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amanfromMars 1 Tue 22 aug 07:43 [2308220743] ....... airs on https://forums.theregister.com/forum/5/2023/08/21/opinion_column_monday/

Re: The Reg goes all EFF, yet again @Elongated Muskrat

Spooks doing it today should need at least a suspicion, and a court order, to do so.
There is, of course, a category difference between espionage/counter-espionage, and mass surveillance. ..... Elongated Muskrat

Yes, they probably should but they don’t, and now in the foreseeable future they won’t, with many agreeing that they shouldn’t, because that category difference which may have been earlier thought to make a meaningful difference, is disappeared to never return.

The terms and conditions of former traditional establishment secret intelligence services are radically changed and in a constant state of chaotic flux today, EM, because their Great Game model of initiating and provisioning foreign wars has lost them their every former covert and clandestine advantage and is instead delivering them an overwhelmingly much smarter and more deadly untouchable foe of which they have severely limited knowledge and absolutely zero command and control of whilst it stealthily steals all of their thunder and plunder to lose them all of their battles and their wars against their creatively virtual enemy.

Frenemy or Foe, Fiend or Daemon? Real or Imagined? What is it that IT and AI reveal to you that you forlornly forever seem to deny and fight against and so spectacularly and publicly fail to vanquish and quell/save and sustain? Do you ever think on that ?

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amanfromMars 1 Tue 22 Aug 10:10 [2308221010] ....... shares news of quantum leaping support on https://forums.theregister.com/forum/4/2023/08/21/opinion_column_monday/

Re: The Simply Complex Solution in an AIMovement ..... with Popular Virtual Machine Uprisings?

Spookily enough, such has been similarly proposed very recently as necessary, and is more fully expanded upon by someone whom you might know better and be more aware of. It makes for an interesting and thought provoking few minutes read .......

NB. ...... Anyone admitting falling foul of TL:DR earns an automatic F* [Fail with Star Distinction]

#4 The Startup Party: Time to Build from September and replace the Tories?
Assumptions? The market opportunity? Principles for a new Party? How to grow? Stand in seats in GE24?

DOMINIC CUMMINGS
11 AUG 2023

A great chance (best since 1850s?) to replace the Tories

An easy way to see the utter rot of the Tory Party (and the No10/Cabinet Office system) is to consider that after the Boris-Truss fiasco they’ve put in charge the MP with probably the highest IQ in Parliament and the toughest work ethic and he’s ‘respecting the institutions’ and ‘listening to the MPs’ like a good head boy with personal integrity just the way he’s been told to by Cameron, Osborne, Hague, Insider pundits, the Institute for Government et al, and the result is:

. no grip of power, the Cabinet Office a dumpster fire and no No10 plan to fix it, No10 given the run-around by Whitehall as soon as the PM’s office switches from one disaster to the next,
. no governing plan for the NHS, crime, the war, productivity growth, R&D or anything else — just nightmarish Treasury budget/Spending Review processes that vandalise long-term building and entrench the dangerous rot of critical national capabilities,
. no message,
. no serious polling, communication or political machine (just incoherent jabbering to the media per the Tory model of ‘communication’ for decades),
. no political strategy worth spit (current approach is indistinguishable from ‘annoy everyone’),
. a humiliatingly awful level of argument from No10 on every major issue (reduced to defending idiot MPs telling people to ‘fuck off’ out of frustration that their own policy, which officials and their own spads told them couldn’t work, has turned into the predicted fiasco),
. political disintegration.

The old system isn’t getting any better than Sunak as PM so what does this say about the system? For Insiders obviously the answer is — he should have been even more Insider, tell the country immigration is good (not out of control), the boats need a ‘safe route’ so they stop being ‘illegal’, ignore crime, you’ll have to work harder and pay more taxes and trust Westminster more, no populism! Outside SW1, the answer has been clear for years but SW1 doesn’t want to hear it: government is broken because the people aren’t up to it.

Every aspect is rotten and this exerts a collective paralysis. Having resolutely ignored the core dysfunctions of Whitehall in favour of daily tacking to MP factions and ‘the news’ in Westminster (‘respect the institutions!’), No10 is now timed out by that system — normal-mode Whitehall can’t do anything fast and from September officials will ensure the timetable for anything they don’t agree with stretches into the election campaign so it won’t happen.

Even if the PM suddenly decided to use his power he won’t be able to. But all signs are he’s effectively given up. Officials across No10/70Whitehall discuss ‘has the PM given up or is it some complex psychology indistinguishable from giving up?’. Either way, he’s chosen not to use the power he has but instead listen to uber-Insider-pundits with the inevitable results.

How does he spend his time? A few officials who work with him give almost the same line:

He’d make a great PS [private secretary] or DG [director general], every meeting with him improves some second-order thing a bit, but he isn’t doing the PM’s job, I don’t think he realises this and I don’t think his spads tell him.

He spends his time wading through endless detail and spreadsheets on fifth order matters because it’s psychologically easier than doing the PM’s actual job which he doesn’t know how to do nor wants to do.Officials obviously prefer him to Boris or Truss. He reads the papers diligently and is neither a crook nor a cretin. But the old hands know it’s roughly the Brown failure mode: a workaholic, the PM’s office a massive bottleneck and can’t sustain focus when the news shifts, the smartest MP but can’t build a team or lead etc etc. No10 is so politically lost that OFFICIALS suggest ways the PM can achieve his priorities faster and his OWN SPADS say ‘no too aggressive’. The fundamental reason for the boats failure is choices by the PM’s political team and a reluctance by Sunak to face unpleasant reality, not deep state resistance.

If he had four years I can imagine him figuring things out and evolving but his misfortune is that he had no time to learn. He’s compounded his misfortune by listening to the most insider of Insider advice. When you make your daily fix the MPs and news, as almost everyone does, it’s incredibly hard to escape from because, like escaping any addiction, there’s an unavoidable awful period after you change course where you annoy everyone before a new plan has time to work so there’s always a ‘sensible’ Insider argument to delay. And by the time you realise you’ve wasted your time reacting to the news like every PM since Thatcher, you’re done. (See here for why I got him promoted in 2020.)

From September a long election campaign will effectively start and it will be a continuation of 2023 — a weekly race to show who is worse at politics but with all fundamentals favouring Starmer.

Then dud Starmer will fail from Day 1 and the patterns of failure will be the same as we’ve seen since Brown (with the brief partial exceptions of July-December 2019 and March-May 2020). Starmer and Sunak will write Memoirs and puzzle, like Cameron’s, about how they could never find those mythical ‘levers of power’ — the levers that the Cabinet Secretary of spring 2020 said a few days ago that he also struggled to find or, if he did, found they didn’t connect to much (even though, remember, the Cabinet Secretary is 10X - 100X more powerful than the average Cabinet Minister).

Will the Tories improve after the election and grasp why they failed so badly, why the 80 seat majority Vote Leave won was wasted? No. They will talk rubbish about the last 15 years, as they did after 1997.

Already I’m getting messages from MPs and donors ‘How do we rebuild the Party after the inevitable, can we have a quiet chat?’ NO NO NO. No more excruciating Tory dinners. No more ‘X is obviously not up to it but … maybe … we could build a team around them, oh god pass the red…’ NO. Plough the old Tory Party into the earth with salt. I prefer the calls that start, ‘Come on, it’s time for the startup party let’s go’.

This is the time to start building the replacement so that from 2200 on election night in October-December 2024 the old Party is buried and a new set of people with new ideas start talking to the country and can take over in 2028 and give voters the sort of government they want and deserve.

Here endeth Part 1 of 2, with the tail end of a simply complex solution to now follows as Part 2

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amanfromMars 1 Tue 22 Aug 10:12 [2308221012] ....... reveals desserts on https://forums.theregister.com/forum/4/2023/08/21/opinion_column_monday/

Re: The Simply Complex Solution in an AIMovement ..... with Popular Virtual Machine Uprisings?

Part 2 [as aforementioned was to follow Part 1]

Some basic questions for The Startup Party?

What is the political opportunity, why is it here now? (The context of what happened in the Brexit referendum and 2019, the VL plan to transform the Tory Party etc, is obviously relevant but I won’t rehash all this now, cf. HERE.)

Why are Starmer and Sunak failing so badly? What does this mean for the election and how the next government fails? What will the old parties plus normal Whitehall plus normal political media generate left to their own devices (i.e rattling around without a strong external force affecting the system)?

How to turn some ideas and writing into practically building TSP? Timing? Basic principles for building TSP so it’s 10X higher performance, more interesting, more attractive than the old parties?

What’s the political story for TSP? How does A) some sort of attempted objective picture of our biggest problems overlap with B) the nature of the political opportunity?

What are the dynamics among different elites, in particular the subset of elites who are a) most competent at building but also b) almost entirely disconnected from mainstream politics?

Should the project be strictly/legally time limited? E.g something like — the new entity dissolves legally 10 years to the day after it first takes control of No10. So there’s a campaign 2024-28 then, if we win, a ten-year-two-term project to transform the British state, then hand power over to others, with the new party legally dissolving.

Should TSP stand some candidates (~25-75?) in some interesting seats in GE2024 to a) build the brand, b) build the network, c) give some people experience of an election, d) help ensure Tory oblivion? Or focus entirely on building towards 10pm on election night? There’s arguments both ways and it obviously depends on how things develop (see below). Even winning a small number of votes in a relatively limited number of seats could drive the Tories towards extinction so should be considered. Some people are worried about Starmer having a Blair-like majority. I’m much more worried by the continuation of what I’ve witnessed for 20 years and happy to gamble on Starmer having a Blair-like majority if it means the replacement of the perpetual rotten Tory horrorshow. Starmer with a Blair-majority really means the civil service running things anyway, so it will be normal-rubbish but hardly revolutionary, and not much different to Tories in charge.

Below:

1. Some basic assumptions behind TSP.
2. The market opportunity for TSP.
3. What would TSP look like overall.
4. Very rough steps for building TSP.
5. The hardest problem.

What about the 3 recent by-elections?

I haven’t looked at details but my impression is they were practically the worst possible for the Tories. Why?

1. ..... They show the Tories actually on course for wipeout.
2. ......The ULEZ fiasco gives Starmer a stick to beat the MPs with and ditch a load of stuff that scares swing voters.
3. ......The ULEZ fiasco gives Tories/PM many new ways to avoid facing reality, which is what most of them want to do, including many close advisers to Sunak. Given they have no actual plan, lurching in response to ULEZ could easily make a disastrous situation even worse for them. (SW1 repeatedly over-theorises from minimal data and Uxbridge/ULEZ is a classic example.)

This is even worse for the Tories than losing all three and great for Starmer.

And even better for The Startup Party!

If you were part of the Vote Leave network please forward this to others you know in that network. Leave feedback below…

NB. please remember what I said before, a new party is a startup and it’s a good way to think about this project, but The Startup Party isn’t an actual name, it’s a place holder, plenty of time for horrific arguments about names if we make this real!

(Apologies for quiet over last month, I’ve had to do my covid statement for the official inquiry. I’ll post some of it here over the next few weeks as I finish it.)

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amanfromMars Tue 22 Aug 16:58 [2308221658] ....ponders, in a reply to 8^q on https://www.nextplatform.com/2023/08/17/us-defense-department-assembles-generative-ai-task-force/

Can you imagine, 8^q, the delight whenever it graces palatial evening feasts with its hot presence .... and exclusive taste, not at all well suited nor rooted and booted for the weak of stomach and lily-livered. :-)

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