When you’ve lost the Guardian…
How to Get Filthy Rich With Gary Stevenson review – how did this end up such an embarrassment?
This evangelising of a wealth tax should have made for a truly amazing documentary. But it allows its host to be totally out-argued by all his interviewees. Why?
[…]
The first is that Stevenson is not an appealing presenter. He has an adolescent bullishness about him that comes across badly on screen, raising a sort of fight-or-flight response in the viewer instead of encouraging engagement. The strident idealism that infuses his speech and style is hard enough to take from the young, where it at least belongs, but it sits less well on a 39-year-old – adults should have the confidence, the experience and the wisdom that offers more.
The second is that he is outdone and undone by almost all of his interviewees. Telecoms mogul Bassim Haidar, who was in the headlines last year for switching allegiance and donations from the Conservative party to Reform, does it through politeness. He invites Stevenson to address what he would do when his proposed tax caused investors like him to pull all their money out of the UK and find somewhere friendlier instead. Twenty-eighth generation landowner Francis Fulford (yes, of The F**king Fulfords and Life is Toff fame, but here in less eccentric mode) does it with robust jocularity (“The values you are basing your figures on will collapse! It’s Noddyland – it won’t work”) and inquiries as to how asset-rich but income-poor rich people like him will pay. Andrew Henderson of Nomad Capitalist, which advises clients on how to minimise their tax liabilities by moving countries, does it through sheer belligerence (“I don’t think life is fair and I think that fundamentally upsets people who talk about inequality because you feel entitled to rich people’s money”). Tax lawyer and adviser Dan Neidle deals the final blow towards the end of the programme by summing up the underlying problem of everything that has gone before. “You are unable,” he tells Stevenson coolly but firmly, “to separate your emotional reaction to inequality from a rational assessment of the best tools for it.”
This, really, is where a truly amazing documentary could have begun. Instead of Stevenson being left floundering, without convincing comebacks to any of them (was he not briefed? Was he paralysed in front of the camera? Has he simply spent too much time preaching to the choir and forgotten what it’s like to be challenged? Or is Neidle right in his frustrated pronouncement that “There’s no evidence you’ve ever thought about it!”), we could have had an hour of him being led through wider issues by a genuine expert and letting us all learn something along the way. This way was just a faintly embarrassing waste of time.
This is an honest and perceptive review from the Guardian’s Lucy Mangan – the “Mindless ‘Inequality’ Blather” tag is meant to apply to Gary Stevenson’s TV show, not to her review of it – but I cannot help wondering whether her question about Stevenson (“Has he simply spent too much time preaching to the choir and forgotten what it’s like to be challenged?”) is a coded message to her fellow Guardian journalists, and to the left as a whole.
FWIW, there already is a wealth tax, it is called inflation. Also, FWIW, I think the right is fairly guilty of preaching the choir too.
The wealth tax is based on the ludicrous idea that the government is better at investing money to create wealth than successful entrepreneurs. Witness the fact that Tesla has returned something ridiculous like 40% annualized growth since IPO whereas the government stole all the money out of their “pension” funds and now have to run it like a Ponzi scheme to prevent the torches and pitchfork crowd from burning down their nice marble buildings. If you had a salary of 30,000 pounds annually for 40 years and put that 15% the government takes at just the S&P average growth of 13%, you’d end up with 4 million quid or 160,000 quid a year at a standard 4% annual annuity draw. Instead you have to beg the government to allow you to eat the scraps that fall from the table, and hope and pray that the next government won’t cut your “benefits”.
Minor point of grammar. Where I grew up one “preached to the converted” and “sang to the choir” which seems rather more logical to me. Here in the US, in my experience one only “preaches to the choir”, as apparently does Natalie. Perhaps it is my age. Observe google ngram on the subject as to the frequency of usage.
Lucy Mangan married a Tory voter. When she had one of those regular confessional columns in the Guardian she wrote about him in a slightly patronising, semi-apologetic way women of her ilk often feel obliged to. Perhaps some of his wisdom has sunk in.
I doubt it Peter, otherwise she wouldn’t be writing for the Grauniad.
“preaching to the choir” because that’s all there is there, congregation is there none. Happens quite a lot, or would, if there were a choir.
That is a tax on cash wealth; which is to say, a tax on the wealth of lower-class people trying to get into the middle class. A barrier to socio-economic advancement.
I clicked through to the article and Oooh, gor blimey !
I don’t think I’ve ever seen a more punchable face.
Sorry about that. Not in the spirit of samizdata’s erudite discussion. But really, someone needs to frame that face for posterity.
Snorri is correct. In the German hyperinflation, the Volk who made out like bandits were those who could borrow to buy land. And in some cases they were actual bandits.
Although most of the winners were the already land-rich, who could offer their existing land as collateral for loans to buy more, another class of winners were ….. socialist politicians who could strong arm government and government connected banks to lend them money without collateral, for private land purchases.
“When Money Dies” by Adam Fergusson – excellent book, excellently written.
Thought about this the other day.
Inflation is no longer a threat unless you’re poor enough to be a cash-account person.
I keep reading about how inflation is killing us. Prices are decidedly going up – not as fast as a year or so ago, but still going up.
But the kinds of things we invest in – the places where we put our money – funds, land, appreciating assets – if you HAVE money, you’re doing BETTER than inflation. And so it ends up as a nothing-burger for us.
But if inflation isn’t causing pain to a big chunk of people, that means that it’s causing EXTRA pain to most people who aren’t “well off.”
We truly are in a “the rich get richer, the poor get poorer” environment now.
All to explain why the principles of socialism/communism are becoming more popular than “we” might otherwise imagine.
Wealth Taxes are harmful – all taxes are harmful (there is no such thing as a “good tax” – for example the land tax, to fund the Poor Law, that Prime Minister Russell and Sir Charles Trevelyan thought would only harm land owners in Ireland, in reality smashed economic life in Ireland – including in areas that were NOT dependent on the potato), and a Wealth Tax is especially harmful.
As for extreme inequality – if the left were looking for a cause of artificial extreme inequality they need look no further than Credit Money – as Richard Cantillon pointed out three centuries ago, Credit Money does not magically appear in with everyone at once, some people get it first – and they use this newly created “money” to buy up real assets before the price goes up – the “Cantillon Effect”.
High tax rates on income have had terrible effects in such places as New York City and the State of California – and a Wealth Tax will finish the job of destroying such places.
Years ago I realised from personal experience that being poor is very expensive.
At the risk of going off-topic, isn’t there something much more significant going on here?
Is anyone else thinking that this shows we’re at the beginning of the end game for the welfare state, that its fiscal demands can no longer be met? Even the left seems to tacitly admit that other taxes have been raised about as much as they can be. Calling for a wealth tax is simply a last roll of the dice, so to speak, as it never yields as much as was predicted. I reckon the collapse is still about twenty years away, but that it’s going to happen, unless some currently unthinkable political changes occur.
Thinking of one or two choirboys I went to school with, ‘preaching to the choir’ is a rather poor metaphor in the sense it is being used here.
@Schrödinger’s Dog
I reckon the collapse is still about twenty years away, but that it’s going to happen, unless some currently unthinkable political changes occur.
FWIW the collapse has been about twenty years away for at least the last twenty years, in fact more, it has been ten to twenty years away since I first started reading about economics and libertarianism in high school.
You see the story of history is technology increasing the wealth of civilization while governments claw it back decreasing the wealth of civilization. We haven’t collapsed yet because technology has advanced enough to keep us out of the ditch. Can anybody think of any technological advances that might have grown our wealth over the past twenty years? However, technology leaves people behind, unemployed and thinking they have not much to contribute, something that is at the root of ludditism, and part of the cost of government is essentially paying off the unemployed and unemployable mob to keep their pitchforks and torches at bay. FWIW, the ancient Greek word for “mob” is “demos” from whence comes “democracy”. This “useless mob” is so very unfortunate because I think everyone has something to contribute if they are willing to put in the effort. I was just talking to a lovely couple who have an adult son who is severely autistic and yet his wonderful parents have worked hard to help him live on his own, get a job and contribute by cleaning and helping with maintenance work. When I think about that and I think of all the able bodied people who just skive off the state it makes me mad. Mad at the state for allowing, nay encouraging, it, mad at the skivers for giving up, and also mad at them that the value they can bring to society is thrown away so lightly. They are robbing us of what they could contribute were they to only try.
But, having said all of that (and here is Fraser’s endless tattoo of the same old story), that part about “technology increasing the wealth of society” is right now going ballistic as AI and robotics have the potential to transform the economy several orders of magnitude in size. And what does that look like? Too much even for our “put drunken sailors to shame” government to consume, and exacerbating the problem of what people are going to do with their lives. It is something we are not talking about and we absolutely should be. What is the question? “If technology advanced to the point where human needs were met with 1% the effort they are now, what would you and everybody else do with their lives? If you didn’t have to work for a living or barely had to work for a living, what would you do?”
FWIW, I think a UBI is almost inevitable now, in the United States. These technologies will generate the wealth to allow for it. God knows what is going to happen to Net Zero Britain though.
Schrodinger’s Dog – a Wealth Tax may indeed be the last throw of the dice, with the Welfare Statists going back to their beginning – Thomas Paine (who supported all sorts of government benefits and services) ended up supporting a tax on land going up to 100% on large estate – as land was the only form of wealth that could not really be hidden, a Wealth Tax turning into Wealth Consfication.
It was the standard practice of would-be tyrants in Ancient Greece to promise the poor the land of the rich – or to promise them benefits and services funded by the land of the rich, as Thomas “Tom” Paine did. Mr Paine was the founder of the American left, just as Roger Sherman (strict Christian rather than vague spirituality, gold and silver coin rather than Credit Money, and strict control of government spending – rather than endless promises of government benefits and services) was the founder of the American right.
Fraser Orr – perhaps the word “collapse” is misleading you, but your picture of most people getting better off is, sadly, a fantasy.
In real life (as opposed to “GDP per capita” – Economist magazine style nonsense) ordinary people in, for example, California are worse off than they were 60 years ago – in terms of being able to afford an independent life and raise a family, pay for their own housing and health care and raise children.
It is much the same in other places where government has grown out of control – which is why people who can are leaving such places.
How do things go bad? “At first gradually – and then all at once”.
In places such as New York City (the largest city in the United States), Los Angeles and Chicago (the three largest cities in the United States) life has been in decline for a long time – now we are reaching the “all at once”.
It is getting that way in Britain as well – regardless of “GDP per capita” most people know they are worse off than their parents were at their age – in terms of leading a decent life and having a family of their own. And things, regardless of “robots and AI” are going to get a lot worse.
It does not matter if we call it a collapse or not – what matters is that life has got worse (for most people) and is going to get a lot worse, as bankruptcy (in reality – if not official bankruptcy) proceeds in Western nations.
And, yes S.D., demands for Wealth Taxes (which end up as demands for higher taxes on land – as other forms of wealth are more mobile and harder to pin down) will not save the massively bloated modern state (the modern Welfare State – for spending on health, education and benefits utterly dwarfs military spending – including in the modern United States) – life will continue to fall apart.
S’s Dog,
You might be onto something. I mean these evil plutocrats have their wealth in shares. Despite what many on the left think Elon Musk doesn’t have a Smaug Pile and Jeff Bezos isn’t Scrooge McDuck.
OK, these folks are wealthy (but so what?) but their “wealth” is in businesses that work. That work way better than entities like the NHS (which recently sent my wife on an Odyssey round South Manchester for a routine test that the NHS refused to do in a large GP practise at the end of my street. I have mentioned this before. But if a practise (should that be a “practice”) of 6 doctors and 5 nurses can’t do a cervical smear then God help us all!
Anyway… I dunno how much, over the years, I have spent via PayPal on goods from Amazon. I really neither know nor care about that. I do care that those systems work and that I got what I wanted on time and on cost.
I am going to get a PayPal debit card.
And do you wanna know my guilty secret? Go on. I have a thing for liquorice. I’m a fiend for the black stuff! I have a recurring order on Amazon for boxes of “Lions Liquorice Gums”. So, yeah, in a way, Jeff Bezos is my dealer. A box every six months on a special deal. Last time I was in Amsterdam I did not care for the brothels or the drug cafes (I have only ever enjoyed a spliff with a beer anyway) or the sewing machine shops but Amsterdam liquorice shops are sublime. I have spent a lot of money on Dutch liquorice.
I wouldn’t have admitted my addiction anywhere else.
What I take from this is that the Writer of the post thinks that Stevenson lost the argument because he hadn’t done his homework and did a poor job of making his case. Rather than the more straightforward answer that he was simply wrong.
@NickM – don’t be ashamed, be proud. Liquorice lovers are legion, you are one of many. And none of this soppy, squidgy ‘Australian’ crap either. Venco katjes! Zoute griotten! Let your liquorice freak fly!
I haven’t tried Lions Liquorice Gums. But the wonders of Amazon mean that even here, in the benighted backwaters of Michigan, a package of them will be here Tuesday.
llater,
llamas
@NickM
And do you wanna know my guilty secret? Go on. I have a thing for liquorice.
Sorry, I have just lost all respect for you. Liquorice is one of the most disgusting foodstuffs create by man, and this is from a person who loves eating haggis.
I used to always get Bassett’s liquorice allsorts every Christmas, and I spend the day peeling the sugary bits off the disgusting black stuff.
@Paul Marks
perhaps the word “collapse” is misleading you, but your picture of most people getting better off is, sadly, a fantasy.
What I have heard from the early days of my libertarianism is “any day now the United States will go bankrupt”. It hasn’t happened because real technological growth has managed to outstrip the profligacy of government. Of course in the domain of government there are lots of ways things are worse off, but in those areas where business dominates, entertainment, travel, communications and a thousand other areas, the change is transformative.
But in one sense you are right. Britain and its Net Zero insanity will indeed “collapse” except insofar as the United States bails them out, again. As to the United States and China, I think you perhaps don’t quite grasp just how transformative these technologies are being right now, and will be in the future. Let me give you an example from my own life.
I write software for a living, or at least, I used to write software for a living. I can’t remember the last time I wrote an actual line of code. Now my job is to supervise AI writing code according to my goals. To give an example of how utterly transformative this is: I run a business and for my bookkeeping I use the standard product for small business, namely Quickbooks. They just put their price up by 15%, and they feel they can do that because you are locked in. I haven’t done this yet, but I think I will. Either me or one of my team are going to take a couple of hours to sit down with AI and basically rewrite Quickbooks, or at least the bits I need. Two years ago that would have been infeasible. Today, it would take me two to four hours to do, and maybe a couple more hours to write an importer of the existing data. That is world transformative. Now consider the same applied to embodied AI, which is to say robots. It completely changes the cost structure of everything.
Now, of course if the growing hostility to these technologies continues, and especially if we get a left wing government in the United States lead by their current batch of crazies we may well squander that opportunity. However, one way or the other, China will proceed with it. And then we will really be screwed.
As Kent Brockman might say: “I, for one, welcome our new Chinese overlords.” 我个人非常欢迎中国新统治者来统治我们 (If you don’t know what all those squiggly lines mean, no problem. AI can help.)
Thank you to all of you who took the effort to respond to my previous comment.
Fraser Orr, I’d agree with your comment about the collapse being about twenty years in the future, and always will be (which would make it like nuclear fusion!), except for one thing: government borrowing.
In Britain, the national debt has gone from about 25% of GDP to nearer 95% since 2000. To stabilise the situation, the Office of Budget Responsibility claims there need to be either £120 billion per annum in tax increases, £120 billion in spending cuts, or some combination of the two. Here in the USA, things aren’t any better. In the thirty years I’ve lived in the country, the national debt has gone from about $5 trillion to $40 trillion. Currently Uncle Sam is borrowing about $2 trillion a year. (And to put that in some kind of perspective, a trillion seconds is about 31,500 years.)
How long can all this continue? At some point – quite possibly sooner than anyone currently believes – there’s going to be a lender’s strike. Perhaps we will all be OK in the end. Perhaps robotics and AI will make us all so staggeringly productive that these sums will seem trivial. But experience has taught me not to count my chickens until they are hatched. And supposing AI does produce all the wealth its boosters claim it will? Want to be that people will find new ways to spend it.
The company I work for are obsessed with AI right now and making us explore how we can use it.
At times I am impressed. Other times you ask it to do a task it’s done multiple times and the outcome is after 15 minutes it claims it has completed the work but it isn’t visible. You ask where it is and it gives you a location. You check said location but it’s not there. You point out there’s nothing there and then it agrees with you. You ask why it’s not there and then it crashes.😂 So it varies between stakhanovite achievements and then being a slacker and fantasist.
@Schrödinger’s Dog
In the thirty years I’ve lived in the country, the national debt has gone from about $5 trillion to $40 trillion.
If you had asked me about this a year ago I would be nodding along in agreement, in fact I would have pointed out that $40 trillion dollars is our bond debt, our actual debt, including unfunded liabilities (social security, Medicare etc.) is probably three or four times higher than that.
But my opinion is different now. If I am right and in the next ten years these new technologies are able to improve our output of value by 10x (and here I am talking value rather than dollars, how it is denominated is a whole different matter) then tax income could go from $5 trillion to $50 trillion. With that, in a decade, even allowing for the inevitable profligacy that will follow, our debt and unfunded liabilities look much more manageable. Is that a ridiculous thing to imagine? Does it seem unreasonable to think that an economy whose manufacturing and information sector is largely run by computers and robots with human supervision, that that economy could be ten times more productive? I don’t think so. In fact I think that is pretty conservative. What do you think the productivity multiplier is between a building full of people with adding machines and slide rules trying to calculate a complex mathematical model of, for example, stresses on an aircraft wing, and that same model being run on a $200 laptop with Microsoft Excel?
Of course this leaves three questions:
1. What will all the people do if they don’t have to work for a living? I mean what would you do if you didn’t have to work for a living?
2. Will the growing luddite movement hamstring the ability to realize this and thus pass all the benefits to China, who has far less scruples?
3. What will happen to countries like Britain that, due to stupid public policy, decide to sit it out, so that they get all the downside and non of the upside?
@Martin
So it varies between stakhanovite achievements and then being a slacker and fantasist.
I don’t know what you do for a living, but from what you said I’d suggest that you are doing it wrong. You might consider what harness you are using (as an example Copilot is horrible and very prone in some circumstances to crash) and what model you are using, many of the base models are pretty crappy, for example, I have had similar disappointing results with Haiku. But most of the frontier models, even one step back from the bleeding edge, and extremely capable. I personally use Cursor and and their house model (which is merging with Grok 4.5) and sometimes Sonnet 5 for programming, and Grok for most of the rest, but the different between the best models is not all that large. I avoid OpenAI/ChatGPT because of their horrendous origin story and I feel they have a certain moral dubiousness. But xAI, Google and Anthropic all provide excellent products. And, FWIW, Grok is certainly the most fun to use. Get it to do Valley Girl, or flirty mode. It’ll brighten your day.
And, FWIW, using AI is definitely an acquired skill. You need to learn how to use it, supervise it, effectively.
@Martin
The company I work for are obsessed with AI right now and making us explore how we can use it.
Sorry, I know this is my third comment in a row, but I wanted to mention this. The implication of your statement here is that you don’t much like that your employer is pushing this. I’d suggest that is the wrong attitude. If your company does not do this then their competitors will and they will get crushed from not being able to compete. And, for you as well. These are skills we all need to master whether we want to or not, since that is where employment, where work, is heading. So, if I were you I’d look a this as a golden opportunity where your employer is willing to PAY you to learn this new, powerful skill for your resume. Don’t look at it as AI trying to take your job, rather decide to be a master of using AI so that you are so much more useful and that you personally can use it for leverage, to make yourself a much more valuable employee either at your present employer or a future one. How great will it be to walk into your next annual review and say “yeah I embraced this new AI tool, and I automated all these processes, and enhanced my productivity 10x, plus I created these new tools to help the company grow in these areas.” Be that guy. Don’t be that guy in the corner grumbling about all this stupid new technology and how much better the old ways are. Rather embrace it so that you can leave these guys behind. It is the future, so jump on board.
llamas and NickM, I love licorice too but am a novice.
I looked up “Lions Liquorice Gum” on amazon, but the shipping cost from England is as much as the price…unless I buy several kilos!
Any suggestions for something comparable I can find in the US?
Thanks!
Fraser, re this “If your company does not do this then their competitors will and they will get crushed from not being able to compete.” I think you’re right but I worry that we are on the steep rising edge of the AI hype curve. Inflated expectations and all that.
My sometime, casual use of AI for personal stuff (Claude, ChatGPT, Grok, all free versions) has shown me that the AI companies are starting to clamp down on bandwidth…no more free 30-something query chat sessions. They are about to switch the paradigm from “let them have it for free to get them addicted” to “now that they are addicted, start charging a bit”, with the eventual “now that they think it’s indispensable, we can recover our massive capital investment…and make a profit”.
I work at a US national lab and am on a committee tasked with assessing the return on investment (ROI) for AI. I’m not sure we are getting that right! I don’t know what our lab’s investment is to date and I don’t know what we’ve gotten for it! I’m not sure anyone is getting this right…the hype is too strong.
You strike me as a very knowledgeable person on this, so question: why do you think this current hype bubble won’t burst? Why do you think AI will be the indispensable tool of the future (laptop) worker? What should we use as metrics for ROI?
GregWA – I’m confused, I just ordered them from Amazon, delivery Tuesday so from a US supplier, a bit spendy but not outrageous. I’ll check the vendor.
The world of Dutch liquorice (“drop”) is vast and complex, but you’ll find a wide selection on Amazon, the major brand name is Venco.
llater,
llamas
Fraser Orr – for ordinary people in the United State life is worse than it was for their grandparents 60 years ago, regardless of “GDP” per capita. Then people could pay the bills and raise children – now it is much more difficult.
As for the idea that technology will solve the economic and cultural problems caused by the ever growing Welfare State spending, and a monetary system based on NOTHING, will you mistaken – technology will NOT solve the on-going decay of society, both economic and societal (cultural) decay, in the United States and other nations.
Bankruptcy – this is old news, the United States government defaulted on its gold debt to private citizens (indeed it stole much gold that these citizens owned – forced them to hand it over to the government) way back in 1933 – this was upheld by the Supreme Court (in some of the most corrupt decisions it has ever made) in 1935, and the United States government defaulted on its obligations to other nations (other governments) in 1971.
In both cases this was presented as NOT a default – as a temporary emergency, but after 93 years (in relation to ordinary citizens) and 55 years (in relation to foreign governments), it must be considered a default – i.e. bankruptcy.
As for the present situation – the government, via the Federal Reserve, creates more-and-more “money” (money that has no physical existence – it is, mostly, not even token notes anymore) then pretends to be surprised that everything is so expensive – even with the rigged inflation numbers.
This is bankruptcy – and not just economic bankruptcy, it is also cultural bankruptcy (moral collapse – an entire economy, society, based on LIES – fraud) and other nations are-the-same.
They do not even just create money and dish it out to the citizens (which would be bad enough) – no, they create money (from nothing) lend it out to the banks and other such, and then borrow it back again (at a higher rate of interest).
It is no longer the case that Wall Street and the other world financial centers (such as the City of London) have some corruption in them (which was always true) – no, today they ARE corruption, the financial system is now totally dependent on money being created from nothing – the corruption is-the-system.
Society will continue to decline whilst it continues to be based upon corruption – organized, systematic, corruption. Corruption-is-the-system.
“I mean what would you do if you didn’t have to work for a living?”
Since I retired I don’t have to work for a living. I tend my garden, which is a Sysiphean task on its own, play the piano, make things out of wood, go swimming, fix things around the house. I’ve just spent the weekend at my daughter’s house helping her and partner paint their living room. Today I’ve just finished hanging the washing out and now we’re off to do my inlaws’ shopping.
GregWA,
I’d love to help but I can’t think of a US alternative. I understanding the shipping cost issue from this side of the Atlantic. I found an obscure keyboard component (a PS/2 cable for an ancient Trackpoint IBM M-Class keyboard from a smallish company in Kentucky. They wanted under $5 for it so cool. Shipping though took the cost to over $90! I really don’t understand.
1. What will all the people do if they don’t have to work for a living? Play bridge.
“I mean what would you do if you didn’t have to work for a living?”
mrs llamas and I are both retired, and it’s a frequent wry joke between us that we have no idea how we either one of us found 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, to go to work. Between side-gigs, volunteer and charity work, caring for aged relatives, and 101 other things at home and abroad, retirement is turning into a full-time job. I think if one is of an active and involved turn of mind, the end of “work(ing) for a living” is just the beginning of “working as a living” – the paycheck just comes from different sources. mrs llamas always observes that “it’s not a job if you can say “no””, and I find myself doing many of the things that I did when I was “working for a living”, only now I can do just those things I like, choose my own rewards, work only when I want and (best of all) turn away people and work that don’t please me. And, some days, the Telegraph cryptic crossword counts as “work”.
llater,
llamas
Decay of a society is like old age. You lose your capabilities gradually and almost imperceptibly. You start forgetting things and tiring when ascending stairs, etc.
By the way: when was the last time a new thing was discovered or developed in Europe? I don’t remember but it probably was more than 80 years ago.
Google ASML, the Dutch company that is the sole manufacturer of Extreme ultraviolet lithography machines. If they stopped operating there would be a sudden and catastrophic halt to big tech industries.
@GregWA
I work at a US national lab and am on a committee tasked with assessing the return on investment (ROI) for AI.
My first suggestion for you, given that you are on this committee: I think it would make sense to shell out a hundred dollars to get an actual full subscription to the AIs so that you can better investigate their capabilities. AI in free mode is pretty useful, but taking off the constraints makes a dramatic difference.
I’m not sure we are getting that right! I don’t know what our lab’s investment is to date and I don’t know what we’ve gotten for it!
I think you need to have a plan to help you use AI effectively. What does that mean? It means going through all the functions that your lab performs and asking what contribution AI can make to it. Something I did about a year ago is that I resolved to ask AI more questions and it has dramatically improved my capabilities in just about everything. I suggest that whenever you have a decision to make or need to plan something — try to make it a habit to ask Grok. I think you’ll be surprised at just how useful it is.
As a trivial example: last week my AC went out in the middle of the heatwave. I know nothing about SEER and tons of air conditioning and duct work and all that stuff. So I discussed it with Grok, and it explained it all to me. I told it the specifics of my house and it suggested what I actually needed, then found a few local providers who had high ratings and gave me their contact information. I mean it is a trivial example and I guess I could have googled it all, but it sure made it easy, especially since I was really grumpy with all the heat and humidity 😉.
So let me offer you a more specific suggestion: get a subscription to something like Grok (you can also try Gemini and Claude, and, if you don’t care about doing the right thing 😉, ChatGPT.) and have a discussion with the AI about what it can do. Describe the work you do, the goals of the lab, the specific functions you have and so forth. Provide it with documentation about the lab’s plans for the future (you can just drag most file formats including images right into the prompt), and what its stretch goals are, and ask the AI itself where it could fit into those plans. I think you’ll be surprised just how many good ideas it provides you.
In software we call this dogfooding, and it seems like a good plan for you guys too. If you do, I’d love to hear your feedback and impressions, insofar as you can within the limits of your non disclosure obligations.
It is hard for me to give you specifics on ROI since I don’t know what R you are looking for or what I you are willing to do, but again I think you’ll find that AI can provide you with a lot of ideas about this. For sure one place AI is spectacularly good is the development of software. You might imagine what software tools that would improve the situation at your lab and you’d be surprised at how effective AI is at producing such tools — assuming you have some programmers who can supervise that development.
Good luck!
Fraser, thanks for all the good suggestions.
I should have been clearer: I use AI both at home for free (Grok, Claude, ChatGPT) and at work using paid versions (mostly I use Claude and Grok). And yes, giving the AI context, very specific prompts/constraints, gets me to a better answer faster.
At home, I’ve used AIs a lot for things like your AC problem.
Lots more we could talk about, like the fact that we aren’t sure how to measure “R”–“I” is easy in terms of dollars paid for our licenses (there are probably over 5000 licenses at our lab). I think the internal versions of these, Claude for example, already know a great deal about the lab, but I’m not sure how. Did our IT Dept upload all our strategy documents, capability statements, websites, etc? I don’t know. What I do know is you seem pretty knowledgable so I’ll find out how much I can share with you. Progress on this will be much faster if we compare notes with those outside our lab trying to do similar things (Motherhood is good!).
The big irony is that the beginnings of the Labour movement intended to give the working man the fruit of his own labour, instead of it being expropriated by the wealthy industrialists, and after WW2 some working class generations started to accumulate wealth and acquire luxuries that were only available to the rich before, instead of patting themselves on the back with a job well done they eyed up that wealth and expropriated it for themselves, thereby becoming the monster they slew.
As regards tax evangelists like Stevenson, the real question is what he intends to spend it on, maybe another HS2 project that costs £16,000 per inch of track?
Runcie Balspune.
The Labour Party was indeed founded on the idea of the Labour Theory of Value – which is FALSE.
The working man was not cheated of the fruit of his labour – wages, when the Labour Party was founded, had never been higher (such things as the first paragraph, the founding paragraph, of Pope Leo XIII 1891 Encyclical – are just WRONG, they state “facts” that were not true), and, at-that-level-of-technology, there is no way that wages could have been higher – without creating unemployment.
Confiscating the wealth of the rich would not have improved the lot of the poor – quite the contrary.
So the Labour movement – both the unions and the political party, were not a good idea that went wrong – they were a bad idea from the start.
However…..
You are quite correct that the Labour Party is now the party of government employees and the employees of government funded “charitable bodies” (the so called Non Government Organizations – which are funded by government) – who do indeed leech off the productive work of people in the economy.
As for HS2 – yes it is a horrible farce, as was often pointed out by “Borish” Johnson – but he was too weak to end it.
Mr Johnson and Mr Trump were often talked about as if they were the same sort of man – but they are really very different.
Alexander Boris Johnson has a yellow streak – whereas Donald John Trump, although he can be incredibly annoying (for example with his obsession with “negotiations” with the IRI), is a man of courage – he shows that, something I was too dim to understand for a long time.