vivweb01blog

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 early last year....  Could it be that AI is already evolving - without us realising it ? Enjoy.... Travelodge and the ‘Escapist’ Robot – Is it cleverer than we think ? 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 writing… As you can imagine, much mir...

  The expression ‘The Best Thing Since Sliced Bread’ seems to be on everyone's lips in the UK media nowadays, and has even been adopted as the title of a documentary radio series on Radio 4.  Whenever I hear it used to describe yet another ‘wonder-product’, I have to ask myself where on earth it came from…. As it stands, the phrase implies that the process of slicing bread during its manufacture really does represent an improvement over ‘prior art’ (presumably this would have been un -sliced bread). The nearest I’ve come to an explanation for this somewhat inexplicable enthusiasm in the past for sliced bread as a ‘new and revolutionary' product is that housewives* in the 1950s were so fed up with having to slice their loaves themselves that they couldn’t wait for someone else to do it for them. To my mind, slicing bread as part of its manufacturing process has some notable disadvantages – let’s take a look at a few of them: 1)       1)  The slicing ...

  A new Covid sub-variant responsible for a surge of infections in India is giving rise to concerns that it could also lead to a significant rise in hospitalisations and deaths in the UK this autumn. Research indicates that the new variant, named Arcturus, could be significantly more infectious than previous sub-variants in the Omicron series, which are still predominant throughout Europe and the USA. Also known as Omicron sub-variant XBB.1.16, Arcturus was first identified in January and has been monitored by the World Health Organisation (WHO) since 22 March, which upgraded it to a “ variant of interest ” in mid-April. WHO reports suggest that Arcturus doesn’t so far appear to be producing symptoms any more severe than the prevalent Omicron variants.   It has only one additional mutation in the spike protein, but lab investigations so far have confirmed it does exhibit increased infectivity over the other Omicron B variants, as well as the potential for increased patho...

  I’ve often wondered what might have happened to the UK’s fortunes if David Cameron hadn’t decided to hold a referendum on EU membership in June 2016. Given his obvious desire to see us stay in EU, and the adverse public opinion on immigration and its effect on jobs in particular at the time, I'm sure I'm not alone in wondering why on earth he did…. The Background Although he had promised a referendum in the 2015 manifesto, to be held some time during the lifetime of the parliament, Cameron had plenty of wriggle room and could easily have ‘kept his powder dry’ until much later in the parliamentary term, which he had already fixed at a full 5 years. Although the precise reasons why he went so early in the parliament aren’t 100% clear, I suspect a large part of the impetus was his failure to gain significant concessions on free movement from Brussels by early 2016. A detailed examination of the issues thought to have led to his decision can be viewed here . Some commentato...

  ASDA recently joined the other majors and the discounters in reducing the price of milk and there has been much hype in the media about this.  However what has not yet been extensively reported is an important policy change on price reductions which, I suspect, they were hoping to introduce ‘by stealth’ while consumer focus was diverted elsewhere. This move will have a far greater effect on some of the prices we pay than a few pence off the price of a ‘pinta’ – read on to find out why… Some Background I recently revised an article which was first published last autumn on supermarket food. This was a time when the cost-of-living crisis was beginning to hit us all hard. The article was primarily aimed at highlighting food waste and what we could do to reduce it, thereby saving ourselves money and helping protect the environment. What emerged at the time was that many people were already finding it necessary to use food banks to feed their families adequately, and those ...

This blog was originally published in October 2022. Given the efforts currently in progress to secure a solution to the NI Protocol , I've updated it to reflect changes since then, in the hope that it may contribute to a practical solution for import compliance monitoring. ****** I’ve often wondered why Brussels are so concerned about goods intended for use in Northern Ireland straying into the Irish Republic.... After all, UK was a member of the EU until very recently, and the standards we apply to our goods within UK are still closely comparable with those applied in EU. For the most part, this is likely to remain so, despite our current national obsession with 'going it alone'. Tariffs for UK goods imported to EU are effectively 'zero-rated' under the current withdrawal agreement, so there is little financial incentive to 'smuggle' goods into Eire from NI. The proportion of goods flowing into NI from UK that is destined for Eire is also very small.Why t...

In short – it stifles incentive and enterprise..... Let me try to explain. The Covid pandemic, Brexit, and more recently the worldwide ‘cost of living crisis’ have undoubtedly put a huge strain on many western economies since the start of the decade, and ours in UK is no exception.  The many billions gobbled up by pandemic costs and the furlough scheme in particular were but one example of the financial challenges we faced, and these will still have to be paid for somehow.  Raising taxes was a logical response during the first years of the pandemic in an attempt to pay down some of our mounting debt. Maintenance of ultra-low interest rates and effectively ‘printing money’ via quantitative easing was another means adopted to try and soften the immediate economic blow in the late 2010s, but unfortunately had the effect of making the economy appear more robust than it actually was....and building up our debt mountain alarmingly. These policies, which were in any case out of...