Britain is not significantly poorer because of Brexit. We are significantly poorer because we have just been though a plague, which has left us with terrible debts, and because Europe is now at war which is causing renewed recession and potential apocalypse
Brexit is utterly trivial compared to all this
Well the trouble with your point is that Covid and the current international situation impacts all our economic competitors fairly equally, but the UK is under performing those competitors. The stand out difference is leaving the single market. The impact on UK exports and inward investment is simply stark, and therefore the reduced economic efficiency of the UK can absolutely be put down to Brexit.
One thing I do not really understand from the pro-Brexit side is the refusal to accept that in the short to medium to term (at least) it is a net economic negative relative to our former trading partners. Doesn't mean we won't still outperform some (just relatively less so).
There is a converse argument that's been forgotten in the years since the vote: the single market was never completed and probably never could be because of differences in language and business and political cultures.
It's become an article of faith that the single market is a good thing economically, but the actual evidence for it is fairly thin on the ground. Having a deal which gives us zero-tariffs and quotas (which was not on offer before we joined the EEC) but also doesn't oblige us to follow everything Brussels does is very far from being self-evidently bad.
Is that likely to be on offer?
That's what we've got (with the exception of the NI protocol).
The issue isn't really tariffs. These are falling around the world. The problem is product standards. The single market aligns product standards. If you are outside the single market you have to prove that you comply before you can sell inside the EU. It is a massive non tariff barrier. It is the difficulty of being outside the regulatory space that is killing our exports because the cost of proving compliance are significantly higher than any applicable tarrif.
Actually, the EU regulatory structure for most goods - the CE Mark - is incredibly low touch, and is almost entirely self certified. The US, and in particular the UL fire standards, are much more onerous.
There was no need for any of it when we were still in the EU, and however light it may be said to be, the reality is that the new regulations are killing small business exports. No support has been given to exporters at all and the result is that farmers and small entrepreneurs are being driven to the wall.
Don't cite reality. Leon will brand you a remoaner. And that is the most withering putdown / denial of reality there is. The government and its remaining parrots really are deluded.
Their messaging about British lamb now being sold in America being a great example. That the EU ban was lifted by the Americans months ago seems not to matter - we are last. Again. And the volume of sales a fraction of what we have already lost. They want growth? Rejoin the EEA.
It's weird to go on YouTube and find a video from 10 years ago entitled "1938 stock departs Morden". The oldest trains on the London Underground today are the 1972 trains used on the Bakerloo Line. It's easy to forget these 1938 trains were still being used relatively recently.
Was taking about the rail strikes on the way back from the racing on Saturday as I had to drive obvs. Everyone seemed to think that the way to deal with a Tube strike in the future is to sack the drivers and replace them with driverless trains. Which is possible. But expensive. Ruinously expensive. And time consuming. You can’t just plonk a driverless train on the Bakerloo or Picadilly lines and say “off you go”. The whole network would have to be revamped which would take a long time and cost a lot of money.
"There are several explosions in the Shevchenkivskyi district, in the center of the capital city. All services are rushing to the scene. More details later" - Kyiv Mayor Vitalii Klitschko https://twitter.com/EuromaidanPress/status/1579344995357982720
Air raid sirens overnight in most Western Ukranian cities. Air defences heard being activated around Kiev, but reports now on the ground of several explosions.
Seems Putin’s lashing out in fury but not going nuclear.
I still think that the remaining generals will depose him before that happens - they all have families.
By many reports, he’s severely short of long-range missiles, so there’s a limit to just how much he can terrorise Ukraine.
That said, he’s *really* pissed off at that bridge going down. He once boasted that it was the most defended bridge in the world, and that Russia had trained dolphins to attack frogmen!
I'm glad I got on the "Elon Musk is a tw@t" train long before most other people.
I mean, has he *no* idea what has been going on in Hong Kong?
Musk is a stoner. Has these utterly visionary ideas which he leads brilliantly to shape the market - Tesla, Space X - but also has stupid ideas - The Boring Company, "This is Not a Flamethrower" and manages to tweet the worst kinds of stupid.
On balance I like him more than I dislike him. Anyway, if we persecuted people because of shitposting then Sean / Lady_G / eadric / Leon would keep getting the ban hammer...
I'm glad I got on the "Elon Musk is a tw@t" train long before most other people.
I mean, has he *no* idea what has been going on in Hong Kong?
Musk is a stoner. Has these utterly visionary ideas which he leads brilliantly to shape the market - Tesla, Space X - but also has stupid ideas - The Boring Company, "This is Not a Flamethrower" and manages to tweet the worst kinds of stupid.
On balance I like him more than I dislike him. Anyway, if we persecuted people because of shitposting then Sean / Lady_G / eadric / Leon would keep getting the ban hammer...
It's weird to go on YouTube and find a video from 10 years ago entitled "1938 stock departs Morden". The oldest trains on the London Underground today are the 1972 trains used on the Bakerloo Line. It's easy to forget these 1938 trains were still being used relatively recently.
Was taking about the rail strikes on the way back from the racing on Saturday as I had to drive obvs. Everyone seemed to think that the way to deal with a Tube strike in the future is to sack the drivers and replace them with driverless trains. Which is possible. But expensive. Ruinously expensive. And time consuming. You can’t just plonk a driverless train on the Bakerloo or Picadilly lines and say “off you go”. The whole network would have to be revamped which would take a long time and cost a lot of money.
Driverless trains on the tube are possible on the self-contained very simple lines. W&C, Victoria. Might be possible on a couple of lines - Central perhaps. But is literally impossible with current technology on the rest.
The solution is not remove the drivers. The solution is pay people properly. And not just the tube drivers, all the other people on scandal wages being tret like scum by this government.
"There are several explosions in the Shevchenkivskyi district, in the center of the capital city. All services are rushing to the scene. More details later" - Kyiv Mayor Vitalii Klitschko https://twitter.com/EuromaidanPress/status/1579344995357982720
Air raid sirens overnight in most Western Ukranian cities. Air defences heard being activated around Kiev, but reports now on the ground of several explosions.
Seems Putin’s lashing out in fury but not going nuclear.
I still think that the remaining generals will depose him before that happens - they all have families.
By many reports, he’s severely short of long-range missiles, so there’s a limit to just how much he can terrorise Ukraine.
That said, he’s *really* pissed off at that bridge going down. He once boasted that it was the most defended bridge in the world, and that Russia had trained dolphins to attack frogmen!
It's weird to go on YouTube and find a video from 10 years ago entitled "1938 stock departs Morden". The oldest trains on the London Underground today are the 1972 trains used on the Bakerloo Line. It's easy to forget these 1938 trains were still being used relatively recently.
Was taking about the rail strikes on the way back from the racing on Saturday as I had to drive obvs. Everyone seemed to think that the way to deal with a Tube strike in the future is to sack the drivers and replace them with driverless trains. Which is possible. But expensive. Ruinously expensive. And time consuming. You can’t just plonk a driverless train on the Bakerloo or Picadilly lines and say “off you go”. The whole network would have to be revamped which would take a long time and cost a lot of money.
You’d need to remodel most of the Tube lines, to allow for straight platforms with secondary doors everywhere, before you could put driverless trains out there. Most of the interchanges between lines would also require extensive remodeling. It’s currently not economical, not to mention the (political, as well as monetary) cost of closing existing lines for years as the work was done.
At some point though, as the cost of labour increases and the cost of capital and construction falls, it will be worth the effort. There was a missed opportunity during the pandemic, for a lot of overdue works to be completed on the existing infrastructure.
It's weird to go on YouTube and find a video from 10 years ago entitled "1938 stock departs Morden". The oldest trains on the London Underground today are the 1972 trains used on the Bakerloo Line. It's easy to forget these 1938 trains were still being used relatively recently.
Was taking about the rail strikes on the way back from the racing on Saturday as I had to drive obvs. Everyone seemed to think that the way to deal with a Tube strike in the future is to sack the drivers and replace them with driverless trains. Which is possible. But expensive. Ruinously expensive. And time consuming. You can’t just plonk a driverless train on the Bakerloo or Picadilly lines and say “off you go”. The whole network would have to be revamped which would take a long time and cost a lot of money.
Driverless trains on the tube are possible on the self-contained very simple lines. W&C, Victoria. Might be possible on a couple of lines - Central perhaps. But is literally impossible with current technology on the rest.
The solution is not remove the drivers. The solution is pay people properly. And not just the tube drivers, all the other people on scandal wages being tret like scum by this government.
The lines you list are automated but the driver exists because until you have track doors at every station (impossible due to how they were built if nothing else) the risk of issues is just too great.
London transport got to stage 3 automation decades before anyone else but to go driverless requires level 5 automation and you will never get there from existing systems without rebuilding them
I preferred SeanT’s last persona. This one is insufferably dull."
++++
Nothing ever changes
Lol. Don’t takes things personally, a week after that I had taken on board the warning, made major major changes to my personal life and made out like a bandit in the market.
On issue du jour, I don’t have normalcy bias. I’ve thought about it a lot. And just disagree.
Foreign minister spends half their life on planes and in hotels. Good to hear.
As I recall Truss developed a taste for expensive travel and entertaining whilst Foreign secretary. I've personally got no problem with this, but it is going to be a bad look as she tries to roll out 'austerity 2'.
I'm glad I got on the "Elon Musk is a tw@t" train long before most other people.
I mean, has he *no* idea what has been going on in Hong Kong?
Musk is a stoner. Has these utterly visionary ideas which he leads brilliantly to shape the market - Tesla, Space X - but also has stupid ideas - The Boring Company, "This is Not a Flamethrower" and manages to tweet the worst kinds of stupid.
On balance I like him more than I dislike him. Anyway, if we persecuted people because of shitposting then Sean / Lady_G / eadric / Leon would keep getting the ban hammer...
It's not just sh*tposting though. Take one example: the diver he called a paedo. He could easily have got himself out of that situation, but instead doubled and tripled down. And he actually hired a private investigator (*) to investigate the diver.
People would send them their cryptocurrency (bit-coins or ethereum or whatever) and they'd promise you something like 15% API risk-free. They claimed they were doing various crypto lending and trading things with your money, and they were doing some of these things, but it seems like they were paying out early depositors from later depositors right from the beginning.
Anyone who had money in Celsius - an obvious ponzi scheme, as Edmundintokyo points out - is an idiot.
There are a few cautionary words to add to this, though, in terms of government regulation. The US decided to regulate the market earlier this year by banning "yield generating" (i.e. paid for by ponzi) accounts earlier this year. But only NEW accounts.
In the early stages of the ponzi, it was possible to argue Celsius was legit (acting as a hedge fund, investing customers money and returning with the yield - about 6% IIRC). But by the later stages, even when it was much more obvious, the government intervention had the impact that a lot of users whose old yield generating accounts were "grandfathered in" decided to keep them, because they wouldn't be able to re-open their accounts if they closed them, due to the government intervention only applying to new accounts.
An interesting example of where the government tried to intervene in a good way, but ended up with a negative outcome (for existing users, who failed to take the hint).
If weird data comes in, do not immediately dismiss it as rogue
1. Look at the data
2. Take a deep breath. Dismiss your normalcy bias. Look again. Be honest with yourself
3. Crunch the numbers
Then you get a result which might be quite accurate. Let us pray that Max Tegmark, even if accurate in his probabilities, is wrong in his worst case scenario
It's been going on 8 months and I still don't get why some people like that think 'urging de-escalation' is some grand moral position in of itself. This isn't a war of words, it's a war, practical de-escalation surely requires some pretty significant and concrete steps and willingness, most particularly from the aggressor. In the absence of that willingness simply urging peace or de-escalation is as impactful as singing kumbaya.
So the question is what achieves that willingness for the aggressor, and its hard to see how the suggestions of Musk, or Stop the War, of to some degree rewarding the aggressor, achieves that willingness - that happened 8 years ago, and led directly to the latest invasion.
Now, that doesn't mean anyone worried about nuclear catastrophe is inherently wrong, but the Musks of this world are also not coming in with some moral or coldly practical take when their interventions are one stop above from 'give peace a chance'.
I was talking more generally about predictions, and the need for an open mind in a Time of Weirdness
Nuclear Disaster is now a very real threat, and we have to accept that, and factor it in, even if it scares us
But in the narrower scheme of the Ukraine war: yes. There was a very articulate post by @TheValiant earlier on which explained why we now have no choice but to support Ukraine. Because even if we don't Ukraine will continue anyway. I can see the logic. We have to face down Putin, might as well do it with Kyiv
It is a tremendously delicate decision. I am really not sure we should support Ukraine in retaking Crimea, if it comes to it
You’re still barking up the wrong tree. If there’s a WMD escalation it will be with nerve agent, not nukes. Putin crossed that “redline” before in Syria and there was no consequence from the West at all. I think he’d be right in thinking the Black Sea fleet would be left untouched by the US if he did that. Although the US would find other ways to indirectly negate the impact of course. But he might do it anyway just to be a tough guy and because some will (incorrectly) persuade him it can change the course of the battlefield.
What’s against use of nerve agent? The open countryside fighting that is characterising this phase of the war is not well suited to it. Wind can change after all. If we get to lots of urban warfare then perhaps it comes into play.
You'd have a point if I had argued otherwise
I have said for the last 48 hours I expect Putin's reaction to Kerch will be non-nuke but dramatic. He will only go tactical nuke if completely cornered; he is not that, yet
A missile assault on Odesa, a chemical/nerve thing, who knows? It will be something
And if I am wrong and he does nothing at all I will come on here and confess my idiocy, and also give sincere thanks. That means he is a paper tiger, and we probably have the mastery of him
I’ve only been dipping in and out here recently so probably missed the timing detail of your fear. I think he’s using Kerch to justify an internal purge (truck came from Russia!), which really is him shaping the political battlefield for ignoble retreat. As I said earlier, your MIT professors believes it’s virtually certain he cannot survive if he loses the war. I disagree.
I thought your analysis of the MIT guy's analysis was reasonable. The prof is too pessimistic. It is - as you say - not 100% certain Putin falls if his war is lost. More like 60-80%? And so on
Add these altogether and the 1 in 6 prediction of a total nuclear war is seriously over-gloomy
Nonetheless it is now in the realms of the possible. If forced to put figures on it I'd say 3% chance of all out nuclear war and 15% chance of a tactical nuke. Actually considerably down from the last week, due to his lack of reaction over Kerch. So far
Doesn't the lack of reaction over Kerch make you question your theories? As has been discussed the Kerch bridge is totemic for Putin. It is the physical symbol of Crimea being reunited with Russia. Putin personally opened it by driving a truck across etc etc. And everything we know about his personality says that he hates losing face. So he surely wanted a massive reaction.
And yet... nothing. There hasn't been a reaction. Why not? The only answer is obvious. It's because Putin does not have free reign. He is held back by the KGB-oligarch nexus in Moscow and they won't let him go any further.
They are holding Putin in office but not in power, as the fall guy when Russian troops get POW'd in huge numbers in Kherson. The Russian army being bussed back to the border sans weapons will require a head to roll.
The Russian people will be satisfied with Putin's. The revolution will fizzle out with him. The rest of the military and the oligarch's can stay in place without the barricades being erected.
That seems unlikely. Traditionally, when unpopular governments are overthrown there is a violent clearout of the whole lot. The decision to overthrow the discredited Honecker in East Germany didn’t save Egon Krenz and his allies from a prison sentence.
Yes, although it is notable how many of the people who rose to the top of East European politics in the years after the fall of the Wall were former senior communists. And as I recall, in Bulgaria and Slovakia they got back into power for a while? Russian society doesn’t have any of the bulwarks that democracy needs to take root and survive - independent media, independent judiciary, any cultural history or tradition of democratic participation, etc. - hence the economically-obsessed reforms of the 1990s led to a mafia economy rather than an open one. It is hard to see many seeds in Russia that would lead to a better outcome this time around?
Comments
@bankofengland is doubling the size of its daily emergency auctions to buy long-dated govt bonds from £5bn to £10bn.
Also announces a new temporary special repo facility for banks affected by what's happening in this corner of the pensions market https://twitter.com/EdConwaySky/status/1579356792089640960/photo/1
Their messaging about British lamb now being sold in America being a great example. That the EU ban was lifted by the Americans months ago seems not to matter - we are last. Again. And the volume of sales a fraction of what we have already lost. They want growth? Rejoin the EEA.
By many reports, he’s severely short of long-range missiles, so there’s a limit to just how much he can terrorise Ukraine.
That said, he’s *really* pissed off at that bridge going down. He once boasted that it was the most defended bridge in the world, and that Russia had trained dolphins to attack frogmen!
On balance I like him more than I dislike him. Anyway, if we persecuted people because of shitposting then Sean / Lady_G / eadric / Leon would keep getting the ban hammer...
NEW THREAD
The solution is not remove the drivers. The solution is pay people properly. And not just the tube drivers, all the other people on scandal wages being tret like scum by this government.
At some point though, as the cost of labour increases and the cost of capital and construction falls, it will be worth the effort. There was a missed opportunity during the pandemic, for a lot of overdue works to be completed on the existing infrastructure.
London transport got to stage 3 automation decades before anyone else but to go driverless requires level 5 automation and you will never get there from existing systems without rebuilding them
On issue du jour, I don’t have normalcy bias. I’ve thought about it a lot. And just disagree.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/liz-truss-tory-donor-leadership-b1985560.html
The guys actively malign.
(*) Who hilariously turned out to be a fraudster.
There are a few cautionary words to add to this, though, in terms of government regulation. The US decided to regulate the market earlier this year by banning "yield generating" (i.e. paid for by ponzi) accounts earlier this year. But only NEW accounts.
In the early stages of the ponzi, it was possible to argue Celsius was legit (acting as a hedge fund, investing customers money and returning with the yield - about 6% IIRC). But by the later stages, even when it was much more obvious, the government intervention had the impact that a lot of users whose old yield generating accounts were "grandfathered in" decided to keep them, because they wouldn't be able to re-open their accounts if they closed them, due to the government intervention only applying to new accounts.
An interesting example of where the government tried to intervene in a good way, but ended up with a negative outcome (for existing users, who failed to take the hint).