It’s no longer more than a million a year (thanks Kier Starmer, I guess) but there are now at least 15 million people in the UK who aren’t White British, it is absurd to pretend that isn’t a big number.
A lot of people ideally want immigration to be negative, so +170k is still going in the wrong direction.
There are potential arguments in favour of that level of immigration but you need to convince people that it’s fine for their country to change beyond all recognition in the space of a single generation.
And unsurprisingly, the people trying to do that are finding it a tough sell
"huge uncontrolled levels of immigration". Let's put some actual numbers to this. Net immigration in 2025 was about 170k people, over the next 10 years projections are for about 2.2 million net immigration. So that's about 3-4%. However, UK population is shrinking without immigration so net population growth with immigration is about 1.7 million.
Not sure if that matches a definition of huge, but it's important to note that with a shrinking population without immigration the UK would be in serious economic trouble (like every country). This is even more exaberated due to the aging population that the shrinking population implies.
Immigrants like always are the convenient scapegoat that is being used to distract from the increasing gap between the rich and everyone else.
It's a little more than scapegoating, though. It's also absolutely about social dumping. Yes, the UK would be in serious trouble without immigrants, but richer people would be disproportionately in trouble, especially non-working ones (i.e. retirees). Working poorer people, well they wouldn't be better off maybe, but they'd have some compensation in that their labour would be in much higher demand.
That is simply not true. One example is a hilarious skit by an Australian comedian (John Safran) going to salt lake city and knocking on doors asking if he could talk to people about atheism. The amount of violent threads he received is quite revealing.
In my personal experience having lived in the US and several other countries, I found officially people can say much more things (i.e. due to the strong freedom of expression laws), but in personal settings you are much more likely to be shut down, fired, threatened with violence, ostracized... for stating unpopular (in that social environment) opinions, in the US compared to the other countries.
There was an interesting talk I heard a while ago about the scalability of oral exams vs written. They did quite a bit of study of typical exam preparation and marking times and the cross over point where oral exams were actually taking longer than written exams was surprisingly high, around 180 students or so. To be fair though I think they considered 15 min oral exams, but the gist is that in the scalability argument people tend to forget to account for marking and exam design time appropriately.
The problem is not the total time commitment, but the flexibility of when that time can be spent. The time expenditure for a written exam (writing the exam set, testing it, correcting submissions, having a grading meeting) can be spread over many weeks, with plenty of room to move things around to take care of other responsibilities, and easy tolerance for delays. Oral exams have to be scheduled in a dense block because students are only available during designated exam weeks, and any delays have cascading effects.
> Even in Texas/California photovoltaic output in the winter is measly, anywhere more to the north and it's effectively inexistent. Solar+storage requires massive overprovisioning, to the level that it's cheaper to burn literal money.
One additional tidbit of info. While the northern coast in Germany has certainly more wind, a reason why wind falls off so strongly towards the south, are the policies of the CSU party in Bavaria, which though not quite as bad as trump has been running Anti-Wind policies and making wind installations extremely difficult to build.
I can give you a prime example where you want to render all the data and quickly, oscilloscopes. It's quite common that you fetch traces with millions of samples, but then want to zoom into specific regions. There are lots of similar applications in experimental signal processing, where you want to have large data sets, but sampling easily will hide details that you want to see (unless you already know what exactly your data looks like).
> The parent described a story from a different reality - one where people are people, where communities have basic expectations of conduct, and authority is respected on all sides. The cop was angered and snapped (bad), but was stopped by their partner (good, and it's one of the reasons cops have partners!). The parent was a kid who behaved like an asshole in a moment, by their own admission. Plenty of teenagers act like that, it's an age-old more. The judge did not act as a proxy for the angry cop to retaliate, but instead reacted correctly by both praising the civic attitude (to the chagrin and I imagine further embarrassment of that cop), and addressing the behavior that is not welcome in a civilized community.
So why did he not give the cop community service then?
Sure they are. Surf around on HuggingFace and you'll see dozens of open-weight models up to 120B parameters in size from for-profit US companies, freely downloadable (if not freely runnable, alas). Probably hundreds of them, at this point.
And a 3T parameter model is scheduled to be dropped by the Chinese on Monday.
They should certainly publish more, and if somebody were to argue that model weights trained by scraping copyrighted data should inherently be accessible to everyone, I'd be 100% in favor of that.
