vivweb01

‘Middle England’ is worried…and so it should be.... In his new role as our PM, Burnham has, in his own words, ‘hit the ground running’ in his project to 'Manchesterise' Britain (or at least the non-devolved English part of it). He is looking hard for new revenue-generating targets to fund his many and varied 'projects' without 'spooking the markets' with a lot of extra borrowing.   His left-leaning socialist ideology naturally points him towards across-the-board redistribution of the UK's wealth. Since most of the UK’s private money and assets are held by so-called 'Middle England', Burham sees this large, disparate and normally compliant group of electors (particularly those over 50), as a potential soft-touch....and they are therefore firmly in his sights as a potential cash-cow. One of the problems our new PM faces, however, is that he is severely constrained, as was his illustrious predecessor,   by the wording of Labour’s 2024 manifesto. Sta...

In view of the current reflections on AI and what its consequences are likely to be, I couldn't resist revisiting an early blog I'd written on the subject in 2022....  Could it be that AI has been evolving for some time - without us actually realising it ? Enjoy.... --------------------- Travelodge and the ‘Escapist’ Robot – was it cleverer than we thought ? An entertaining news story took my eye last week and brightened things up somewhat amidst the anticyclonic gloom of late January in UK…. Apparently a cleaning robot being used by the Travelodge hotel in Cambridge went AWOL, and was later found under a hedge nearby. ( https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-cambridgeshire-60084347 ). Having checked my calendar to ensure I hadn’t managed to hibernate without realising it,   thus missing February and March this year and landing on 1st April, I then verified that other news outlets were also reporting the story. After reading a couple of them, I wiped my eyes and started w...

  Followers of the now somewhat beleaguered hotel chain may have noted an item in the news recently regarding several instances of occupied room keys being issued in error to unauthorised persons. Rumours abound as to why this might have happened, citing lax hotel security policy, poor staff training, etc. However, an interesting alternative explanation surfaced recently on social media, based on the possibility that it wasn’t actually a mistake after all…. The theory advanced is that in attempt to ‘spice up’ their hotel offering, Travelodge’s Marketing Development Department have come up with a ‘blind date’ type scheme whereby rooms occupied by single travellers are selected at random and a surprise additional occupant, also selected at random, is issued with a second pass key. Presumably neither 'victim' is aware of what the hotel has in store for them.... This is apparently designed to ‘make life more interesting’ for the unwitting participants and encourage lonely...