. Write it as an epitaph on human-kind’s gravestone: “We didn’t possess the wit to overcome the dopamine-driven desire for more, now.”

A high carbohydrate and so high insulin-producing plant-based diet certainly isn’t healthy for me. The evidence that it is extremely problematic for many if not most people is compelling.

With the best will in the world, the plain and simple fact is that there are too many people [both on the planet, if the intention is for everyone to live the ultra-high-energy/consumption ‘developed world’ lifestyle, and] in the UK in particular, when accepting the reality of 21st century society.

We are not anywhere near food or energy secure.

Ah yes, David “will of the people bollocks” Lammy, as he put it on twitter in response to the brexit referendum outcome that he didn’t like.

Before I go any further I will say that this is my last post on this subject.

I’m not aware of the UK government using torture to crush dissent.

This is a so-called straw man argument, I never said the UK government used torture to crush dissent. If you expect me to go to the trouble of a response, frankly, do better.

The social contract is not “I give up the freedom to murder without legal consequence in order to not be murdered” in a civilised society. Is in 1025 or 2025? (This is a rhetorical question.)

I don’t think the public should be spied on all the time. But if there is some way that illegal communications (like planning murder) could be intercepted, without spying on others, that would be good.

We do not particularly disagree. Except that due to information security being an interest of mine, I know that it isn’t technically possible to weaken encryption for one without weakening encryption for everybody.

Being something like a specialist interest of mine, I also know that weakening encryption is one part of the creation of a total-surveillance state that is taking place - much like the explicit oligarchy we see forming now in the US has taken decades to build. This environment is certainly one in which fascism will thrive - something I don’t want to see, seeing as how I still remember people talking about the second world war and all that.

I also know that this snooping capability will be placed in the hands of future, and some current, political and business leaders who don’t have the interests of the public at large at heart, and who even might actually might be prepared to murder people: the US is now aligned with a Russia that has committed war crimes in Ukraine. If I mention Gaza and war crimes there is some (presumably small) chance I might be arrested under the Communications Act 2003, which defines illegal communication as ‘using public electronic communications network in order to cause annoyance, inconvenience or needless anxiety’.

Here is a letter written by experts regarding removing end to end encryption:

https://haddadi.github.io/UKOSBOpenletter.pdf

Take note of the 2003 communications act. Here are a few articles from a very quick search that explicitly show the kind of society that is being built, brick by brick:

https://bigbrotherwatch.org.uk/press-releases/big-brother-watch-condemns-uks-first-use-of-city-wide-facial-recognition-in-cardiff/

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/24/business/london-police-facial-recognition.html

https://www.verdict.co.uk/most-surveilled-city/

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-68274090

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/dec/11/britain-leads-the-world-in-cracking-down-on-climate-activism-study-finds

As I said, I am done with this thread now. Thanks

Couple of things: I am sure that the likes of GCHQ get the messages of specific individuals who threaten the UK without any court orders right now. This cartoon sums up the limits to encryption’s effectiveness in this sort of context: https://xkcd.com/538/ And it has been red Tory v. blue Tory, one party, since 1994. I assume you disagree on this my second point - I am always happy to agree to disagree.

Regarding encryption, surveillance, and snooper’s intrusion: I was brought up being told the stasi were the bad guys. The stasi would blush at the surveillance foreign corporations and the British government now engage in as a matter of course: it is beyond their wildest dreams.

But spying on all of the public all of the time comes at a cost to society I would rather not pay. It quells dissent in the short and maybe mid term, but that extreme intrusion, ultimately drives otherwise moderate people into the hands of extremists (on every side). The terrorists win when we sacrifice liberty for temporary security (or whatever that quote was).

I saw it called “end to end encrypted icloud backup” in the news. I guess it is that, in that it is encrypted at rest on apple’s servers, then between those servers and the end-user’s device. But that is a bit different to what signal does. Signal doesn’t store anything at rest on any servers they own as far as the experts I rely on for information on this (and who signal allow to audit them) say.

It seems to be the case that as long as apple offer any products at all to the UK market, the UK government have the right to ask, in secret, for apple to provide encryption backdoors into their products for all of apple’s customers whatever the nationality. It seems likely that the UK will share this information with five eyes countries’, allowing those countries to circumvent their own legal processes.

It isn’t clear if that has happened or is going to happen but it seems likely that they will, if they can get away with it without it becoming public knowledge. Which has pissed off, for instance, US information security professionals who like iphones whose data now can’t be considered secure.

It might be the case that apple has had to withdraw this particular product from the UK for public relations purposes because somebody whitleblew. But as long as apple wants to sell products in the UK it seems the snoopers charter allows the snoopers to request backdoor access to their products globally.

The Chinese have done the same. People here call them totalitarian for doing so.

I understand where you are coming from, but the encryption is not secure if somebody else holds your password.

Then there is the other issue of Elon Musk and Donald Trump, or Nigel Farage and Tommy Robinson, or some other entity the likes of Russia, and now America promote, and bang goes journalist’s and activists’ anonymity. It would be great to have it both ways, but it isn’t possible.

I worked in recording studios for nearly a decade about twenty years ago or so ago, recording all kinds of stuff including film and tv scores.

Producers and composers were overwhelmingly from a privilieged > public school > Oxbridge background. Presumably the lack of representation from other groups is either the same or worse now.

The people I worked with tended to have grown up with money/privilege (meaning it is easy to piss about producing films). But some kind of Oxbridge old boys network/snobbery mostly covers why this lack of opportunity for the general public exists. Of course Oxbridge is all about nepotism and privilege. I have lived around very privileged people and very underprivileged people. I haven’t noticed one iq point of difference between the two cohorts. If anything, being forced to struggle makes people atronger (until the amount of hardship to be endured becomes too much).

I can say that it was often the ones that acted like they expected to be waited on hand and foot, who didn’t show any class whatsoever when it came to actually paying their bills on time (often if at all).

British society is rife with it. Ultimately these type of people being in charge makes our society extremely weak. As we move beyond 20th century political/economic liberalism this weakness will be exploited by adversaries.

The question is do you want serious cyber criminals, and whatever authoritarian government shows up at some point and starts tearing up the already increasingly authoritarian UK rule book (hi America) to have access to all communications? Should they have access to journalist’s sources, and other activists’ communications? Should cyber criminals have access to all financial data?

You don’t get one without the other. Encryption either works or it doesn’t. And you can certainly assume that dedicated nation state actors (who will and do work with people that do not want a liberal open society in countries across the world including the UK) will quickly develop the capability to circumvent any exploitable encryption.

In this case the increasingly authoritarian/data-totalitarian UK government and secret services has been trying to do it in secret. They want their eyes on everything at all times and damn the consequences for an open society. They sure are doing their bit to end the 20th century idea of a free, open, tolerant society I grew up being told existed.

Then again, I watched some sort of parliamentary enquiry more than a decade ago where somebody from gchq nonchalantly admitted they abuse UK citizen’s human right of privacy as a matter of course and everybody in the room just shrugged. It caused no ripple at all in the press. No doubt the likes of gchq face all sorts of threats we the public are not aware of, but they appear to operate with no checks and balances whatsoever, and they are playing right into the hands of extremists who want to see the end of an open society in order that their extreme views become more acceptable.

It must be said that personal privacy is a cornerstone of a civilised society. You either have that or you don’t. For many people, particularly those that pay attention to this stuff, we have already gone too far. There is a lot an individual can do to mitigate the intrusion of US tech corporations, but destroying encryption, in a world where so much can only be done online, affects everybody regardless of personal choices they have made. To try and do it in secret is even worse.

The paradox of intolerance: tolerating intolerance immediately results in an intolerant society.

There are various paradoxes and limitations inherent to a socially liberal society (not including the obvious issues of capitalism) that have been exploited by billionaires, fascists, strongmen, religious nuts and many others.