Best Of

I sometimes wonder if the fact I have zero chance of inheriting any assets affects my ability to get very worked up about the principle of inheritance taxation.

I think it is more a "feels" thing. I'll probably inherit a significant amount (to a normal person (and myself...), perhaps crumbs to some of the pb elite)), and think it weird that it would be taxed less strictly than me working hard.

Maybe if it was from a family business rather than well paid professional jobs I might think differently as that would create more attachment between the money, bequestors and the future so I can see where the farmers are coming from, but ultimately we are skint, and someone has to be taxed more and very few of the candidates for that will like it either.

I visited my mother recently, and it seems like she's lost all her money on this McCarthy & Stone leasehold retirement flat that she moved into a while ago, and she feels quite bitter about it.

One of the other residents left their flat to the Salvation Army, and it sounds like they're going to struggle not to lose money on the bequest.

People really like to pass money onto their kids once they don't need it anymore. It is a strong emotional thing.

Why is there low demand on resale for those retirement flats? Feels like it should have been a growth market over the last couple of decades such that even with charges leaseholders shouldn't come out too badly.

AIUI it’s like buying a timeshare

I assume that when the service charges reach market rent levels there is no value in owning the property. Indeed as there is a negative value because, unlike a tenancy you cannot give notice but have to sell the flat on.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-manchester-68253902

I don't agree. Social Media networks should not have the status of being publishers of news - it conders a legitimacy that isn't warranted. We also know that when they do censor (as Facebook does) they often censor the wrong thing, wrongly. Social media is just a conversation. People should just understand that and grow up.

But people don't understand that. Some people do not make a clear distinction any more between fact and fiction. So when they see something on social media that is plainly nonsense, they judge it's truth by the popularity or authority of the source, not the content. Such people are susceptible to manipulation by bad actors. It's not unreasonable for a body like the EU to ask Twitter to do something about the issue. And it's no longer "mischief makers" that we have to worry about, but hostile states trying to shape public opinion, influence elections, and cause social unrest. Stopping such acts is an entirely legitimate thing for a state to do. If you leave it to self-regulation you are simply allowing our actual enemies to harm our society.

The government have spent it's first year and a half looking for trouble. If one of the Palestine Action people die of hunger strike it will be very serious for them. They seem to have gone out of their way to alienate people. Seeing Greta Thunburg arrested just makes them look ridiculous. People have been very patient with Starmer but I think it's now time to get themselves a LABOUR leader. I'd go with Streeting. As much to wash away the detritus that's attached to them as anything else

Leaving aside the merits of the PA proscription, is Greta Thunberg still flavour of the month? I don't seem to stumble upon news about her very much anymore, though I get the impression she has predominantly transitioned from environmental causes to the palestinian cause, so it feels like she needs to get arrested to get attention, which makes it less compelling than, say, reports than 100 grannies have been arrested for doign the same.

Greta has I think become addicted to the fact of being Greta, and become more of a self-caricature in the process. It’s a shame, but she was always too far down the sanctimonious spectrum.

Franchising yourself into multiple issues is a mistake too. The examplar of a clearly defined, focused environmental campaigner who has stuck neatly to an easily digestible script is Feargal Sharkey. That’s how to do it.

Without looking into it too much I wonder if it is a case of everythingism, in that it is presumed by too many people, including campaigners, that if you support X you have to not only support Y, but speak out about it as well, even if it really has no real relation to X*.

Palestine is often an example, as with the new Unison head saying she will defend the interests of the working class, and that that 'requires' support the 'freedom struggle' of the Palestinian people. Now, I don't see any issue with people supporting the working class and the people of Palestine, many do just that, but I really don't see how one 'requires' the other.

* people can broaden their areas of focus of course, but I think the risk there is becoming just another politician, elected or otherwise. Many might have presumed various political opinions to Greta when she was primarily an environmental campaigner, but remove any ambiguity at all and wlill she even be listened to on that subject anymore?

I have mixed feelings about this.

On the one hand I've normally been a bit dismissive of single issue campaigners. There is more than one thing wrong with the world, and many issues affect each other. You also see different single issues often pitted against each other, as though they're in opposition, so it helped if advocates for change have a broader outlook.

That said, concentrating on a single issue has the benefit of focus and simplicity, and makes it easier to build a broad base of support. An advocate for action on climate change shouldn't particularly care if a potential ally is pro-Palestinian or pro-Zionist. Both sides of that argument can be on either side of the debate on ending usage of fossil fuels.

You can decide what you want to campaign on, but why should you get to decide what Greta Thunberg campaigns on? That's her choice. I think Thunberg is in a better position to decide what she wants to do than any of us here.

And people can have an opinion about whether her approach is particularly effective, so what's the problem? It's no different to having an opinion about how a politician, on one's side or not, chooses to focus their messages - public figures will be commented on by the public.

That's why I was curious if she is still making waves among her intended audience, which is now narrower than it was previously.

Matt Ridley in a recent Speccie article (worth a read), suggesting that the bottom has fallen out of the climate change market:

A top climate scientist is warning climate change will wipe out humanity unless we stop using fossil fuels over the next five years,’ tweeted Greta Thunberg in 2018. Five years later she deleted her tweet and shortly after decided that Palestine was a more promising way of staying in the limelight.


https://spectator.com/article/the-great-climate-climbdown-is-finally-here/

The truth is 2025 is setting more records for warmth in the UK and worldwide. The UK's warmth record set in 2022 is going to be broken and most people remember the summer of 2022 for those exceptional few days of heat when we broke 40c in London.

We know Ridley is a denier and to be fair some of the proponents of claimate change have done themselves no favours with some of their hyperbolic prognostications but a rapidly warming world (whether caused by human intervention or not) is going to cause a lot of problems.

I'm more worried that scientists are deliberately downplaying the outputs of their models so as to appear more credible. Some of the tipping point stuff looks seriously nasty. Massive uncertainty, of course.

Yes, this is a much unexplored set of risks. Not least because of the way the climate models are developed and tested they're much more likely to be too conservative rather than exaggerated.

https://x.com/SecRubio/status/2003547575580815814

For far too long, ideologues in Europe have led organized efforts to coerce American platforms to punish American viewpoints they oppose. The Trump Administration will no longer tolerate these egregious acts of extraterritorial censorship.

Today, @StateDept will take steps to bar leading figures of the global censorship-industrial complex from entering the United States. We stand ready and willing to expand this list if others do not reverse course.

For far too long, ideologues in Washington have pursued coordinated efforts to obstruct renewable energy projects they oppose, using federal authority to suppress innovation, distort energy markets, and limit domestic energy supply. The European Union will no longer ignore these egregious acts of policy-driven obstructionism.

Today, EU institutions will take steps to formally challenge the United States’ prohibition of new wind projects, measures that raise prices for American consumers, weaken grid resilience, and increase U.S. dependence on foreign energy sources. These actions undermine climate commitments, economic competitiveness, and the foundations of transatlantic cooperation. We stand ready and willing to escalate our response should these restrictions not be reconsidered.

Evening all. It's easy to be concerned by all the fascist shit Trump is trying to pull in the US, but the good news is they are so laughably, horribly bad at it.

Not content with uploading the entire unedited 60 minutes they wanted to censor, it turns out all the 'redacted' Epstein files can be read by copying and pasting the 'redacted' text into any other document...

I recall the Ministry of Defence did the same thing once (probably more than once). That's pretty incompetent given the ease of proper redaction now.

@mjsdc.bsky.social‬

NEW: By a 6-3 vote, the Supreme Court blocks Trump’s deployment of the National Guard to Chicago to assist immigration agents. A majority holds that he likely lacks authority to do so. Thomas, Alito, and Gorsuch dissent.

https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25pdf/25a443_ba7d.pdf

It is interesting that some of Trump nominees are actually less servile and slavishly 'loyal' than the likes of the laughably corrupt Thomas.

On the redactions - “export to PDF”, kids.

That seems to be the problem. They redacted the documents using Adobe Acrobat apparently

Government by technobros.

We need a squillion dollars for AI and space and shit. Also we don't know how Adobe Acrobat works...

The only real redaction is rasterize, redact, convert back to PDF. Having said that, if your country demands accessible PDF/UA by legislation, you can't do that. You would at the very least have to OCR it. And possibly even that might be inadequate for the legislative standards.

I sometimes wonder if the fact I have zero chance of inheriting any assets affects my ability to get very worked up about the principle of inheritance taxation.

I think it is more a "feels" thing. I'll probably inherit a significant amount (to a normal person (and myself...), perhaps crumbs to some of the pb elite)), and think it weird that it would be taxed less strictly than me working hard.

Maybe if it was from a family business rather than well paid professional jobs I might think differently as that would create more attachment between the money, bequestors and the future so I can see where the farmers are coming from, but ultimately we are skint, and someone has to be taxed more and very few of the candidates for that will like it either.

I think that many of our freehold family farms only came into existence due to death duties on large aristocratic estates, with land sold to tenant farmers to pay the tax. At the end of enclosures there were a lot of tenant farmers, a lot of very large landholdings and a relatively small number of small freeholders.

The history of landholding in this country is not one of freehold family farms, it is mostly of turning peasants with traditional rights into a landless working class, and consolidating land ownership amongst the aristocracy. It was only Death Duties (and more recently IHT) that had reversed things..

Conversely, I would say that life as a peasant was (for the majority), always pretty rough, and when people got the opportunity to obtain better-paid work in cities, and the new industrial towns, they availed themselves of it.

A typical village had a Big Man, and several better off peasants, but the large majority were always dependent on the former, whether or not they owned their small holdings.

I am not particularly agitating for reparations from the landholders in compensation for the loss of traditional lands in the Highland Clearances and the equivalent English Enclosures, but it would be nice if they acknowledged how they came by their lands. It was theft, albeit historic theft.

There is something massively appealing to the very idea of running a farm, supporting a family from your own produce, and turning a profit from it.

But, I don’t think that was ever available to more than 20-25% of the village population (the hoplite class in classical Greece, the yeomen of late medieval England). The rest depended on the wages they got as labourers and servants, to the better off peasants and the Big Man, in addition to produce from their small plots.

Frontier societies came closest to this ideal, but usually at the expense of defeated peoples, being pushed off the land.

The powerful were always trying to grab more land. It was fortunate that in late 18th century England, this coincided with the demand for labour in new industries. For the rural poor, leaving the land was a blessing.

So similar to the slaves exported from Guinea to Virginia, it was worth it for the long term benefit?

And should be grateful to those Liverpool ship owners?

No. Being a chattel slave rarely represented an improvement in one’s life. Working in new industries often did.

Interesting that someone is trying to sell the “being a factory worker = slavery” thing.

Only the most extreme Southern Fireaters tried that pitch, back in the day.

No, its simply asking if the ends justifies the means.

Clearly African-Americans are better off now than Guineans, clearly I am better off than my Scottish crofting ancestors and English copyholder ancestors, but does that justify the monumental wrongs done?

The reason that we have so many rich landowners is that they are descended from thieves who pushed their kinfolk off the land with no posessions to rural or urban poverty wages or emigration to the colonies.

You’re seeing pre-industrial rural life in rose-tinted terms.

Pre-industrial societies (including Scottish clans and English villages), were only ever extractive. The agricultural and industrial revolutions created a hitherto unprecedented level of wealth. They proved Malthus wrong.

My children have just arrived home for Christmas (I have been told by my wife to stop calling them children at 30 and 25).

I have just been told by my son that they have a hedgehog on top of their tree. After numerous questions I am none the wiser as to why.

One branch of our offsprung is descending on us tomorrow with their now adult offsprogs, and I think I may have hit on a whizzo scheme to deal with all the Xmas gifts, which has usually been a headache catering for their various tastes and interests. –– I got Amazon to send me 7 books which *I* might be interested to read. I'll wrap them up and put them in a bag to be taken out as lucky dips with the requirement that each book when read or rejected gets swapped for one of someone else's, including self and wife, and that the process continues till all books have gone through each of us and the last person to get any particular book keeps it.

The government have spent it's first year and a half looking for trouble. If one of the Palestine Action people die of hunger strike it will be very serious for them. They seem to have gone out of their way to alienate people. Seeing Greta Thunburg arrested just makes them look ridiculous. People have been very patient with Starmer but I think it's now time to get themselves a LABOUR leader. I'd go with Streeting. As much to wash away the detritus that's attached to them as anything else

Leaving aside the merits of the PA proscription, is Greta Thunberg still flavour of the month? I don't seem to stumble upon news about her very much anymore, though I get the impression she has predominantly transitioned from environmental causes to the palestinian cause, so it feels like she needs to get arrested to get attention, which makes it less compelling than, say, reports than 100 grannies have been arrested for doign the same.

Greta has I think become addicted to the fact of being Greta, and become more of a self-caricature in the process. It’s a shame, but she was always too far down the sanctimonious spectrum.

Franchising yourself into multiple issues is a mistake too. The examplar of a clearly defined, focused environmental campaigner who has stuck neatly to an easily digestible script is Feargal Sharkey. That’s how to do it.

I hope we deport her and give her a lifetime ban from re-entering the UK as we would with other terrorist supporters. No need for her to sit in jail.