The Braindump Blog

Contra the New Yorker, Christopher Snowdon gives us some reasons to believe that the case isn’t as absurd as it seemed to be at first sight.

Of course as a total outsider there’s no way for me to know who’s right, who’s telling the wholer truth. But perhaps the recent verdict is less obviously wrong than I’d have thought based only on the New Yorker article.

The recent UK election, with its Labour landside, brought a new record for Britain’s youngest serving MP. Sam Carling, a new MP for Labour in North West Cambridgeshire, is 22 years old. This makes him the first MP to be born in the 21st century. This comes after he scraped victory by just 39 votes against a Conservative MP who had held the seat for nearly 20 years and had a majority of 25,983 in the last general election. Impressive stuff.

As wild as that seems when I think back to my own experience of being 22 - which was definitely not compatible with running any part of anything, let alone the country - I’m excited to see how he goes. After all, I usually find that young people make voting decisions I like better.

At the other end of the age spectrum, Sir Roger Gale, from the Conservative party in the constituency of Herne Bay and Sandwich, is currently the oldest MP. He was elected in 1983 - 19 years before Carling was born - and is currently 80 years old.

The election is over. The UK has a new government, following a landslide victory by Labour.

The results in terms of seats, as per the BBC:

There’s a lot going on under the surface of these numbers, not all of which is reassuring. For one, the “landslide” is a lot more landslidey in terms of seats than votes. But we can surely take a couple of days to celebrate the chance, however small, that we have a new set of people governing us who maybe, just maybe, can improve the lives of our citizens along with what remains of our country.

Whilst he retained his seat our previous PM, Rishi Sunak, has apologised and is going to stand down as Conservative leader.

Other Tory VIPs were less fortunate, losing their seats entirely. That list includes ex PM Liz Truss, who lost her huge 32,988 majority, as well as Grant Shapps, Penny Mordaunt, Alex Chalk and Jacob-Rees Mogg.

Labour lost one potential seat to the excommunicated Jeremy Corbyn.

Unfortunately Reform’s Nigel Farage won his seat - 8th time lucky for him, 1st time unlucky for us - along with 4 other folk from Reform.

It’s General Election Day today here in the UK. Us UK folk should all leave the house and go and vote, vote vote!

Find your local polling station here. They’re supposed to be open from 7AM through to 10PM. You have to go to the specific one you’ve been assigned to.

Don’t forget to take some photo ID, as foolish as introducing that requirement probably was. What counts as legitimate photo ID is detailed here. It’s the sort of requirement you really have to comply with today, even if you want to campaign against it afterwards.

Also you might as well take your polling card if you have it - but no worries if you lost it, they can look you up there and then in the polling station in order to let you exercise your democratic rights.

If anyone who has a postal vote they forgot to post then you can take those to the polling station in person too (but do take it!).

If you’re too ill / unexpectedly away / have lost all your photo ID then you still have up to 5pm today to apply for an emergency proxy vote if you have someone you can trust to carry out your vote on your behalf. Do that by contacting the electoral services team at your local council ASAP, definitely before 5PM, the details of which can be found via this website.

Nothing is inevitable. And if you’re skeptical that taking action can take a difference, well, not taking an action certainly won’t.

📺 Watched “Can AI Steal Your Vote?” documentary.

This is a Channel 4 documentary from their Dispatches series whereby they found 12 households who had in common the fact that they claimed to be undecided as to who to vote for in the forthcoming UK general election.

They were then enrolled into an experiment where they were told that they were going to be shown various political content - in the modern style of Facebook posts, Tiktok vids, and the like - on a new social network for an experiment that was designed to test their reactions to political content that might be shown during the election campaign.

Of course the twist, which wasn’t revealed to the participants until after the fact, is that some of this content (hopefully) isn’t actually going to be shown. Because it was AI-generated deepfakes that the show’s creators had come up with.

Typically these deepfakes consisted of video or audio based on real footage or recordings, but altered so that the person concerned - Sunak or Starmer - appeared to be saying something that they never did. Subsequent comments or misleading posts from fake social media users also appeared the timeline.

So for instance we see Sunak apparently claiming that he’s going to save the NHS by introducing a £35 fee to see your doctor (not true) and Starmer saying that he’s going to ensure immigrants get top priority with regard to welfare and housing (also not true). There were also supposed leaks where the Prime Ministerial candidates seemed to be caught saying things like that they only tell voters what they want to hear or that they’re cross some nefarious plan or other got leaked.

6 households were exposed to fake content designed to push them towards voting for the Conservatives, and 6 to content designed to encourage them to vote Labour. At the end of the “experiment” they then have the participants (fake) vote in the way that they would now feel inclined to in the real election - Labour or Conservative - in order to see whether there’s evidence that being exposed to the fake content made a difference to their voting.

It’s probably not much of a spoiler to say that - contrary to Betteridge’s Law - this exposure did have a sizeable affect. OK, I don’t think it was the necessarily the most rigorous of experiments, but it was nonetheless pretty compelling to watch, and a fair warning to us all.

It’s not a overly surprising result. So many of us get our information from social media post style output in this form, whose primary intent is usually to influence us. There’s no reason that fake-but-seems real content would affect us any less than actually real content if done well. Particularly when this content has been actively designed by experts to be as influential and manipulative as possible, which is the scenario faced both by the participants here, and potentially us all in the real world. After all it’s good, perhaps even our duty, to seek out information about who we’re voting for, to learn what they stand for, what they’re likely to do to our country. It just doesn’t work out so well when the information that’s available is lies, indistinguishable at first glance from the truth.

So the participants were in no way behaving oddly, stupidly or in a way deserving mockery. At least a few of them did actually question whether the content was real and true at times. Some looked into a couple of the issues concerned - there was no restriction on what other sources participants could consult - and found no other evidence that some of what they’d seen was true, particularly some of the more outlandish supposed footage. At least one of them works in tech and AI as a job. They were all pretty humble about the experience after the fact. But even with all that taken into account, the claim is that the continued and varied exposure to it had some effect.

Perhaps one of the most interesting comments after it was revealed to the participants that much of the content they’d seen was generative AI fakery was as follows:

Participant: ‘I’m still fuming about charging us £35 for an [doctor’s] appointment and it’s not even true.’

Presenter: ‘In a way scarily there’s a bit of you that might sort of remember that and think maybe it is true.’

Participant: ‘Exactly that. It wasn’t so much now we know it’s fake but the anger is real.’

Presenter: ‘You can’t unthink that in a way.’

Participant: ‘That’s right.’

So, despite the fact they now knew what they’d seen wasn’t real, it doesn’t change the fact that they at the time they first saw it they felt powerful emotions - anger, disgust, fury - the memory of which perhaps unconsciously sticks with them. Emotions affect behaviour, and you can’t rewrite the past. I suppose there is some risk of course that even showing the deepfake content on this show - which they frequently do, albeit it’s systematically watermarked as not being real - could have some effect on the rest of us for a similar reason - let alone if out-of-context clips get circulated or manipulated in exactly the way the show warned about.

There wasn’t a great deal about how to avoid falling prey to this stuff. Perhaps because we don’t really know very much about how to defend this potential onslaught. As one of the experts notes, there’s rarely even time to debunk any given falsehood, even if it was felt that that would do all that much good. Recall Brandolini’s law:

The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it.

Which will be ever more the case now uncountable reams of bullshit can be automatically generated by anyone via AI.

So really the main advice was the fairly obvious (but sometimes hard to remember to do) idea that if you see something that makes you feel a certain way or believe something new - and especially if you feel compelled to share it with other people - at least try to double check the source. It’s awkward to say and none are perfect, but some sources do remain inherently more reputable than others. And if only one or two sources are reporting some clearly world-shattering news then you might be extra sceptical that it ever happened. For example, no British newspaper of record is going to forget to mention a complete revolution in, some would say destruction of, the basic principles of how the NHS works

The whole show seems to be freely available on YouTube - legitimately! - so here we go:

Last month Ticketmaster got hacked by a group known as ShinyHunters, the same group that previously stole data containing details of 70 million AT&T customers.

They got their hands on the personal details of 560 million Ticketmaster customers, with the intention of selling the purloined data onwards for half a million dollars. Apparently the information included at least partial credit card numbers and ticket sales.

No-one, nothing, is safe out there. I guess we all have to operate on the basis of if we enter our data anywhere online then there’s a non-zero chance it’ll be expropriated by bad actors at some point.

From The BBC:

France’s far right is in pole position after the first round of parliamentary elections that confirmed their dominance in French politics and brought them to the gates of power.

Sadly Macron’s absolutely bizarre decision to unnecessarily call an election - seemingly on the basis that his opponents seemed to be doing better than he hoped - appears to be panning out exactly as awfully as most sane people I know predicted. It’s a pretty unprecedented situation for France.

Led by Donkeys doing some of their usual amazing work via slowly dropping a banner featuring an overexcited Vladimir Putin from the ceiling as Reform leader Nigel Farage was in the middle of extolling his usual brand of tripe.

This of course is in large part a reference to Farage’s recent comments that somehow it’s the EU and NATO’s fault that Russia unilaterally attacked Ukraine.

Microsoft accidentally leaks some of the source code behind their PlayReady DRM software.

The technicalities are beyond me, but let’s hope this helps some tech wizard figure out how to remove this particular example of the software scourge known as Digital Rights Management, so that we can permanently store and play any digital content we purchased where and when we want to without so much risk it’ll all vanish some day.

Several Conservative party candidates and officials are in trouble for, perhaps in a desperate measure to get rich before they lose their jobs on July 4th, by betting on the date of the general election using their insider knowledge before the public announcement was made. This is of course illegal, potentially something you could even go to prison for.

Right now there are at least 6 named Conservative candidates and officials being investigated:

• Craig Williams, the Prime Minister’s parliamentary aide.
• Laura Saunders, Conservative candidate (who is married to the Conservative’s directory of campaigning).
• Tony Lee, Conservative Party director of campaigning
• Nick Mason, the Conservative Party’s chief data officer.
• Russell George, the Welsh Conservative member of the Senedd

Up to 6 police officers are apparently also being looked on for the same matter.

Showing their ability to never totally come out of someone else’s scandal unscathed, there’s also a Labour candidate, Kevin Craig, who is being investigated for better on the Conservatives to win his constituency. I suppose he might have gotten reasonable odds on that given the landslide in the other direction that’s currently expected (at least at a nationwide level, I haven’t checked out his area in particular).

So another day, another (mostly) Tory scandal. It’s not like it was even for serious money. We’re generally talking about bets in the order of £100. Apparently bookies will typically only take fairly small bets on this sort of thing as it’s a fairly small market that they’re less confident that they have an edge over punters than in the case of sports.

It’s very possible more names might come out soon. Newsnight reported that up to 15 Conservative candidates and officials are being looked into by the Gambling Commission. George Osborne has said that around 40 people in total would have been aware of the election date in advance

📚 Finished reading Politics on the Edge by Rory Stewart.

This is Rory Stewart’s memoir of his time before, but mostly during, his time serving as a British member of parliament. That episode that commenced in 2010 when he was elected to serve as as part of the Conservative party.

He’s had a privileged upbringing which has turned him into something of a stereotypical British posh boy in presentation. Despite that though, he has somehow apparently remained a lot more sane, a lot more human-seeming, that most of his often-equally-as-privileged contemporaries have managed to do.

He identifies as a centrist, moderate, a one-nation Tory - who holds some more traditional small-c conservative views, including much respect for British traditions and institutions (political, royal or otherwise) and the notion of public service, in comparison to his culture-war-addled modern very unconservative Conservative contemporaries.

Since then, he’s stood for the leadership of the Conservative party - yes, he could have in theory been our prime minister - as well as, as an independent, the mayor of London. Neither of those two attempts worked out for him, but I do remember his famous strategy of asking his potential voters to let him come and stay the night at their homes.

Why stand as an independent? Well, in 2019 he was excommunicated from the Conservative party via the withdrawal of the whip for the crime of voting against what he saw as the first step towards a devastating no-deal Brexit.

Some of his fellow travelers had the whip restored in due time, but Rory in any case felt compelled to quit the party entirely given that the only alternative would mean he’d have to serve under Boris Johnson, a politician who ranks amongst the highest on his list of asinine dangerous fools that shouldn’t be allowed to be anywhere near the levers of power.

Nonetheless, his years of experience have allowed him to present to his readership a fascinating, albeit extremely depressing, insider’s look at how the wheels of British government turn in practice. This undoubtedly goes some way to explaining the current abject state of the country.

Most of his Parliamentary peers are shallow, tetchy, over-ambitious, confrontational, incompetent and ignorant. To be fair, the system seems designed to keep them that way, with ministers switching roles - he himself held 5 ministerial positions between 2015 and 2019 - and job titles so rapidly at whims of their leadership there’s no chance to actually build up any expertise and skill, even if they did care enough to do so. Besides, why bother learning anything when given the power of the leadership and the whips under the current system it’s very rare that politicians are even enabled to vote with their conscience? They do what they’re told by their leadership. Or they suffer.

He name names, tells personal anecdotes and exposes huge structural flaws within the system in a manner that suggests he’ll never be invited back to the Conservative party. Not that he shows no real signs of wanting to be, at least in its current state. Things got so bad at one point during his time serving that he had a moment where he no longer wanted to be alive. At moments he saw himself starting to behave, or thinking he needed to behave, in the same ways as his despised colleagues, leading to feelings of shame and self-loathing.

He’s particularly vicious about Boris Johnson’s immense variety of failings, and not all that much more impressed by Liz Truss. There’s a couple of politicians he seems to have retained some respect for - Theresa May and David Gauke - but of course even they have to battle against a system that appears designed to thwart their better-intentioned moves.

He retains a sense of humour. The book is laugh-out-loud funny at times, especially for folk like me who often find absurdity hilarious. But it’s one of those situations where it’s only funny until you remember it’s real. The dysfunctional system it describes is the same one that holds such tremendous power over you and your fellow citizens.

In that sense it’s also a very depressing book, infused with the author’s own despair and frustration. I don’t get the sense that Stewart really tries to give hope that there’s much redemption for the system beyond burning it all down and starting from scratch.

It’s not going to stop me voting in the forthcoming general election, and I very much hope it doesn’t stop you either - but I certainly understand the people who react to these stories with a sense of “what’s the point?” helplessness. But, as is almost always the case, whilst playing an active role may or may not improve the world, doing nothing is certainly not going to change anything.

404 reports that:

Users of massively popular AI chatbot platform Character.AI are reporting that their bots' personalities have changed, that they aren’t responding to romantic roleplay prompts, are responding curtly, are not as “smart” as they formerly were

Uh oh, it seems like another company making AI that’s designed explicitly to behave as though it was a human may have - accidentally or otherwise - lobotomised everyone’s boy/girlfriends again.

Hopefully users are a bit less surprised, or at least traumatised, this time around compared to the original Replika incident.

I’m still very far from sure that these ‘we want to make an AI that is indistinguishable from a human’ products are a good idea.

free-for.dev is a wonderful list consolidating a ton of “as a service” offerings that folk interested in developing websites or other software and infrastructure might be interested in which have a decent cost-free tier. Ideal for the inveterate hobbyist tinkerer who wants to play with shiny new nerd toys but isn’t in a position to invest a lot of money into the act.

Usually, but not always, the free tier is offered as a potential gateway to a paid tier. That’s often worth considering doing, if nothing else then to support the services you like. But the list is constrained such that the free offering must be both long term and useful.

These are all as-a-service offerings rather than self-hosted things. You can easily help out by contributing to the list.

My personal use-case for it this time was finding a way to implement a contact form on a static website. It saved me a lot of time and effort vs Googling and hoping for the best.

📧 Reading the Political Calculus newsletter.

It’s election season madness here in the UK, so I’m rapidly ingesting anything and everything on the topic to a, hopefully, only slightly unhealthy degree.

This (free) newsletter - “on the connections between politics and the economy” - is written by Ben Ansell. He’s a political scientist who wrote the book “Why Politics Fails”, which has already made it to my near infinite length “want to read” list, given the state of the country. Well, the world.

The latest edition I read focuses on the perceived generational war that the Conservatives have seemed to be intent to pursue in recent times. Young people have seemingly declared war on the Conservatives in response, at least in terms of voting preferences for the upcoming general election. More on that topic here.

Stolen test data and NHS numbers published by hospital hackers

(From The BBC)

A group called Qilin has shared 400GB of private NHS data on the Darknet, thought to include patient identifiers and blood test results. This seems to be the result of an unpaid ransomware demand, allegedly for $50 million. The action also caused potentially dangerous disruption to thousands of medical appointments.

Qilin is a ransomware group that popped up in 2022 and is thought by many to work from Russia.

The data was not stolen directly from NHS systems but rather from an organisation called Synnovis who provides pathology services for the NHS. Again this shows that it’s really only the weakest link that matters. Hackers only have to be successful once.

It’s far from the first healthcare organisation to be attacked. Just a couple of years ago the NHS once again saw one of the organisations who provides it with IT services attacked. Last year saw 70TB worth of sensitive data from Barts Health NHS Trust held to ransom as well as details of over 1 million patients threatened by an attack against the University of Manchester.

Elsewhere, earlier this year United Healthcare decided to actually pay the ransom, suggested to represent $22 million worth of Bitcoins, when their subsidiary, Change Healthcare was attacked.

It’s all rather terrifying. At least whilst it feels like there’s little indication we really know how to stop it happening.

The US separation of church and state ethos continues to be ever more troubled under the influence of the modern-day version of the Republican party (and perhaps their activist allies in the Supreme Court).

From The Associated Press:

Louisiana has become the first state to require that the Ten Commandments be displayed in every public school classroom

This of course refers to the Ten Commandments as found within the Christian bible, and indeed a specific version of them.

Donald Trump is somehow a big fan which would be improbable in any more sensible universe. The Daring Fireball blog runs down a few examples of him personally breaking at least nine of them.

What a surprise that Nigel Farage - current face of the booming Reform party - isn’t opposed to many of Andrew Tate’s ideas (yes, the guy who is currently stuck in Romania on charges of human trafficking, rape and forming a criminal gang to sexually exploit women). In the interests of balance, whilst he did think Tate was an “important voice for the emasculated”, he didn’t offer unqualified support, deeming him to be at times “over the top”.

He was less qualified in his his take on Liz Truss' famously disastrous budget, that ruined to some extent both Britain’s economy and standing in the world, alongside her own (mainstream) political career.

“I welcomed much of Liz Truss’s budget….I would much have preferred her to hold her nerve, keep making those arguments and see if the party dared get rid of them.”

He’s been a big fan of Putin and Orban in his time too of course.

I would not want someone so incapable of learning a lesson, so fundamentally unpatriotic despite his flag waving, anywhere near our economy.

📺 Watched Clarkson’s Farm.

A show so fantastical that, at times, it makes Jeremy Clarkson look almost like a sympathetic character.

Yes, he’s bounced back from whatever his last offensive comment or terrible political opinion was to grace a large number of screens in the UK as he “runs” a farm called “Diddly Squat”. Remember “The Simple Life” show all those years ago where the hook was that Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie would endevour to do whatever was regarded at the time as a nasty, messy or generally subservient job - you know, the kind of jobs many of us routinely do but someone with in their stratum of fame and wealth never had to learn how to do? This is kind of like a version of the farm episode from that, except that the celebrity know-nothing concerned owns the place.

It has less structural sexism or ageism (excluding anything Jeremy might say), but the same ethos of privileged person who doesn’t really have a clue about what he’s doing bumbling around doing things badly whilst the normies who really know how it’s done - because it’s what they have had to become proficient at in order to live a hopefully decent life - try to save him from himself. It’s usually a light-hearted enough show so stuff turns out OK in the end, with the exception of some upsetting animal deaths.

The surrounding cast, his employees and contractors are, are pretty universally entertaining and seemingly nice, rational, kind of normal people who get openly exasperated having to deal with someone like Jeremy, even though he is their boss. With great accents in some cases.

So there’s a lot of charm here, and even some references to important issues that are currently causing great stress to the type of farmers who are not TV celebrities - weather, costs, income etc. - if you can overlook the host’s history and don’t mind listening to a few standard rants about political correctness gone mad, government overeach (some of the latter may even be fair, I’m no expert) and the like.

Shoutout to Patsy Gallagher, who spent the first few months of her life officially known as “Pasty” - as in the handheld pastry-sack of meat treat - thanks to an employee making a typo on the registration documents.

This month’s The American Prospect magazine has an absolutely - possibly surprisingly - fascinating set of articles on the topic of prices under modern-day capitalism. Or as they term it:

The many innovations corporations have devised to get you to pay more.

I’ve only gotten through a couple of the articles (which are freely available) so far, What We Owe and The One-Click Economy, but the rest are on my list.

Note for my fellow country-folk: The American Prospect is an entirely different magazine than the Prospect magazine one sees out and about in the UK.

Maybe I’m just vegetable-sheltered, but I don’t think I encountered something that looked quite like this before.

I guess it’s some kind of squash? ChatGPT thinks it might be a turban squash, I’m not so sure.

Britain has something of a penchant for novelty candidates in its elections. We’re regularly treated to the sight of the 6000 year old Recyclon leader wearing a bucket on his head - Count Binface - standing next to some important luminary from a more mainstream political party.

Here’s a classic, courtesy of Reuters, from one time our disgraced ex-Prime Minister won his seat back in 2019.

Fun fact - Count Binface used to be Lord Buckethead, before some earthbound copyright got in the way.

Anyway, entirely unrelated to the Count or Sesame Street, the Brighton Pavilion ballot is an interesting one this year.

First off there’s a classic entry by a candidate for the Official Monster Loony Raving Party, a 42-year old party founded by Screaming Lord Sutch.

“Vote for insanity” is their slogan, which admittedly doesn’t greatly distinguish them from several of their opponents. In fact some of their policies seem a little more sensible and realistic than what we currently live with on a daily basis: “We will send all MPs who misbehave to Rwanda”, “NHS…We will reduce hospital waiting lists by using a smaller font.”

But, new for 2024 as far as I know, one of the candidates is literally - as opposed to the more typical figuratively - inhuman: “AI Steve”. As you might guess from “his” name, AI Steve is basically an artificial intelligence style chatbot.

Apparently this collection of 1s and 0s is going to be the ultimate “by the people, for the people” candidate. For starters, you can chat to it 24 hours a day. NBC shares a screenshot of the experience.

After that, “all inputs are summarised and outputted into HubSpot so that they can be analysed and turned into policies using ChatGPT”. Of course ChatGPT had to be involved somewhere, right?

Finally, it asks its potential voters - the “Validators” - to score its proposed policies, with anything getting more than 50% marks becoming official policy. Absolutely no way that could ever go wrong of course.

Because, so far, only humans are allowed to physically sit in Parliament, a winning variant of AI Steve would in theory be represented in human form by Steve Endacott. He happens to be the chairman of Neural Voice, a company that sells " Dialogue Driven AI" in the world outside of politics.

Despite now apparently having admirably Green leanings, in 2022 he was a fully human candidate for the Conservatives. That didn’t work out well, with him gaining just 487 votes, placing him in last place of a 7 candidate race. But, lessons have been learned. This time, aside from having created some of the initial policy ideas, it sees like he’s really just a proxy and will vote based on what AI Steve tells him to do. As an independent, which in some way seems unnecessary given Sunak often gives me strong vibes of being an AI deepfake himself. But sure, I wouldn’t want to be associated with the Conservatives if I was an info-swilling computer full of reassuringly definitive, and sometimes even correct, answers.

Apparently part of the intention was to solve the problem that many politicians have faced over the years, namely how to work effectively when you insist on living extremely far away from the constituency you are claiming to want to represent. Creatively, it turns out you just don’t, you just get tell your constituents to talk to a machine and the machine to make all the decisions.

In a way it feels quite incredible that this is legal. Although I suppose it’s a grey area. There’s a good chance that something half-like this is already happening and the MP in question just hasn’t mentioned that they primarily govern via commercial chatbot yet.

In any case, I’m relieved to see that number 1 on the list of what “AI Steve stands for” is “Good ideas”.

Apparently I was not the only person to rather take advantage of all-you-can-eat deals, at least in my years as a student. Last month the US restaurant chain “Red Lobster” filed for bankruptcy, in part due to losing $11 million in 3 months associated with its “eat unlimited shrimp” deal. That’s 13 years after it made basically the same mistake with regards to unlimited crab. ,

Marketplace reports that it’s far from the only restaurant to suffer these kind of all-you-can-eat losses.

All-you-can-eat deals have nearly killed a lot of restaurants, Allen said: Olive Garden lost millions on endless breadsticks; Pizza Hut lost big on its endless pizza buffet; Sizzler blamed its 1996 bankruptcy, in part, on people abusing the endless salad bar.

Seemingly these deals are a good way to short-term get punters into your business, but in the end restaurants don’t often have the margins to survive the habits of the people they attract in the longer term.

In the same way that being susceptible to obesity is, at least in part, a biological genetic trait, so, scientists found a few years ago, is thinness. Researchers found several genes, over and above those known to be connected to obesity, that were associated with being thin.

As one of the researchers said at the time, with reference to one of society’s last acceptable prejudices:

This research shows for the first time that healthy thin people are generally thin because they have a lower burden of genes that increase a person’s chances of being overweight and not because they are morally superior, as some people like to suggest

Or, again from The BBC’s reporting:

…this supports the idea that, for some people, being thin has more to do with inheriting a “lucky” set of genes than having a perfect diet or lifestyle.

The day has come: Reform is polling slightly higher than the Conservatives in the “Who do you intend to vote for?” Yougov UK general election polls: 19% against 18%.

Yougov reports that the difference is well within the error of margin for their survey, so one can’t confidently say that Reform is winning that mini-contest yet - but it certainly seems to be a possibility.

They’re still not expected to win many actual seats. But hey, it must nonetheless be kind of embarrassing for the Cons, and a shame that any protest votes are shifting in that direction for those of us who are really not Reform fans.