BRFR Cake Stop 'breaking news' miscellany

[Stevo 666]

Maybe the narrative is a bit more complex and nuanced than the one playing in your head.

See my post above about small business being the main cause of the tax gap and explain how if fits in with your thinking.

 

[bobzmyunkle]

See my post above about small business being the main cause of the tax gap and explain how if fits in with your thinking.

See my post above where I said you appear to be a bit slow on the uptake.
Then
1. ask yourself what this 'tax gap' you refer to actually is.
2. See if you can work out why small businesses would more likely be the 'cause'.

Clue - it's f*ck all to do with the laffer curve (as far as I know, but I'm not an accountant).

 

[Stevo 666]

See my post above where I said you appear to be a bit slow on the uptake.
Then
1. ask yourself what this 'tax gap' you refer to actually is.
2. See if you can work out why small businesses would more likely be the 'cause'.

Clue - it's f*ck all to do with the laffer curve (as far as I know, but I'm not an accountant).

I wasn't talking about the Laffer curve, you're getting confused.

And the tax gap is defined by hmrc - have a read:
https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/measuring-tax-gaps
Heres the relevant bit: "The tax gap is the difference between the amount of tax that should, in theory, be paid to HMRC, and what is actually paid."

I asked for your thoughts on why small businesses are the main contributors and all you've done is ask the same question. Try answering it if you think I'm missing something.

 

[briantrumpet]

An interesting piece on where the Tory Party is heading on the question of being 'British'. I'd forgotten the pitch from the Thatcher era. The contrast between then and now is rather stark.

https://www.ft.com/content/86f45cf7-2f25-4a8b-8d9b-c2326fa28e02

When Conservative politicians use a definition of who is “native” to the country that excludes people whose own ethnicity is “white British and something else”, that treats people who have been born, raised and educated in the UK as somehow not part of Britain, they are moving towards a definition of race that hasn’t been part of mainstream British politics for more than half a century. This “one drop” approach was, until very recently, considered to be beyond the pale in accepted Tory thought.

 

[briantrumpet]

Apparently Musk doesn't like what his own Grok is saying about right wing violence in the US. So yeah, let's just tip the scales (and talk to AI like it's a real person).

 

[briantrumpet]

Not unrelated, here's an interview with an interesting AI sceptic - interesting, not least because her specialism of computational linguistics gives her an insight into how the smokescreen of credibly human language of LLMs masks the complete inability to 'understand' anything in the human sense.

https://www.ft.com/content/9029cc1c...&shareId=83af7127-5482-4cab-875c-cfcad53d66a7

According to Bender, we are being sold a lie: AI will not fulfil those promises, and nor will it kill us all, as others have warned. AI is, despite the hype, pretty bad at most tasks and even the best systems available today lack anything that could be called intelligence, she argues. Recent claims that models are developing a capacity to understand the world beyond the data they are trained on are nonsensical. We are “imagining a mind behind the text”, she says, but “the understanding is all on our end”.

Bender, 51, is an expert in how computers model human language. She spent her early academic career in Stanford and Berkeley, two Bay Area institutions that are the wellsprings of the modern AI revolution, and worked at YY Technologies, a natural language processing company. She witnessed the bursting of the dotcom bubble in 2000 first-hand.

Her mission now is to deflate AI, which she will only refer to in air quotes and says should really just be called automation. “If we want to get past this bubble, I think we need more people not falling for it, not believing it, and we need those people to be in positions of power,” she says.

 

[briantrumpet]

Maybe my homemade hummus addiction (I'm using it copiously as a butter substitute) is good news:

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/chickpeas-cholesterol-beans-health

Edirisinghe and his colleagues enrolled 72 people with prediabetes in a trial that had them consuming a cup of chickpeas, black beans or white rice every day for 12 weeks. At the end of the trial, the cholesterol levels of people on the chickpea diet dropped from about 200 to 186 milligrams per deciliter. That may seem small, but it’s actually “gold,” Edirisinghe says. It means participants “are coming back to the healthy side.” Doctors consider total cholesterol levels below 200 mg/dl to be normal.

People in both the chickpea group and the black bean group also showed reduced signs of inflammation in the blood. Part of the excitement about these health benefits stem from the beans themselves, says study coauthor Morganne Smith, also a nutritionist at Illinois Tech. “They’re very common, they’re affordable and they’re accessible.”

 

[PurplePenguin]

Surely just use AI when it is helpful.

 

[briantrumpet]

Surely just use AI when it is helpful.

Indeed. But the industry itself has an interest in bigging itself up as the answer to all our problems, and in that way lies madness.

 

[bobzmyunkle]

Surely just use AI when it is helpful.

You assume we have the choice.
Anyhow, I asked it if Shimano front derailleurs are made of cheese (based on recent experience, I thought this might be the case).
Here's the summary
'Shimano derailleurs are designed with precision and engineered for reliable shifting performance. While they may be sensitive to impacts and require proper maintenance, they are certainly not made of cheese.'

 

[PurplePenguin]

Indeed. But the industry itself has an interest in bigging itself up as the answer to all our problems, and in that way lies madness.

In the same way that an advert does?

 

[briantrumpet]

In the same way that an advert does?

Does advertising in itself pretend it's the answer to the world's problems?

 

[PurplePenguin]

Does advertising in itself pretend it's the answer to the world's problems?

I think that's a bit of a strawman.

 

[briantrumpet]

I think that's a bit of a strawman.

You've lost me. Advertising sells us stuff we don't need. It doesn't in itself pretend to do anything else. The AI industry is pretending to be able to do things it can't, using the LLM output of human-like language as the smokescreen. As it stands, a large chunk of it is a fraud: the step-change in its ability to mimic human language has been the prompt for its hyperbolic claims of 'intelligence'.

Sure, as you say, it's got really good at writing code, but it's really important that people realise what it's not good at, as well as the dangers of its overuse to humans' ability to evaluate stuff & to develop deep understanding.

 

[briantrumpet]

This will be an interesting one to follow:

https://www.ft.com/content/1ca893d0-7384-45c6-b305-904fb2f6c0af?shareType=nongift

I suspect it won't pass, but it's quite fun to listen to the gnashing of teeth in the meantime.

Lawyers and bankers in Switzerland are warning of a UK-style exodus of the wealthy ahead of a referendum on a 50 per cent inheritance tax for the super-rich.

The Alpine nation is due to hold a popular vote in November on the introduction of a federal tax on inheritances and gifts worth more than Sfr50mn ($61mn). Unlike existing cantonal duties that would still apply, the proposal does not include an exemption for spouses or direct descendants.

The looming vote comes after the UK sparked a rush for the exit among wealthy foreigners by making the global assets of non-domiciled residents liable to inheritance tax — a move it is now considering reversing. Meanwhile, jurisdictions such as Dubai and Italy have stepped up efforts to lure the rich.

“In terms of the chance for Switzerland to attract people leaving the UK, the damage has been done. The timing was terrible,” said Georgia Fotiou, a lawyer advising private clients at Staiger Law. “It hasn’t stopped everyone from coming but more have chosen Italy, Greece, the United Arab Emirates and elsewhere instead.”