Smile! UK cops spend tens of millions on live facial recognition tech UK government has launched a £20 million ($25 million) competition for tech companies to provide live facial recognition to a number of police forces. The procurement marks another step in the UK's plans to introduce the controversial technology into policing and security services. Via BlueLight Commercial, a non-profit …
This petition has run up some very interesting numbers, very, very quickly ( I believe it has already surpassed all existing records fop participation speed.)
Ah yes, the most pointless petition ever, lets assume it gets 3.5 Million votes, that's around 5% of the 68 million UK population (OK, I know, not voters), let's say the voters = 35 Million, that's still only 10% who can be bothered to sign a petition which might as well have said, The british people want Turkeys to Vote for Christmas :-)
The british people want Turkeys to Vote for Christmas :-)
They were gullible enough to be taken in by Boris' oven ready turkey as well
https://uk.news.yahoo.com/boris-johnson-oven-ready-brexit-deal-general-election-111920698.html
It's not pointless though is it? It's just another way to embarrass this vulgar government, media have already been talking about it and firing questions at Starmer, so it's doing its job, tightening the screws. I'm sure in the local council elections next year Labour will take a serious beating. It's about sending a message.
Pointless. As Ian Hislop pointed out, every government, ever has raised taxes the first year they get in. The farmer inheritence tax is an attempt to get land back from Baron's etc. Although he is a tit a lot of the time, Jeremy has highlighted issues with farming, although slighly undone all his work by admitting his buying of the farm is a tax dodge. With him being forced to sell fields it would mean people like Kaleb could afford to buy land to farm. We should possibly look to the French model, if you own farming land it must be farmed and not used for the likes of shooting.
"if you own farming land it must be farmed and not used for the likes of shooting"
As a person who lives in rural France, let me tell you that twats with guns will go everywhere that isn't physically blocked off, because there might be a critter to shoot. Often they'll be accompanied by a dozen noisy unruly dogs, and feel perfectly happy to walk across whatever private land even that surrounded by flat empty fields with not even a bunny in sight.
The worst are the syndicates. Bunch of dickheads in white vans that come along, trample everything, shoot with little concern for the rules like there's a bloody war going on, then bugger off. They just don't care because they aren't locals. Menaces, the lot of them.
"The farmer inheritence tax is an attempt to get land back from Baron's etc."
So the odd thing about this is that Starmer has been meeting with Larry Fink, head of Blackrock, one of the BIGGEST land barons out there. A good part of their business model is owning residential property and renting it out at vast cost to the occupier.
If you factor in the "value" of the agricultural land, regular family farmers are getting a 0.5% return on investment each year. Many family farms only work as viable businesses because thanks to inheritance the land is effectively free to them. Buying new land would be challenging as a farmer (not a celebrity like Kaleb) would be unlikely to earn enough farming it to cover it's cost.
Landlord X sells to Landlord Y
Tenant pays rent to Landlord Y instead.
Not if Landlord Y has bought the land to build houses, or install solar panels, on it. It's most unlikely that a farmer selling land these days would find another convenient adjacent farmer who wants to buy it and add it to their own farm, and has the money to do so.
The land will still be there, no one is going to buy up Ambridge and ship it overseas! If land is sold it will give those tenant farmers a chance to buy it and own their futures for a change, rather than living hand-to-mouth, sweating the land with chemicals to maximise yield at the expense of its long-term health.
Ah the old "Yu town folk don't understand our cuntry ways, oh ah, oh ah."
Perhaps you'd like to check the actual rules?
For a single parent that's £1 000 000 of farmland on top of £500 000 allowance.
For a couple it's 2x that IE £3 000 000.
Now even with inflation a £1.5m farm is still a pretty damm nice piece of farmland.
Of course the question is how many UK farms are worth > £3m. HMG reckons < 500/year will be in the net
I can't recall if it was John Smith (the Labour leader) or John Prescott who commented that people would fight for things (like keeping public school businesses VAT free) that they would never have a chance at owning (or affording) because they liked the idea that maybe one day they could.
This tax will affect the Farmer Palmer get-off-my-land UK "Barley Barons," not Dai-8th-gen-hillside-sheep-farmer-with-arse-hanging-out-his-trousers.
UK farming is a bloody good little tax operation, on a par with being the head of a charity.
This tax will affect the Farmer Palmer get-off-my-land UK "Barley Barons," not Dai-8th-gen-hillside-sheep-farmer-with-arse-hanging-out-his-trousers.
It'll affect Farmer Palmer's estate directly, but poor old tenant Dai will still get shafted when he's chucked off the land Palmer's son has to sell to Barrat or Wimpey, to pay the IHT.
They literally cannot do that. The landlord of the farm behind us has been trying to do it for a decade or more without success.
What it may do is reduce the book value of farmland. If so, more tenant farmers have an actual chance to purchase the farm they've been farming for decades.
As someone who knows lots of farmers, both owners and tenants, I can say that not one of them is rich in a monetary sense, but rich in the accomplishment of putting food on their and other peoples tables.
I was at a meeting at the local NFU office last Thursday, Two out of the 6 of us had gone to the protest and as they said: "started milking at 04:30 as usual, then did all the feeding and got my breakfast at 09:30. Then instead of doing (growing amounts of) paperwork, maintenance and vet checks, I went down to London on the off-peak train. Got back at 16:30 for evening milking and after doing all the checks finished around 21:30 for diner. So although I took half the day off, I still worked 10 hours!" They both share a 'relief milkman' with many other farms, and so only do the milking 13 out of every 14 days.
Farmers are out every day in whatever weather, including the snow and storms this week.
Sheep tend to lamb at night and so for 2 months there is little chance of sleep.
When the weather is good enough there is the arable land to tend. One year, when I was still a student and able to help, there was a big storm forecast and I did 4 days straight to get the winter wheat and barley sown along with 3 other helpers and the farmer, whose wife was feeding us. The farmer said that it nearly bankrupt him, but had the crops not gone in, then he certainly would have been bankrupt - that how little cash is available to most farmers!
How would you like to work all year to raise a crop to have it wiped out by the weather? Or for the supermarket to say, "we are having a promotion on Cabbage and so we are only going to pay you half of what we said at the start of the year"? (And because the supply chain for these perishable crops is almost just-in-time, there is nowhere else to sell your crop.) It is not unusual to see whole fields of Brassicas ploughed in as it is cheaper than trying to harvest them with the prices they are being told to accept.
Or your cattle to get TB, or sheep get Blue Tounge, or your pigs get any host of illnesses, and have to be slaughtered?
Land, the main asset of farms, used to be cheap (about £4K a hectare 10 years ago where I live) and is now at least 10 times that as the Pension Funds and the rich fight to buy it up.
It is very difficult to go into farming except by inheriting a farm.
£1.5M is unlikely to be a viable working farm: Vable, a farm that is large enough to generate an income sufficient to be the main income for at least one family member. With a typical return of 0.5% means £7.5k on £1.5M of assets (not just land, but buildings, machinary, stock). That is less than the minium wage. Good years will be much more, bad years may make a loss.
Yes, many farms will be below the inheritance tax limits. But these will often be one of two types:
1) The occupants will be officially retired but have no familty (or other relatives) willing to take on the farm, so are gradually winding down, e.g. by letting the land / selling the grass to neighbouring farms, farming less intesively (e.g. beef instead of dairy - less work but less income). At some point they will sell up and move into town. The number of farms has been steadily reducing for decades and farms increasing in size and mechanisation.
2) 'Hobby' farms. Someone has a bought a 'nice' house (former farm house, converted barn) which was sold with some land. They keep some stock or let the land. The 'farm' is not their main income but counts as a farm for tax purposes (inheritance tax avoidance).
Besides land: farm house, considering a boring 4 bed house on a new housing estate with a hint of garden can easily cost £600k, a house in a rural setting with an actual garden could be valued at £1M on it's own. Then there is machinary. And stock. A dairy herd of 100 cows could be £200k.
If your return on investment (ROI) is less than 1% you don't have a business, you have a hobby. Maybe a great hobby, a really useful one that helps other people, but its still a hobby.
Despite the poor returns farmland is incredibly valuable and you do not need to be Adam Smith to work out why!
Indeed.
2 things.
1) I cannot recall a time when farmers anywhere publically said "Yes our government supports us pretty well, in fact we're thinking about asking them to cut our grants and have us pay a bit more tax"
Like f**k that's going to happen.
2) Farming is the only UK industry (and make no mistake it is an industry) with it's own department looking after it.
There's a book on business fraud that has a phrase that's very useful to explain farming.
Mine will be the £300 Barbour with the removable inner.
"Covert reward schemes."
Look closer whenever some tells you some business is sooo horrible they wouldn't recommend it to anyone (yet they stay in it).
Farmers never mention that nearly everything they wear, drive or use during the day is tax deductible If the game isn't quite as profitable as it was when the UK was in the EU due to farm subsidies they should blame all the numpties who voted for Brexit, or got battered by the deals with NZ and Aus The Johnson did with those countries also due to Brexit.*
*Remember those "Sunlit uplands" ? More like the water logged fields of a Welsh hill farmer after storm Bert.
they wouldn't recommend it to anyone (yet they stay in it).
A lot of them stay in it because it's all they've ever known, it's what they enjoy doing and are good at, and they feel a responsibility to continue the work of their forebears (or three of them at least).
Farmers never mention that nearly everything they wear, drive or use during the day is tax deductible
And yet they still make very little profit each year, and some years make a loss. Perhaps those tax breaks are there because the government know that without them farmers would go under completely?
I'll let you in on a little accounting "secret"
Sometimes "profit" is not the goal.
"Profits" mean taxes. Losses mean access to government support and tax breaks.
Profits only matter if you're trying to sell it as a viable business.
As long as it provides three substantial meals a day and enough to cover all the costs of fuel and fertiliser most can go into a pension pot.
I spent a summer on a farm shovelling manure. IOW I've a fair nose for bu***hit.
Yes, looking at all the people who are propagating it on Twitter I think it's going to give a fairly accurate count of how many fascist morons there are in the UK. The vast majority of such people are not so much upset with Keith's governance as they are whining that they lost. They want a new GE before the Tories can regroup so that Farage can take over. That's it.
Yah know it might also be about how Sir Beer Korma has said repeatedly over the last couple of years how the Tories were trying to freeze pensioners and the cost of living is too high and now they are in power they're going full speed at making it worse.
Would you use the same description for all the millions who signed the 'stop brexit' petitions they had? I think one got over 6 million votes which is not far off what the Tories got in the GE.
Sure. As the AC above pointed out, and I acknowledged in my OP, some people actually are signing because they somehow didn't realise until after the election that Starmer was a Tory in a red rosette despite him saying so at every opportunity for the last two years. But in my basic trawling of the trending tweets, most of the tweeters are ranting about how "lefty Starmer has betrayed Britain" - usually by failing to cause the EU to sink beneath the waves. You don't really need to ask what their politics are, because if you're so far to the right that Starmer looks left wing then you're probably also burning your portraits of Hitler because he was a centrist liberal.
E: if you want specific examples that's harder as I don't have Twitter access on this PC. But they're easy enough to find.
"probably by saying that they're doing fine so "shut up!""
The PM actually responded (on the evening news today) that the 2M+ who signed the petition were probably drawn from the population that didn't vote labour (so presumably by implication their views don't count). This from one who stated before taking office that he would put country before party.
For any national politico -Voters that will always vote for the same party regardless of policy can be safely ignored, they only care about the undecided who will actually affect the result in marginal seats.
Old sayings to remember - Better the devil you know & Be careful what you wish for...
& then the classic from Bonzo Dog - No matter who you vote for, THE GOVERNMENT ALWAYS GETS IN -
Hello 50cent.
If China is "growing and increasingly properous" then it needs to STOP claiming its a "developing country" that then gains benifits of being declared as such. I don't know any other country that is classed as "developing" that has a fucking space program. It also needs to STOP coal production and STOP over fishing, especially in waters that aren't its own.
Even a country in decline is "developing" by the widest definition, just in the "wrong" direction.
On the other hand, a country self-declared as "developing", assuming the term is accepted, gets preferential treatment by (at least) the WTO and various UN agencies because they have different and more specific definitions of "developing". Not sure any of them still recognise China as "developing" though, On the other hand, China is still in the throws of large numbers of people from the countryside moving to the cities. Many city dwellers came from there directly or are 1st generation "immigrants" to city life and by that definition could be classed as developing. Bit it's still hard to accept a country with such levels of economic and military power as developing.
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And this tech likely won't work as planned.
It's a numbers game. Bruce Schneier said it a couple of decades ago when they first got enthusiastic about it. If you scan a lot of people trying to match against a small target list, any given match is far more likely to be a false one.
Facial recognition works better if you're e.g. using it for entrance to a secure facility. Then your target list is a much larger percentage of the people you're scanning.
But police like sitting at a desk and only stirring when there's an alert. Glorified security guards. And a lot of them are likely not much good for anything else these days.
Quite so.
Where I used to live in the UK, I had a double (similar height and build, facial features close enough to fool people who knew us both, except at close quarters if they were sober). It wasn't a particularly large town either, so I'm sure this would be repeated for people in larger cities.
So, my intuition on this is that the error rate for facial recognition among the general population could be a lot higher than the few percent that its proponents claim.
It also works as a pre filter on a bigger target list to flag potential matches to people who will look at it and give a yes, no or maybe verdict. In some respects this is what already happens manually as some people are very very good at matching faces. Less proficient people will filter out possible matches for the highly skilled folks to make the final call. The advantage of an automated system is that the false positive rate can be tuned to match what the skilled humans can cope with.
We've already proven, repeatedly, and beyond reasonable doubt that what actually happens is a few of the false positives get bundled into the back of a van, roughed up a bit and then finally released after a few hours.
And rather a lot of the people so abused have darker skin tones.
A bored person is very, very easily swayed by the fig leaf of "the computer said so". Add even a small amount of bias...
The Met have previously been found to be institutionally racist. If they have improved since, this is a massive leap backwards.
#Add even a small amount of bias.#
Does this kind of software even recognize skin colour. I always thought that it was based purely on physical dimensions. I've The distances betweens various recognised points of features. ie: Tip of the nose to cheek bone, cheek to cheek, chin to nose etc ?
"Does this kind of software even recognize skin colour. I always thought that it was based purely on physical dimensions. I've The distances between various recognised points of features. ie: Tip of the nose to cheek bone, cheek to cheek, chin to nose etc ?"
What was wrong with my question ?
The problem is not so much colour, as contrast. If the entire face is dark then it is harder to distinguish features. There would be just as much of a problem recognising caucasian faces in a low-light environment, but since using cameras to look at dark skin in the light is more common, and hence raises more false positives, than looking at light skin in the dark, it gets considered as a racist problem rather than just the limitations of the optics.
I suspect the main (or, maybe, another big) problem is that face recognition that is trained on, say, predominantly white English/European faces will be worse at distinguishing between subjects of other ethnicities whose face geometry is significantly different, leading to more false positives, etc.
IIRC, all the previous pilots/trials of face recognition hit the brick wall of "base rate" whereby even a small fraction of false positives among the basically nice law-abiding population will dominate the true positive rate over a small number of criminals / thugs. This was reported even in the Register on a few occasions. This is likely to be the main problem before every other big problem of relevance.
Vendors were invited to set-up their systems in an old Panda Car parked outside New Scotland Yard. The best system demonstrated an 80% true positive score: Plod, Plod, Plod, Lord Lucan, Plod. As usual the Horizon system set-up 'round the back of the City of London Post-office achieved an 80% false positive score: Criminal, Criminal, Criminal, Elvis, Criminal.
Although this gov has managed to be less popular than the last lot somehow.
The last lot got chucked out because they kept raising taxes by stealth, and doing nothing useful with the money. What did the current lot do as soon as they got in? Raised taxes on workers even more (despite promising not to) and used the result to give juicy pay rises to their pals in the public services, getting nothing in return.
Both lots need to learn that you can't tax yourself into growth, nor borrow yourself out of debt, you need to spend less. Mr. Micawber explained the basic economic rule some 170 years ago.
@Phil O'Sophical
"Both lots need to learn that you can't tax yourself into growth, nor borrow yourself out of debt, you need to spend less"
I think we are in for a long wait before this is an option. I hope I am wrong but our politicians keep wanting to 'invest' when their past 'investments' havnt paid off.
ANPR sneaked across the whole UK road system in the last couple of decades. Can't remember the initial excuse for it to start appearing. But you now can't enter any major town or main road without a camera noting your number plate.
But it's okay. We can trust Government not to do the same with Facial Recognition cameras....
Fashion needs to take note. Lets make a new trend for full face balaclavas and\or facepaint.
> Not true, ANPR coverage is nowhere near as extensive as you believe it is, outside of cities and motorways.
According to the government in Feb 2024, https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/national-anpr-service-data-protection-impact-assessment/national-anpr-service-data-protection-impact-assessment-accessible , "At present over 18000 ANPR cameras nationally, submit on average over 80 million ANPR ‘read’ records to national ANPR systems daily."
I seem to remember some years ago NPIA (or was it still called ACPO then?) had a rollout edict that required each force's sub-operational areas to have at least 1 patrol car fitted with front and rear facing ANPR systems and have static ANPR cameras fitted on all major roads (not just motorways) within their areas, and to have a "ANPR rapid response team" to follow up on ANPR "hits".
Obviously for the more rural forces then "major roads" would mean A-roads and potentially B-roads also (if the force area is very rural).
There's a belief by politicians and coppers that if they collect more data, they'll be able to do .... something. The problem is that it doesn't work when you factor in the error bars and are just taking a scattershot approach to the problem. Sifting through the sheer volume of data can be too time/resource intensive so that when something is found (and verified) the window to act on it has been and gone. More isn't better. Better is better and better is the enemy of good enough.
I know most of this stuff is pants. When I used to fly, I was "randomly selected" for extra screening over 90% of the time. I fit some sort of profile or a known terrorist shared my common as muck name and none of that meant anything useful. I've not been arrested, I don't attend protests and I don't hand out end-of-the-world pamphlets on street corners. I don't donate to radical groups or make international calls to burner phones. Hell, I don't even buy/sell crypto.
There's a belief by politicians and coppers that if they collect more data, they'll be able to do .... something.
This is mainly because there's not enough money in the system to recruit sufficient officers to do things the old fashioned, manually intensive way, I.E. patrolling the streets looking for crime and criminals.
Therefore technology is brought in to "streamline operations" or "focus resources" which is great as long as you then have the resources there to be focused on the area or to do the operations. However, what actually happens is that the frontline officers get bombarded with loads of random data hits which they can't respond to as they're too busy doing cell watches or hospital watches, writing up case files for court, copying and pasting data between 2349343 different computer systems which all do the same thing, and waiting on a phone line for the Crown Prosecution Service (who are similarly understaffed and underfunded) to declare that the case file they've spent 12 hours creating isn't good enough and it needs another 4 hours of work before they'll charge anyone, only to then reject the case because there's no reasonable prospect of conviction and all the money has been spent on trying murderers.
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