Budget Looming

It's the budget on the 26th November but thankfully i am not going to be here because from the 19th November until the 4th December I will be bobbing around in the East Atlantic Ocean on a huge cruise ship while the industrial strength cleaner is employed to clean the fan of whatever Rachel Reeves has hit it with.
I do have some sympathy with the Labour predicament because the previous Conservative administration left her an awful legacy of huge Government debt, a massive blackhole of £20bn-£40bn worth of 'promises' they made and stuck in an envelope for them to pick up and services so ideologically run down over 14 years that it would be almost impossible to just get it back to where it was with one budget and one 5 year administration.
At the last budget, the Chancellor delivered an estimated £40bn of tax rises and financial experts seem to think that this time she is likely to need to raise a further £26bn to get the UK's public finances in order, and that is the crunch, it is not to raise tax to drastically improve the public finances, but just to bring them up to a standard where we have enough public and Civil Servants to ensure the country runs correctly and to fund the NHS correctly.    
Obviously she and Labour are going to get the blame for whatever she does, the Conservatives are already harping that they were correct when they said during the election campaign that Labour would put taxes up and they are right, but right because they are going to have to in order to pick up the dreadful slack that the Tories left them.
Unfortunately, Labour didn't do themselves any favours by immediately cutting the winter fuel allowance which opened them up to accusation so going after the pensioners and they were quite rightly forced to backtrack on that idea as well as climbing down on reducing benefits to avoid a revolt from their own back-benchers.   
Following a pre-Budget press conference last week where the Chancellor never really told us anything but refused to rule out breaking their manifesto pledge to not increase Income Tax, National Insurance or VAT which would realy pout her under the4 cosh if she did so i would like to think was just kite flying to see what the reaction would be if she did do it,  the wise money seems tro be on things such as a Wealth Tax, Mansion Tax, Exit Tax and even the merging of National Insurance and Income Tax which someone with a better calculator than me would raise approximately £33bn so i'm guessing that is where she will be looking.
Anyway, i will not be here and will be avidly avoiding it and will have no phone access until i am back on the 4th December, hopefully with a sun tan, a Cruise belly and a photo reel on my phone to bore people with into the New Year. Enjoy.

So You Are Going To Trump's America...

Where America once said 'Bring me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to break free', it has added...'oh and the passwords to all of your electronic devices so we can lock your sorry arses up' because stories abound about travellers to the USA having their devices searched.
Even white people turning up at Trump's American borders have been detained, one French Scientist was denied entry to the US recently after immigration officers at an airport searched his phone and found messages in which he had expressed criticism of the Trump administration's research policy and was accused of writings: 'That reflect hatred toward Trump and can be described as terrorism' and he was promptly sent back to France on the next plane.
The US Customs and Border Protection, blubbed in a statement: 'As part of their critical national security mission, CBP officers routinely determine admissibility of foreign nationals using longstanding US immigration law. If an individual has material discovered on their electronic media that raises flags during an inspection, it can result in further analysis' so if you want to go to the USA, a Security expert has given me details on how to prepare your machines first.

1 - Do not go to the USA, simply stay home and leave your phone the way it is, nice and easy and you won't risk ending up being bundled into the back of an ICE van.
2 - Decide before you go if you are going to refuse to hand over passwords to your devices (might look suspicious) or of you will let them look at your devices (which could be possibly worse).
3 - Whatever you decide encrypt your data then turn off face ID and fingerprint unlocking
4 - Delete all anti Trump social media and blog sites like this one
5 - Set up face social media accounts where you just share cat videos
6 - Get a burner phone instead

As a rule, if you are reading this or know me personally then you are probably pretty dubious in their eyes anyway, what with all us lefties being woke, vegan, Israel hating, tree hugging climate complainers so it's best to assume you will get taken aside and questioned anyway.
Obviously the drawback of just not taking your phone is that you can't then be added to any top-secret group chat about bombing middle eastern countries but if it keeps you out of an  El Salvadorian prison then that's a decent trade off.

Why Do We Love Christmas So Much?

The Christmas TV Adverts are starting to fill our screens and already i think i have found my favourite for the year and it comes from Supermarket Lidl who have come up with an absolute corker which pretty much sums up everything i love about Christmas.
We see a young girl who questions what makes Christmas special as she watches people sharing moments of kindness, rather than focusing on traditional Christmas indulgence or materialism and has an absolute killer of a pay off line.
She asks the question, 'Why do we love Christmas so much?' and wonders if it's because maybe everyone's a bit less grumpy and how it is not about 'me, me, me' but more about 'us' and when time isn't about money anymore, its just time and instead of thinking what we want, we wonder what someone else might like and decides that: 'I think we all love Christmas so much because we all want to make each other feel more loved'.
And then the line with which i wholeheartedly agree with....'I think everyday has a lot to learn from Christmas.'
Just brilliant and i hope whichever advertising bod came up with it has been given a few days off as reward to go Christmas shopping and a massive hamper, from Lidl of course. 

Welcome To Arsenal Mamdani

Zohran Mamdani is having a great November because not only has he just added 'Mayor of New York' to his CV, but his Football team also sit top of the Premier League.
Social Media posts from 2011 celebrating Robin Van Persie and having a moan about Granit Xhaka starting in the team have resurfaced with Mamdani spouting forth on all things Gunners so he isn't a Johnny come lately to the red side of North London and another Political Arsenal fan, Jeremy Corbyn, was pictured posing with a 'North London 4 Zohran' Arsenal football shirt.
Keir Starmer is also a fan of the mighty Gunners but before you start thinking supporting Arsenal is a left wing thing, Conservative Party members Priti Patel and James Cleverly are also declared supporters and they are as left wing as William Saliba.
Arsenal do have some very famous fans such as Mick Jagger, Lewis Hamilton, Rihanna, Jay-Z, and actors like Colin Firth, Idris Elba, and Danny DeVito as well as Roger Daltry, Kevin Costner, Robert Pattinson, David Schwimmer and it was rumoured that Queen Elizabeth and the Queen Mother were both big fans.
On the 'You sure you wouldn't prefer Tottenham?' list is Piers Morgan and Osama Bin Laden who was a regular at Highbury before he took his talents for hiding in caves to Afghanistan but that is the best thing about the Arsenal, we accept anyone as the transfer of Willian and Francis Jeffers showed.
As for Mamdani's politics, i keep hearing he is a Socialist so we can fully expect him to be sat with Starmer at the Emirates and helpfully passing on tips on how Socialism should work, and maybe some to Gabriel Martinelli, our very own exceptional left winger.

Remember Remember....

Remember, remember, the 5th of November, Gunpowder, treason and plot and in the UK we do remember because tonight is not a night to have a peaceful kip because it is going to be non stop fireworks whizzing around and old sofa's and cupboards set on fire in fields.  
The story of Guy Fawkes is a strange one, firstly he wasn't even called Guy but Guido and everybody hated the Catholics at that time because they seemed to think that they were always plotting something which in this case they were because Fawkes was caught red handed under the Houses of Parliament with 36 barrels of gunpowder ready to blow up King James I and it would have worked if one of his co-conspirators hadn't written to his Catholic MP to tell him to avoid the Commons that day and who told everyone and got Fawkes caught.  
Fawkes was arrested and sentenced to death but as he was being taken to the gallows, he made the worst escape attempt ever and fell off and broke his neck, killing himself in the process.
17th Century justice being what it was, the Government thought he isn't getting away with that and had his genitals removed and burnt before quartering him between four horses and gutted anyway.
Ever since then, November 5th was decreed the day where we celebrate the Kings safe escape from being launched through the roof of the Houses of Parliament but due to Health and Safety gone mad, we can no longer burn real Catholics and have to make do with burning effigies instead while going 'ooh', 'aah' and 'whee' at a few overpriced fireworks and watch a teddy bear in a Donald Trump mask make the ultimate sacrifice.

Dick, Bush And Colon

There wasn't much amusing about the Iraq War but the fact that it was bought to us courtesy of a Dick, a Bush and a Colon (Colin actually but for some reason Americans pronounce it like the part connected to the poop chute) was usually enough to bring a wry smile to the fact that all three lied their way to a massive war in the Middle East.
Colin Powell died a few years ago and while Donald Rumsfeld (who disappointingly didn't have a rude sounding name) has also turned up his toes and now the 84 year old Dicky Cheney has joined him because the last man you would want to go quail shooting with has confirmed the Billy Joel lyrics that only the good die young.
One of the main architects of the War on Iraq and Afghanistan, the last remaining of the quartet, George W Bush, said that: 'The death of Richard B. Cheney is a loss to the nation and a sorrow to his friends. Laura and I will remember Dick Cheney for the decent, honorable man that he was. History will remember him as among the finest' which makes me wonder if there was another Dick Cheney because the one i remember  wasn’t just a driving force in the wars as well as championing torture, but pushed both the Iraq WMD lie and the Saddam is mates with-Al-Qaeda falsehood which resulted in millions of Iraqis and thousands of American soldiers dying.
So with Dick and Colon gone as well as the miserably unfunnily named Donald Rumsfeld, at least Bush had the decency to keep his war mongering head down and not go swanning around like Tony Blair who, to be fair, had to avoid a few shoes and eggs thrown at him when he was last seen in public but there you have it, another completely horror of a person thankfully off the face of the Planet but while we can only hope that the war criminals of today (Netanyahu, Putin, Al Assad etc) don’t get to live quite so comfortably as Cheney did, his friend who's face he mistook for a quail and blasted him with a shotgun, might be relieved.

Follow The Money

Just as Labour pushes on with it's policies of reaching net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, the UK’s two main rightwing opposition parties are openly questioning was is long-settled climate science with Nigel Farages' Reform party saying they will cancel it if they are elected and the Conservative Party policy is now to suspend it until later.
As 71% of of the British Public support Net Zero and are concerned about the climate crisis, they do seem to be battling their own voters but with extreme weather really ramping up globally, how did we get here?
It was actually the Conservatives under David Cameron, Theresa May and Boris Johnson who did most to bring about Net Zero and Labour are just continuing the policies they put in place and as for Reform, deputy Richard Tice was absolutely taken to the cleaners by everyone when he said that there was no evidence that humans putting carbon dioxide in the atmosphere changes the climate so he is obviously on top of things and really shouldn't be listened to.
So why are the two right wing parties swimming against the tide to try and dismiss something we can literally see happening with our own eyes?
It might be noting that both are doing very well financially out of playing down Climate Change with both Reform and the Conservatives backed by prominent donors and supporters with a climate-denying outlook.
Kemi Badenoch and her family recently spent a week as guests of the donor Neil Record, who chairs Net Zero Watch, an offshoot of the UK’s main climate sceptic thinktank, the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) and handed Badenoch £10,000 for her campaign to become Tory leader and the Conservative Party has received millions of pounds in donations from individuals and entities such as the GWPF linked to high-pollution industries such as fossil fuels, aviation, and construction.
One of the biggest donors to Reform is the shipping magnate Terence Mordaunt, a trustee of the GWPF and now head of First Corporate Shipping who has given hundreds of thousands of pounds to Reform but analysis of donors listed in the Parliament donor book show that 92% of Reform's funding came from individuals or companies with polluting interests or those who question climate change.    
Follow the money and it is obvious why both parties are bizarrely ranting against Climate Change policies but as the majority worry about Climate Change, both parties are on a collision course with not just the British public but the laws of physics because Mother Nature won't care as she bakes, floods and throws more and more extreme weather at us.
Still, the growing Conservative and Reform bank balances will soften the blow for them i'm sure.

Internet Connected What??

I gave our son my old coffee machine a while ago but it started to make strange noises whilst doing its coffee thing so we went to the coffee machine shop to inquire about buying a new one and they all looked a bit flimsier and had a lot more buttons and some included WiFi and Bluetooth.
I asked the nice shop salesman why it would need WiFi and Bluetooth and he said it was so it could be updated over the internet which seemed a bit mad so we went for one which didn't come with an app but i later heard of something which was even madder, so much i thought it was a spoof at first, an internet connected smart mattress.
There was a Cybersecurity expert and he was talking about security concerns about the firmware in the mattress which allowed backdoor access and full arbitrary code execution capabilities making the mattress a disastrously unsafe device to keep on a home network...or something like that because i was stuck on...there's an internet connected mattress??? WTF???
Nope it was not a wind up, there really are people who pay £2,000 for the mattress and a subscription of £17 per month for  'bed control and bed monitoring and sleep-enhancing features' which include heat control, automatic firmness adjustments and other settings to optimize your sleep surface through the use of sleep tracking sensors.
Brilliantly, during the major Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage last week the people who actually shelled out for a internet connected mattress found that the lack of internet caused chaos in bedrooms across the UK because the mattress designers didn't think to include an off switch and were stuck at high temperatures and odd positions in the night because something they do if you don't pay the subscription fee, (or disconnect it from the internet) is turn to such an angle to be unusable.
So many questions but mostly, what genius pays £2000 for a mattress that monitors everything that you do in it and then holds you hostage and turns completely useless if you don't pay the subscription fee, or the internet blinks off?

Why This Post Isn't Written by AI

Have you ever read something online and wondered if a robot typed it? In a world full of chatbots, those doubt creeps in fast. People worry about fake stories flooding the web, making it hard to spot real voices. But here's the truth, this piece comes straight from my own human hands.
People everywhere buzz about spotting Ai these days. They poke at every word online, hunting for robot clues. But here I am, a flesh-and-blood writer, ready to lay out my case. This piece lists the wild ways I prove my humanity. It's all absurd, yet it hits close to home.
Unfortunately, Ai has got that good now. It can fool you into thinking it's human and I have been accused of being many things, one of which is an Ai Chatbot which bless my circuits, is so far from the truth but then i would say that if i was an Ai chatbot so i asked Ai how could i prove that i was an actual human and not an Artificial Intelligence?
It said that i should show you why, through quirks and choices only a person would make and readers will see why my posts feels alive whereas Ai sounds flat, like a textbook. That's because real creativity comes from inside, not code.
I use metaphors and subtext, choosing words that nod to shared struggles, feeling it because we have been there and while machines output facts, i weave tales that echo their own experiences.
For example, last week, i fought a form online. It timed out three times. I yelled at the screen but that is a shared scene played out by many people every day and as we Humans rant together over such nonsense, it builds a trust between us, an AI wouldn't understand the emotion of any of this.
You'll sense my human hand pushing down on the keyboard, words are not repeated in odd ways, the text dances freer, with personal flair and blending ideas smoother, veering naturally with a flow and not in a formulaic way as if using words picked from a word cloud.
I know that Ai can delibrelty include sneaky flaws and personal touches to help it blend in but I don't write flawless stuff. I slip up, pause, ramble, mix up long and short sentences which whispers 'real writer at work' and dashed out by a human brain but i guess an Ai aiming to convince you it's human would toss in those same rough edges on purpose to convince you it's human through tiny, forgivable slips.
Humans are opinionated and have a bias, Ai plays it safe and does'nt show a real opinion and keep it bland, people like me not so much which are a nod towards convincing the reader that i am a human. I adore punk music. It's all energy and shouted angry lyrics and I crank it up loud. That mess proves I'm real, no smart code picks music like that for enjoyment.
Irony and Sarcasm are very much human traits and i make them my stock in trade, so you may be thinking 'Oh joy, another Lucyp post about AI' but that just proves it is me and not an Ai, i twist my words, play on them and use slang and lie and exaggerate, humans err and are messy.
Spotless text hints at code but this is how Ai fools us but as Ai sharpens, we'll have to sharpen too. Keep questioning what you read. It keeps us real.
Trust me, I'm just like you.

Stuff

Something i always hear from the older generation is that: 'Things aren't built to last these days' and as they came from a period when they would patch things up to make them last a bit longer until they literally fell apart, they are more right then even they probably know.
There is a famous quote made by economist Victor Lebow who in 1955 said to fuel economic growth: 'We need things consumed, burned up, replaced and discarded at an ever-accelerating rate' which pretty much admits that  indeed things aren't built to last these days on purpose, so basically we are forced to buy that thing again, something called  planned obsolescence.
For occasions where stuff cannot break fast enough, there is also something called psychological obsolescence  in which products are designed to become obsolete in the mind of the consumer, even sooner than the components used to make them will fail so that would be things like most electrical items such as TV's radios, computers and phones which are constantly tweaked and improved, since 2007 there have 26 iPhone generations, each one worked or looked slightly better than the last with at least one new model released each year and we have all been guilty of buying a new phone despite having a perfectly good working phone in our possession.
Obviously the ever-accelerating rate of buying things and then disposing of them sooner creates immense pressure on natural resources and the trashing of the planet to extract them and at the other end of the line we have excessive waste hence the overflowing landfills and plastic polluted oceans and at some point we are going to run out of natural resources and/or run out of space to store all our discarded items.
Something called Overshoot days spells out that Humanity is using nature 1.7 times faster than our planet’s bio-capacity can regenerate and on 24th July 2025 was the date that humanity's resource consumption for the year exceeds Earth's capacity to regenerate it, meaning that by the end of this year we would have used 1.7 Earths worth of resources and this is expected to rise to 2 Earths by 2030.
We are running out of resources, basically using too much stuff and undermining the planet’s very ability for people to live on it and that is before we even consider the implications of how much we are polluting the air, land, water and drastically changing the climate.
I read something that said that the average British person is exposed to over 3,000 advertisements a day which seems a lot but Google states it is between 4,000 and 10,000 so the 3,000 could be an underestimate but regardless, the raison d'être of adverts is to try and persuade you that you need something you haven't got or need a new thing and it must work because in 2024, the total UK advertising spend was approximately £42.6 billion and that would be a lot of wasted money if it wasn't working.
Something will have to give at some point as we can't continue down this path as it is just not sustainable but it probably won't be in our lifetime, or even our children's.
The harsh truth, and i am just as guilty of this, is that we all want stuff and are easily manipulated by advertisers messages for stuff but as the planet's resources grow more depleted and our atmosphere gets more polluted and areas on the Planet become unlivable and the climate grows ever more angry and throws worse extreme weather at us, we will have to start cutting back and stop consuming, burning up, replacing and discarding our stuff because we won't have a choice, we will have to.