Should people in Britain really be starving? I'm sure I saw a 1kg bag of rice going for 35p in Tesco not that long ago. Now you might be malnourished if you rely on that but actually starving? With the number of goods available it's possible that people aren't necessarily aware of what the cheapest staples are.
Of course, once you've got your bag of rice you then need to pay for the energy to cook it.
But the general point is taken. Compared to Michael Buerk's iconic images of skeletal children breathing their last on the barren plains of Ethiopia, who cares about the odd case of rickets here and there?
With fewer than a hundred cases a year, yes, you can afford not to think about rickets. It certainly has next to nothing to do with inflation.
The other relevant factor here is that the minimum wage has risen far faster than other wages. No one is pretending that life is easy for people at the bottom but in a lot of industries inflation outpacing wage increases has led to skilled jobs being paid at little more than the minimum wage. There was for instance the tik tok video of the single, 37 year old primary school teacher with 4 years experience pointing out that after his overheads are paid, he has £177 per month spending money, from a 33k per year job.... in Redcar.
You’d want to know what the overheads were though, to judge.
It was in the video. But roughly... Rent, bills, car, petrol, food, gym, netflix. 600+300+300+150+400+50+25....
He had a solution which was to go to dubai, pay no tax, have the same job with all your accommodation paid for you, and his disposable income rose from £177 to well over £1000 per month.
This guy?
“The exercise in totting up monthly goings in the UK and UAE has since notched more than four million views. In the video, the primary schoolteacher shows how much he would have earned in the UK after the many deductions, such as taxes, rent, car finance and food, from a salary of £33,850 ($41,074) — leaving him just £171.94 for socialising and saving each month.
“But in Dubai, thanks to free accommodation provided by his employer and no income tax, he has £1,604 left each month from his £32,460 annual salary after paying bills and buying food.
“ “I get all [year] round sunshine, and I get health care provided by my employer and I only have to pay 20 per cent [insurance] co-pay, which means anything as an outpatient, I pay 20 per cent for, but I get to see a doctor or a dentist on the day,” the 36-year-old from Redcar says in the video.”
There’s a huge shortage of native English speaking teachers out here, both for local state schools and expat private schools.
Yeah, that was the video. I just like the way he was saying 'im not going to listen to lectures about avocados'. (substitute this for netflix/gym membership etc); he just moves to Dubai to get paid properly. If you think about it as well, this all comes alongside lectures from Ofsted etc about needing 'to remove failing teachers', who make teachers lives hell (probably not the case in Dubai) and complaints about a 'shortage of teachers' and 'teachers leaving the profession'. The expectations foisted on young people is just irrational. It isn't too hard to just join the dots.... pay teachers better and improve their conditions and this won't be an issue.
Should people in Britain really be starving? I'm sure I saw a 1kg bag of rice going for 35p in Tesco not that long ago. Now you might be malnourished if you rely on that but actually starving? With the number of goods available it's possible that people aren't necessarily aware of what the cheapest staples are.
Of course, once you've got your bag of rice you then need to pay for the energy to cook it.
But the general point is taken. Compared to Michael Buerk's iconic images of skeletal children breathing their last on the barren plains of Ethiopia, who cares about the odd case of rickets here and there?
With fewer than a hundred cases a year, yes, you can afford not to think about rickets. It certainly has next to nothing to do with inflation.
The other relevant factor here is that the minimum wage has risen far faster than other wages. No one is pretending that life is easy for people at the bottom but in a lot of industries inflation outpacing wage increases has led to skilled jobs being paid at little more than the minimum wage. There was for instance the tik tok video of the single, 37 year old primary school teacher with 4 years experience pointing out that after his overheads are paid, he has £177 per month spending money, from a 33k per year job.... in Redcar.
You’d want to know what the overheads were though, to judge.
It was in the video. But roughly... Rent, bills, car, petrol, food, gym, netflix. 600+300+300+150+400+50+25....
He had a solution which was to go to dubai, pay no tax, have the same job with all your accommodation paid for you, and his disposable income rose from £177 to well over £1000 per month.
This guy?
“The exercise in totting up monthly goings in the UK and UAE has since notched more than four million views. In the video, the primary schoolteacher shows how much he would have earned in the UK after the many deductions, such as taxes, rent, car finance and food, from a salary of £33,850 ($41,074) — leaving him just £171.94 for socialising and saving each month.
“But in Dubai, thanks to free accommodation provided by his employer and no income tax, he has £1,604 left each month from his £32,460 annual salary after paying bills and buying food.
“ “I get all [year] round sunshine, and I get health care provided by my employer and I only have to pay 20 per cent [insurance] co-pay, which means anything as an outpatient, I pay 20 per cent for, but I get to see a doctor or a dentist on the day,” the 36-year-old from Redcar says in the video.”
There’s a huge shortage of native English speaking teachers out here, both for local state schools and expat private schools.
Yeah, that was the video. I just like the way he was saying 'im not going to listen to lectures about avocados'. (substitute this for netflix/gym membership etc); he just moves to Dubai to get paid properly. If you think about it as well, this all comes alongside lectures from Ofsted etc about needing 'to remove failing teachers', who make teachers lives hell (probably not the case in Dubai) and complaints about a 'shortage of teachers' and 'teachers leaving the profession'. The expectations foisted on young people is just irrational. It isn't too hard to just join the dots.... pay teachers better and improve their conditions and this won't be an issue.
"In my view this is like 1997 where the tide has turned and the public want to see something different. The huge challenge the Tories face is that unlike some previous fights they are facing a Labour leader who while possibly being a bit boring is not one who is going to be easily undermined. He is not Jeremy Corbyn."
I really don't see a way back for the tories from this and Liz Truss has now come along to remind everyone just how awful it has been.
The tide has indeed turned and, like dear old King Canute, there is nothing Sunak and Co can do to stop it.
The big question is how popular is Starmer in Red Wall areas like Stoke-on-Trent and Grimsby.
Indeed. We are seeing both polling and detailed focus groups which appear to indicate that first time Tories in the red wall will likely be one time only Tories. Labour's challenge is will they sit on their hands, or revert back to type?
In many seats Labour win with a collapse in the 2019 Tory vote even if those voters stay at home. Tory voters sitting on their hands is the reason why Blair won a landslide in 1997...
Should people in Britain really be starving? I'm sure I saw a 1kg bag of rice going for 35p in Tesco not that long ago. Now you might be malnourished if you rely on that but actually starving? With the number of goods available it's possible that people aren't necessarily aware of what the cheapest staples are.
Of course, once you've got your bag of rice you then need to pay for the energy to cook it.
But the general point is taken. Compared to Michael Buerk's iconic images of skeletal children breathing their last on the barren plains of Ethiopia, who cares about the odd case of rickets here and there?
With fewer than a hundred cases a year, yes, you can afford not to think about rickets. It certainly has next to nothing to do with inflation.
The other relevant factor here is that the minimum wage has risen far faster than other wages. No one is pretending that life is easy for people at the bottom but in a lot of industries inflation outpacing wage increases has led to skilled jobs being paid at little more than the minimum wage. There was for instance the tik tok video of the single, 37 year old primary school teacher with 4 years experience pointing out that after his overheads are paid, he has £177 per month spending money, from a 33k per year job.... in Redcar.
You’d want to know what the overheads were though, to judge.
It was in the video. But roughly... Rent, bills, car, petrol, food, gym, netflix. 600+300+300+150+400+50+25....
He had a solution which was to go to dubai, pay no tax, have the same job with all your accommodation paid for you, and his disposable income rose from £177 to well over £1000 per month.
This guy?
“The exercise in totting up monthly goings in the UK and UAE has since notched more than four million views. In the video, the primary schoolteacher shows how much he would have earned in the UK after the many deductions, such as taxes, rent, car finance and food, from a salary of £33,850 ($41,074) — leaving him just £171.94 for socialising and saving each month.
“But in Dubai, thanks to free accommodation provided by his employer and no income tax, he has £1,604 left each month from his £32,460 annual salary after paying bills and buying food.
“ “I get all [year] round sunshine, and I get health care provided by my employer and I only have to pay 20 per cent [insurance] co-pay, which means anything as an outpatient, I pay 20 per cent for, but I get to see a doctor or a dentist on the day,” the 36-year-old from Redcar says in the video.”
There’s a huge shortage of native English speaking teachers out here, both for local state schools and expat private schools.
Yeah, that was the video. I just like the way he was saying 'im not going to listen to lectures about avocados'. (substitute this for netflix/gym membership etc); he just moves to Dubai to get paid properly. If you think about it as well, this all comes alongside lectures from Ofsted etc about needing 'to remove failing teachers', who make teachers lives hell (probably not the case in Dubai) and complaints about a 'shortage of teachers' and 'teachers leaving the profession'. The expectations foisted on young people is just irrational. It isn't too hard to just join the dots.... pay teachers better and improve their conditions and this won't be an issue.
This is more evidence that the tories are just out of date. You can't treat domestic staff like that and require them to go to court to get paid. It is a bad look.
AI presents a serious threat to Amazon's online retail dominance. Whoever can couple this with decent customer service has a real shot, if Amazon doesn't cannibalise their own business.
I'm informed this morning that Twitter ad revenue is trending to pre-takeover levels by the end of this month and the cost base has been cut by 60%. The growth rate will take it beyond pre-takeover by the end of March and that user revenue is far, far larger than it has ever been already.
Twitter's next valuation round may see it get a reasonably close to the purchase price once debt is included. I honestly wouldn't be surprised if Elon and crew get an IPO done in ~2026 at a higher valuation that what they bought it for, the gross margin at Twitter is looking incredible and there's been no real drawbacks to getting rid of all those people. In fact the word from tech investors seems to be that twitter's dev pipeline and feature pipeline are stronger now than before all the cuts because they got rid of all the million layers that prevented feature releases.
For all the shit he got, Elon Musk seems to have made this work and I wouldn't be surprised if when everything is counted up he ends up making a huge profit from the deal.
I'm informed this morning that Twitter ad revenue is trending to pre-takeover levels by the end of this month and the cost base has been cut by 60%. The growth rate will take it beyond pre-takeover by the end of March and that user revenue is far, far larger than it has ever been already.
Twitter's next valuation round may see it get a reasonably close to the purchase price once debt is included. I honestly wouldn't be surprised if Elon and crew get an IPO done in ~2026 at a higher valuation that what they bought it for, the gross margin at Twitter is looking incredible and there's been no real drawbacks to getting rid of all those people. In fact the word from tech investors seems to be that twitter's dev pipeline and feature pipeline are stronger now than before all the cuts because they got rid of all the million layers that prevented feature releases.
For all the shit he got, Elon Musk seems to have made this work and I wouldn't be surprised if when everything is counted up he ends up making a huge profit from the deal.
Too many of them still make you a twat, however. Although I can see how this might be a USP and bump up the issue price a smidge.
I am shocked and disgusted by the attack on in house compliance teams.
One of GB News’s leading presenters has quit after the channel tried to make him personally responsible for paying fines issued by the media regulator Ofcom.
Mark Steyn, who presented the station’s 8pm peak-time slot, is already subject to two investigations by the media regulator after he used his show to cast doubt on the safety of Covid vaccines.
The presenter’s departure has led some viewers of GB News – which has given airtime to conspiracy theorists warning of a globalist elite takeover – to suggest the channel has itself sold out to shadowy globalist forces.
Steyn, who has been off-air since last year after suffering two heart attacks, told fans on his personal website that the station bosses initially insisted he could not return unless a defibrillator was fitted in the studio.
He said this was fixed with a call to “Defibrillators R Us”, only for Angelos Frangopoulos, GB News’s chief executive, to demand Steyn agree to personally cover the costs of dealing with Ofcom and paying any fines for breaches of the broadcasting code. This is a highly unusual situation given the fines are the legal responsibility of the broadcast licence holder, not the individual presenter.
Steyn, who was employed on a freelance basis, said his response was that “you may be a homicidal maniac intent on bringing on a third fatal heart attack but you’ll have to do better than this”.
The presenter said he used to call GB News’s in-house compliance officer “Ofcom’s bitch” when they argued about what he was allowed to say on air.
It's nearly a year since Putin made that rambling speech setting out his plans for the future of Europe - the speech that put the wind up Sweden and Finland, and is conveniently forgotten by Lavrov.
For once he was being honest.
It's worth being remembered. By comparison the next British GE is small beer. It's Starmers to lose.
We saw a lot of exclamations from certain quarters on Twitter that they were going to leave the platform because of Musk . This was never going to happen . We saw the same faux outrage with Facebook .
I am shocked and disgusted by the attack on in house compliance teams.
One of GB News’s leading presenters has quit after the channel tried to make him personally responsible for paying fines issued by the media regulator Ofcom.
Mark Steyn, who presented the station’s 8pm peak-time slot, is already subject to two investigations by the media regulator after he used his show to cast doubt on the safety of Covid vaccines.
The presenter’s departure has led some viewers of GB News – which has given airtime to conspiracy theorists warning of a globalist elite takeover – to suggest the channel has itself sold out to shadowy globalist forces.
Steyn, who has been off-air since last year after suffering two heart attacks, told fans on his personal website that the station bosses initially insisted he could not return unless a defibrillator was fitted in the studio.
He said this was fixed with a call to “Defibrillators R Us”, only for Angelos Frangopoulos, GB News’s chief executive, to demand Steyn agree to personally cover the costs of dealing with Ofcom and paying any fines for breaches of the broadcasting code. This is a highly unusual situation given the fines are the legal responsibility of the broadcast licence holder, not the individual presenter.
Steyn, who was employed on a freelance basis, said his response was that “you may be a homicidal maniac intent on bringing on a third fatal heart attack but you’ll have to do better than this”.
The presenter said he used to call GB News’s in-house compliance officer “Ofcom’s bitch” when they argued about what he was allowed to say on air.
Course. Time for a change pretty soon becomes Long Past Time for a Change. Folk who bemoan a lack of Labour radicalism should note. Starmer isn't Blair.
Starmer isn't Blair, but that may be not such a bad thing.
@Richard_Tyndall I was discussing this with a Conservative member friend who came for dinner tonight - I know, I know, I can even entertain the other side. We both agreed that the tories are in for a hammering but of course had different views about what happens after that. My take is that we HAVE to rejoin the EU. There is a desperate shortage of flexible labour in a free trade zone. If Labour can make the case for this then it will go some way to helping get this country's economy back on track.
I don't see a solution for the UK economy but to rejoin the single market, WITH freedom of movement.
Did you see my response to you from a few days ago? Rejoining the single market won't recreate the labour market conditions of the decade after 2004 because the A8 member states are now much more prosperous. This trend would have happened with or without Brexit.
Probably true - though Brexit provided a large one off shock which can hardly be described as part of a trend. (And zero Brexiteers were arguing your point ahead of Brexit.)
It was a pleasant one-off shock for many unskilled and semi-skilled workers in the UK, many of whom now earn 20-30% more than they did under FoM, when the legal minimum wage was seen as the maximum wage in a huge number of industries. Those people will be paying more taxes and claiming fewer benefits now, than they did two or three years ago.
Whatever the particular case, though, if you look at the UK statistics for the last decade, it's undeniable that the percentage of those on the lowest hourly rates has fallen since 2016 (though there were already some signs of that trend pre-Brexit - and also it's more true of those paid by the hour than those paid weekly).
The argument is really about how fast that trend would have happened anyway, and whether the economic shock of Brexit was worth it.
Actually, I feel that the argument should be whether you only earn decent money after working 40 hour weeks in an economy where 35 is more the norm.
Are we really wanting to head for American levels of work attendance where 60+ hours per week is considered the norm and everyone is terrified to take any time off? Even for maternity?
Just from a purely tactical perspective the “that individual is a rapist” argument is just so obviously a fudge it will be incredibly unpopular. Just say Bryson is a woman but will be treated as a rapist. Make your bed & lie in it. Refusing to gender Bryson reveals so much.
I'm informed this morning that Twitter ad revenue is trending to pre-takeover levels by the end of this month and the cost base has been cut by 60%. The growth rate will take it beyond pre-takeover by the end of March and that user revenue is far, far larger than it has ever been already.
Twitter's next valuation round may see it get a reasonably close to the purchase price once debt is included. I honestly wouldn't be surprised if Elon and crew get an IPO done in ~2026 at a higher valuation that what they bought it for, the gross margin at Twitter is looking incredible and there's been no real drawbacks to getting rid of all those people. In fact the word from tech investors seems to be that twitter's dev pipeline and feature pipeline are stronger now than before all the cuts because they got rid of all the million layers that prevented feature releases.
For all the shit he got, Elon Musk seems to have made this work and I wouldn't be surprised if when everything is counted up he ends up making a huge profit from the deal.
If you believe Musk, that is.
That should not be a given.
(And this is important. Musk lies. He has been proven to lie. It therefore becomes a question of how much the markets should believe him. And whilst he continues to post profits, they probably will.)
I am shocked and disgusted by the attack on in house compliance teams.
One of GB News’s leading presenters has quit after the channel tried to make him personally responsible for paying fines issued by the media regulator Ofcom.
Mark Steyn, who presented the station’s 8pm peak-time slot, is already subject to two investigations by the media regulator after he used his show to cast doubt on the safety of Covid vaccines.
The presenter’s departure has led some viewers of GB News – which has given airtime to conspiracy theorists warning of a globalist elite takeover – to suggest the channel has itself sold out to shadowy globalist forces.
Steyn, who has been off-air since last year after suffering two heart attacks, told fans on his personal website that the station bosses initially insisted he could not return unless a defibrillator was fitted in the studio.
He said this was fixed with a call to “Defibrillators R Us”, only for Angelos Frangopoulos, GB News’s chief executive, to demand Steyn agree to personally cover the costs of dealing with Ofcom and paying any fines for breaches of the broadcasting code. This is a highly unusual situation given the fines are the legal responsibility of the broadcast licence holder, not the individual presenter.
Steyn, who was employed on a freelance basis, said his response was that “you may be a homicidal maniac intent on bringing on a third fatal heart attack but you’ll have to do better than this”.
The presenter said he used to call GB News’s in-house compliance officer “Ofcom’s bitch” when they argued about what he was allowed to say on air.
Should people in Britain really be starving? I'm sure I saw a 1kg bag of rice going for 35p in Tesco not that long ago. Now you might be malnourished if you rely on that but actually starving? With the number of goods available it's possible that people aren't necessarily aware of what the cheapest staples are.
Of course, once you've got your bag of rice you then need to pay for the energy to cook it.
But the general point is taken. Compared to Michael Buerk's iconic images of skeletal children breathing their last on the barren plains of Ethiopia, who cares about the odd case of rickets here and there?
With fewer than a hundred cases a year, yes, you can afford not to think about rickets. It certainly has next to nothing to do with inflation.
The other relevant factor here is that the minimum wage has risen far faster than other wages. No one is pretending that life is easy for people at the bottom but in a lot of industries inflation outpacing wage increases has led to skilled jobs being paid at little more than the minimum wage. There was for instance the tik tok video of the single, 37 year old primary school teacher with 4 years experience pointing out that after his overheads are paid, he has £177 per month spending money, from a 33k per year job.... in Redcar.
You’d want to know what the overheads were though, to judge.
It was in the video. But roughly... Rent, bills, car, petrol, food, gym, netflix. 600+300+300+150+400+50+25....
He had a solution which was to go to dubai, pay no tax, have the same job with all your accommodation paid for you, and his disposable income rose from £177 to well over £1000 per month.
This guy?
“The exercise in totting up monthly goings in the UK and UAE has since notched more than four million views. In the video, the primary schoolteacher shows how much he would have earned in the UK after the many deductions, such as taxes, rent, car finance and food, from a salary of £33,850 ($41,074) — leaving him just £171.94 for socialising and saving each month.
“But in Dubai, thanks to free accommodation provided by his employer and no income tax, he has £1,604 left each month from his £32,460 annual salary after paying bills and buying food.
“ “I get all [year] round sunshine, and I get health care provided by my employer and I only have to pay 20 per cent [insurance] co-pay, which means anything as an outpatient, I pay 20 per cent for, but I get to see a doctor or a dentist on the day,” the 36-year-old from Redcar says in the video.”
There’s a huge shortage of native English speaking teachers out here, both for local state schools and expat private schools.
Yeah, that was the video. I just like the way he was saying 'im not going to listen to lectures about avocados'. (substitute this for netflix/gym membership etc); he just moves to Dubai to get paid properly. If you think about it as well, this all comes alongside lectures from Ofsted etc about needing 'to remove failing teachers', who make teachers lives hell (probably not the case in Dubai) and complaints about a 'shortage of teachers' and 'teachers leaving the profession'. The expectations foisted on young people is just irrational. It isn't too hard to just join the dots.... pay teachers better and improve their conditions and this won't be an issue.
This is more evidence that the tories are just out of date. You can't treat domestic staff like that and require them to go to court to get paid. It is a bad look.
This is just the Tory worldview in action. Either you are a chum or you are staff.
Just from a purely tactical perspective the “that individual is a rapist” argument is just so obviously a fudge it will be incredibly unpopular. Just say Bryson is a woman but will be treated as a rapist. Make your bed & lie in it. Refusing to gender Bryson reveals so much.
Is Nicola Sturgeon losing the room? There are signs she is. The first minister, high on her supply of self-righteousness, produced an extraordinary performance at a press conference in Edinburgh today. We have three sexes in Scotland now: male, female and rapist. That being so, it does not matter if Isla Bryson, the double rapist formerly known as Adam Graham, is a man or a woman. Bryson is a rapist and only a rapist.
This, at any rate, was the first minister’s latest line. Last week she seemed to indicate some sympathy for the view that Bryson, a trans woman, was not perhaps as unavoidably committed to being a woman as, say, the first minister herself. Today, however, Bryson was very much a “she”, albeit a woman now incarcerated in a male prison.
I am shocked and disgusted by the attack on in house compliance teams.
One of GB News’s leading presenters has quit after the channel tried to make him personally responsible for paying fines issued by the media regulator Ofcom.
Mark Steyn, who presented the station’s 8pm peak-time slot, is already subject to two investigations by the media regulator after he used his show to cast doubt on the safety of Covid vaccines.
The presenter’s departure has led some viewers of GB News – which has given airtime to conspiracy theorists warning of a globalist elite takeover – to suggest the channel has itself sold out to shadowy globalist forces.
Steyn, who has been off-air since last year after suffering two heart attacks, told fans on his personal website that the station bosses initially insisted he could not return unless a defibrillator was fitted in the studio.
He said this was fixed with a call to “Defibrillators R Us”, only for Angelos Frangopoulos, GB News’s chief executive, to demand Steyn agree to personally cover the costs of dealing with Ofcom and paying any fines for breaches of the broadcasting code. This is a highly unusual situation given the fines are the legal responsibility of the broadcast licence holder, not the individual presenter.
Steyn, who was employed on a freelance basis, said his response was that “you may be a homicidal maniac intent on bringing on a third fatal heart attack but you’ll have to do better than this”.
The presenter said he used to call GB News’s in-house compliance officer “Ofcom’s bitch” when they argued about what he was allowed to say on air.
You’re like a cross between the Stop Breeeeexit Man and the Goon Show.
The Goon Show?
Many of your references don't ring true for a 20 something girl about town. The "Confessions" reference earlier busted you as a 62 year old Wellingborough plasterer called Keith.
Course. Time for a change pretty soon becomes Long Past Time for a Change. Folk who bemoan a lack of Labour radicalism should note. Starmer isn't Blair.
Starmer isn't Blair, but that may be not such a bad thing.
Well, for example, Starmer didn't go to a posh public school.
Eh? Starmer's old school is an independent HMC school.
He is the first Labour leader to have gone to public school since Blair
Well now, you are the one banging on about every clever kid should have access to a grammar school education, and here we are with the wrong sort of clever kid, and you think he should have transferred to a sink comp when the school became more exclusive.
You are no meritocrat, you are a shameless elitist.
Of course I know about clockwork orange and goon show etc - I went to art college! If it’s 60’s 70’s I’m all over it.
It’s not the only confessions film I’ve seen! The humour is bright and sunny, the tits are great, and it’s probably realistic, I bet window cleaners and tradesman can tell a few stories!
She suddenly appears there in just stockings, a basque and no knickers and says her husband won’t be home for three hours - what you going to do Mex, make your apologies and leave and mail the invoice for the blocked sink?
Talking of stories, the “I” says Labour fear Boris returning and getting a hung Parliament. Are they really in tune with Labour fearing that, or do journalists just make this up?
Forty years too late for me Moon Dance, and back in the day I'd have hi-tailed it out of there, I was no Timmy Lea.
As for Johnson. I don't see the Emperor's New Clothes but plenty do. The irony of many of Sunak's problems is Johnson was the architect. Are there still enough voters who see the tailored finery or just a fat naked blob? I am not sure.
You’re like a cross between the Stop Breeeeexit Man and the Goon Show.
The Goon Show?
Many of your references don't ring true for a 20 something girl about town. The "Confessions" reference earlier busted you as a 62 year old Wellingborough plasterer called Keith.
Course. Time for a change pretty soon becomes Long Past Time for a Change. Folk who bemoan a lack of Labour radicalism should note. Starmer isn't Blair.
Starmer isn't Blair, but that may be not such a bad thing.
Well, for example, Starmer didn't go to a posh public school.
Eh? Starmer's old school is an independent HMC school.
He is the first Labour leader to have gone to public school since Blair
Well now, you are the one banging on about every clever kid should have access to a grammar school education, and here we are with the wrong sort of clever kid, and you think he should have transferred to a sink comp when the school became more exclusive.
You are no meritocrat, you are a shameless elitist.
Of course I know about clockwork orange and goon show etc - I went to art college! If it’s 60’s 70’s I’m all over it.
It’s not the only confessions film I’ve seen! The humour is bright and sunny, the tits are great, and it’s probably realistic, I bet window cleaners and tradesman can tell a few stories!
She suddenly appears there in just stockings, a basque and no knickers and says her husband won’t be home for three hours - what you going to do Mex, make your apologies and leave and mail the invoice for the blocked sink?
Talking of stories, the “I” says Labour fear Boris returning and getting a hung Parliament. Are they really in tune with Labour fearing that, or do journalists just make this up?
Forty years too late for me Moon Dance, and back in the day I'd have hi-tailed it out of there, I was no Timmy Lea.
As for Johnson. I don't see the Emperor's New Clothes but plenty do. The irony of many of Sunak's problems is Johnson was the architect. Are there still enough voters who see the tailored finery or just a fat naked blob? I am not sure.
The Confessions films were erotic comedies that were neither erotic nor comedies.
I'm informed this morning that Twitter ad revenue is trending to pre-takeover levels by the end of this month and the cost base has been cut by 60%. The growth rate will take it beyond pre-takeover by the end of March and that user revenue is far, far larger than it has ever been already.
Twitter's next valuation round may see it get a reasonably close to the purchase price once debt is included. I honestly wouldn't be surprised if Elon and crew get an IPO done in ~2026 at a higher valuation that what they bought it for, the gross margin at Twitter is looking incredible and there's been no real drawbacks to getting rid of all those people. In fact the word from tech investors seems to be that twitter's dev pipeline and feature pipeline are stronger now than before all the cuts because they got rid of all the million layers that prevented feature releases.
For all the shit he got, Elon Musk seems to have made this work and I wouldn't be surprised if when everything is counted up he ends up making a huge profit from the deal.
They’re also planning to add ‘corporate’ verification starting at $1,000/month, which should both generate serious revenue, and diversify revenue away from the fickle advertising market. Presumably that top tier comes with some decent analytics, and they only need 10k customers for it to make $120m in annual revenue.
I am shocked and disgusted by the attack on in house compliance teams.
One of GB News’s leading presenters has quit after the channel tried to make him personally responsible for paying fines issued by the media regulator Ofcom.
Mark Steyn, who presented the station’s 8pm peak-time slot, is already subject to two investigations by the media regulator after he used his show to cast doubt on the safety of Covid vaccines.
The presenter’s departure has led some viewers of GB News – which has given airtime to conspiracy theorists warning of a globalist elite takeover – to suggest the channel has itself sold out to shadowy globalist forces.
Steyn, who has been off-air since last year after suffering two heart attacks, told fans on his personal website that the station bosses initially insisted he could not return unless a defibrillator was fitted in the studio.
He said this was fixed with a call to “Defibrillators R Us”, only for Angelos Frangopoulos, GB News’s chief executive, to demand Steyn agree to personally cover the costs of dealing with Ofcom and paying any fines for breaches of the broadcasting code. This is a highly unusual situation given the fines are the legal responsibility of the broadcast licence holder, not the individual presenter.
Steyn, who was employed on a freelance basis, said his response was that “you may be a homicidal maniac intent on bringing on a third fatal heart attack but you’ll have to do better than this”.
The presenter said he used to call GB News’s in-house compliance officer “Ofcom’s bitch” when they argued about what he was allowed to say on air.
Have they actually polled the GB News audience? Do either of the viewers really subscribe to this conspiracy stuff?
Yes they do, the GB News viewers believe any old nonsense, worse than the antivax nonsense, they also believe Brexit is a success.
The sole purpose of GBeebies is to continually gaslight people who have been rendered a sponge to keep the flame burning for whatever conspiracies the spiv set want the plebs to believe.
I was amazed to read that they have a compliance officer. Isn't OFCOM just part of the remoaner liberal elite which is ruining the lives of all the loyal Clacton-on-Sea GBeebies viewers?
I am shocked and disgusted by the attack on in house compliance teams.
One of GB News’s leading presenters has quit after the channel tried to make him personally responsible for paying fines issued by the media regulator Ofcom.
Mark Steyn, who presented the station’s 8pm peak-time slot, is already subject to two investigations by the media regulator after he used his show to cast doubt on the safety of Covid vaccines.
The presenter’s departure has led some viewers of GB News – which has given airtime to conspiracy theorists warning of a globalist elite takeover – to suggest the channel has itself sold out to shadowy globalist forces.
Steyn, who has been off-air since last year after suffering two heart attacks, told fans on his personal website that the station bosses initially insisted he could not return unless a defibrillator was fitted in the studio.
He said this was fixed with a call to “Defibrillators R Us”, only for Angelos Frangopoulos, GB News’s chief executive, to demand Steyn agree to personally cover the costs of dealing with Ofcom and paying any fines for breaches of the broadcasting code. This is a highly unusual situation given the fines are the legal responsibility of the broadcast licence holder, not the individual presenter.
Steyn, who was employed on a freelance basis, said his response was that “you may be a homicidal maniac intent on bringing on a third fatal heart attack but you’ll have to do better than this”.
The presenter said he used to call GB News’s in-house compliance officer “Ofcom’s bitch” when they argued about what he was allowed to say on air.
He may occasionally be a bit zany, including on vaccines it seems but Steyn is a brilliant writer, here and in North America but also one of the brightest and most erudite presenters they had on GB News.
So more a loss for them than him. Portillo may be the only presenter they have who is brighter than Steyn but he isn't as funny as Steyn can be
Just from a purely tactical perspective the “that individual is a rapist” argument is just so obviously a fudge it will be incredibly unpopular. Just say Bryson is a woman but will be treated as a rapist. Make your bed & lie in it. Refusing to gender Bryson reveals so much.
Is Nicola Sturgeon losing the room? There are signs she is. The first minister, high on her supply of self-righteousness, produced an extraordinary performance at a press conference in Edinburgh today. We have three sexes in Scotland now: male, female and rapist. That being so, it does not matter if Isla Bryson, the double rapist formerly known as Adam Graham, is a man or a woman. Bryson is a rapist and only a rapist.
This, at any rate, was the first minister’s latest line. Last week she seemed to indicate some sympathy for the view that Bryson, a trans woman, was not perhaps as unavoidably committed to being a woman as, say, the first minister herself. Today, however, Bryson was very much a “she”, albeit a woman now incarcerated in a male prison.
Unusual for an own goal to be played in advance in 4k, HD slow motion months before it actually happens, but here we have an example
The WAAAH! Transphobe! contributors who add so much to this site should be required by convention to preface every post with a statement of their own personal position on the Isla m/w/r issue.
I'm informed this morning that Twitter ad revenue is trending to pre-takeover levels by the end of this month and the cost base has been cut by 60%. The growth rate will take it beyond pre-takeover by the end of March and that user revenue is far, far larger than it has ever been already.
Twitter's next valuation round may see it get a reasonably close to the purchase price once debt is included. I honestly wouldn't be surprised if Elon and crew get an IPO done in ~2026 at a higher valuation that what they bought it for, the gross margin at Twitter is looking incredible and there's been no real drawbacks to getting rid of all those people. In fact the word from tech investors seems to be that twitter's dev pipeline and feature pipeline are stronger now than before all the cuts because they got rid of all the million layers that prevented feature releases.
For all the shit he got, Elon Musk seems to have made this work and I wouldn't be surprised if when everything is counted up he ends up making a huge profit from the deal.
Can he please come in and remove the million unnecessary layers in our government and health service?
In case you missed it, you’re losing hundreds of mobliks and a dozen tanks every day in Ukraine at the moment. Not too sure there’s much left of the once-mighty Russian military to go around.
What gets me are the idiots - and idiots are a nice term for them - who excuse Russia's actions. It's not their fault. It's ours (wrong). We promised no eastwards NATO expansion (wrong). The Ukrainians are Nazis (wrong). Russia deserves a hinterland for protection (wrong). wibble wibble Stepan Bandera (wrong). Russia wants peace (wrong). We 'poked' Russia into this war (wrong). The war needs to end now (wrong, sadly).
All you need to do is listen to what Lavrov and Putin say to see the real cause of this war: Russian fascist imperialism. Whatever we said or did, they would have made a play for Ukraine or another state. Because that's their world view.
You can read exactly those arguments from the MAGA’s.
Keep up the “privately educated Starmer” attacks please. It’s pathetic, and possibly worth even more vote share for Labour.
It wasn't an attack, just pointing out Labour will likely have only won general elections under privately educated leaders in the last 49 years if Starmer wins next time.
The Tories have won majorities under 2 state educated leaders in that time by contrast, Thatcher and Major
Keep up the “privately educated Starmer” attacks please. It’s pathetic, and possibly worth even more vote share for Labour.
It wasn't an attack, just pointing out Labour will likely have only won general elections under privately educated leaders in the last 49 years if Starmer wins next time.
The Tories have won majorities under 2 state educated leaders in that time by contrast, Thatcher and Major and most seats with the state educated May
Indeed. The endless succession of Eton Tories proves how much more working class they are than Labour.
I'm informed this morning that Twitter ad revenue is trending to pre-takeover levels by the end of this month and the cost base has been cut by 60%. The growth rate will take it beyond pre-takeover by the end of March and that user revenue is far, far larger than it has ever been already.
Twitter's next valuation round may see it get a reasonably close to the purchase price once debt is included. I honestly wouldn't be surprised if Elon and crew get an IPO done in ~2026 at a higher valuation that what they bought it for, the gross margin at Twitter is looking incredible and there's been no real drawbacks to getting rid of all those people. In fact the word from tech investors seems to be that twitter's dev pipeline and feature pipeline are stronger now than before all the cuts because they got rid of all the million layers that prevented feature releases.
For all the shit he got, Elon Musk seems to have made this work and I wouldn't be surprised if when everything is counted up he ends up making a huge profit from the deal.
Can he please come in and remove the million unnecessary layers in our government and health service?
Talking about war, the Gilmour Waters war is an interesting way to promote the Dark Side of the Moon 50th anniversary box set...
Why buy a box set? It’s all on Spotify.
Beats me. So many remasters sound horrible compared to early ones anyway. We don't need yet another repackage.
Agree. The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars sounded fantastic on my scratched old vinyl copy, especially when played at or near the instructed “To be played at maximum volume.”
On Spotify, remastered, on headphones, at reasonable “old man volume”, er… not so mindblowing.
Keep up the “privately educated Starmer” attacks please. It’s pathetic, and possibly worth even more vote share for Labour.
It wasn't an attack, just pointing out Labour will likely have only won general elections under privately educated leaders in the last 49 years if Starmer wins next time.
The Tories have won majorities under 2 state educated leaders in that time by contrast, Thatcher and Major
Starmer was privately educated in the same way May was at a comp.
Do you consider her to have had a comprehensive education?
Keep up the “privately educated Starmer” attacks please. It’s pathetic, and possibly worth even more vote share for Labour.
It wasn't an attack, just pointing out Labour will likely have only won general elections under privately educated leaders in the last 49 years if Starmer wins next time.
The Tories have won majorities under 2 state educated leaders in that time by contrast, Thatcher and Major and most seats with the state educated May
Indeed. The endless succession of Eton Tories proves how much more working class they are than Labour.
Theresa May went to a grammar school that became a comprehensive and won most seats. Truss went to a comprehensive as did Hague, Howard went to a grammar and IDS a secondary modern.
Thatcher and Major went to state schools and won majorities.
Labour by contrast to win most seats or a majority normally need a leader educated at private school. For example since 1945 Attlee and Blair went to private school as did Starmer.
Only Wilson is a fully state educated Labour leader to win most seats or a majority since 1945.
The only LD leader to lead his party into government also went to private school. Clegg was at Westminster
I am shocked and disgusted by the attack on in house compliance teams.
One of GB News’s leading presenters has quit after the channel tried to make him personally responsible for paying fines issued by the media regulator Ofcom.
Mark Steyn, who presented the station’s 8pm peak-time slot, is already subject to two investigations by the media regulator after he used his show to cast doubt on the safety of Covid vaccines.
The presenter’s departure has led some viewers of GB News – which has given airtime to conspiracy theorists warning of a globalist elite takeover – to suggest the channel has itself sold out to shadowy globalist forces.
Steyn, who has been off-air since last year after suffering two heart attacks, told fans on his personal website that the station bosses initially insisted he could not return unless a defibrillator was fitted in the studio.
He said this was fixed with a call to “Defibrillators R Us”, only for Angelos Frangopoulos, GB News’s chief executive, to demand Steyn agree to personally cover the costs of dealing with Ofcom and paying any fines for breaches of the broadcasting code. This is a highly unusual situation given the fines are the legal responsibility of the broadcast licence holder, not the individual presenter.
Steyn, who was employed on a freelance basis, said his response was that “you may be a homicidal maniac intent on bringing on a third fatal heart attack but you’ll have to do better than this”.
The presenter said he used to call GB News’s in-house compliance officer “Ofcom’s bitch” when they argued about what he was allowed to say on air.
Keep up the “privately educated Starmer” attacks please. It’s pathetic, and possibly worth even more vote share for Labour.
It wasn't an attack, just pointing out Labour will likely have only won general elections under privately educated leaders in the last 49 years if Starmer wins next time.
The Tories have won majorities under 2 state educated leaders in that time by contrast, Thatcher and Major and most seats with the state educated May
Indeed. The endless succession of Eton Tories proves how much more working class they are than Labour.
Theresa May went to a grammar school that became a comprehensive and won most seats. Truss went to a comprehensive as did Hague, Howard went to a grammar and IDS a secondary modern.
Thatcher and Major went to state schools and won majorities.
Labour by contrast to win most seats normally need a leader educated at private school. For example since 1945 Attlee and Blair went to privately school as did Starmer.
Only Wilson is a state educated Labour leader to win most seats or a majority
Technically Kesteven Grammar School for Girls was a private school at the time Thatcher went there. You either had to pay to attend it, or get a scholarship (funded by the local council). She got a scholarship.
This was in common with all grammar schools in the land, which were brought fully into the state sector in 1944 under the Butler Education Act.
Keep up the “privately educated Starmer” attacks please. It’s pathetic, and possibly worth even more vote share for Labour.
It wasn't an attack, just pointing out Labour will likely have only won general elections under privately educated leaders in the last 49 years if Starmer wins next time.
The Tories have won majorities under 2 state educated leaders in that time by contrast, Thatcher and Major and most seats with the state educated May
Indeed. The endless succession of Eton Tories proves how much more working class they are than Labour.
Theresa May went to a grammar school that became a comprehensive and won most seats. Truss went to a comprehensive as did Hague, Howard went to a grammar and IDS a secondary modern.
Thatcher and Major went to state schools and won majorities.
Labour by contrast to win most seats normally need a leader educated at private school. For example since 1945 Attlee and Blair went to privately school as did Starmer.
Only Wilson is a state educated Labour leader to win most seats or a majority
Technically Kesteven Grammar School for Girls was a private school at the time Thatcher went there. You either had to pay to attend it, or get a scholarship (funded by the local council). She got a scholarship.
This was in common with all grammar schools in the land, which were brought fully into the state sector in 1944 under the Butler Education Act.
Ah yes, this gives us a good opportunity to discuss the fact that Mrs Thatcher knew all about the evils of grammar schools, which is why she closed so many as Education Secretary and didn't reverse that during her stint as PM.
Now I have to disappear into a two hour meeting, which is a shame as we don't discuss grammar schools enough on PB.
I am shocked and disgusted by the attack on in house compliance teams.
One of GB News’s leading presenters has quit after the channel tried to make him personally responsible for paying fines issued by the media regulator Ofcom.
Mark Steyn, who presented the station’s 8pm peak-time slot, is already subject to two investigations by the media regulator after he used his show to cast doubt on the safety of Covid vaccines.
The presenter’s departure has led some viewers of GB News – which has given airtime to conspiracy theorists warning of a globalist elite takeover – to suggest the channel has itself sold out to shadowy globalist forces.
Steyn, who has been off-air since last year after suffering two heart attacks, told fans on his personal website that the station bosses initially insisted he could not return unless a defibrillator was fitted in the studio.
He said this was fixed with a call to “Defibrillators R Us”, only for Angelos Frangopoulos, GB News’s chief executive, to demand Steyn agree to personally cover the costs of dealing with Ofcom and paying any fines for breaches of the broadcasting code. This is a highly unusual situation given the fines are the legal responsibility of the broadcast licence holder, not the individual presenter.
Steyn, who was employed on a freelance basis, said his response was that “you may be a homicidal maniac intent on bringing on a third fatal heart attack but you’ll have to do better than this”.
The presenter said he used to call GB News’s in-house compliance officer “Ofcom’s bitch” when they argued about what he was allowed to say on air.
TBF Icke is a time served news and sport presenter (Midlands Today). He would at least drive the quality of GBN madcap conspiracy theory presentation up a notch or two.
I'm informed this morning that Twitter ad revenue is trending to pre-takeover levels by the end of this month and the cost base has been cut by 60%. The growth rate will take it beyond pre-takeover by the end of March and that user revenue is far, far larger than it has ever been already.
Twitter's next valuation round may see it get a reasonably close to the purchase price once debt is included. I honestly wouldn't be surprised if Elon and crew get an IPO done in ~2026 at a higher valuation that what they bought it for, the gross margin at Twitter is looking incredible and there's been no real drawbacks to getting rid of all those people. In fact the word from tech investors seems to be that twitter's dev pipeline and feature pipeline are stronger now than before all the cuts because they got rid of all the million layers that prevented feature releases.
For all the shit he got, Elon Musk seems to have made this work and I wouldn't be surprised if when everything is counted up he ends up making a huge profit from the deal.
I do feel a bit silly for taking at face value the statements from some tech sources that Musk had done so much damage to the company they wouldn't be able to keep the website running. I will be a bit more sceptical of these sources in the future.
The other thing it shows is the value of the grand old military principle of maintenance of aim. Musk had a plan, stuck to it despite all the warnings of imminent disaster, and, trusting Max as a reputable source, sounds like it is beginning to pay off.
It's interesting to compare this with Liz Truss' experience as PM. Die-hard Trussites will draw the lesson that, if only Conservative MPs had allowed Truss to see her plan through, then Britain would also soon be seeing the benefits of a bold plan seen through against stiff opposition.
I think the difference here is that Musk had the financial and organisational means to see his plan through, whereas Truss had not laid the groundwork for retaining the support of her MPs, or the trust of the financial markets, and so lacked the financial and organisational means to see her plan through. The fruitful comparison is with Thatcher, who prepared carefully for the Miner's Strike of 1984-5, and so she was able to see that through to a victorious conclusion.
This then brings us to Sunak, and the public sector strikes that he is now enduring, for longer than many would have thought possible, and yet with no preparation. Can he wait this out for longer than the Unions? I don't see any obvious means for the Unions to force his hand. By the time the May local elections damages his electoral credibility, it is possible that inflation will be considerably lower, and public support for higher pay settlements may erode.
I think Sunak is going to see this one through, and thereby avoid having to court more unpopularity later by imposing further tax rises to balance the books.
"In my view this is like 1997 where the tide has turned and the public want to see something different. The huge challenge the Tories face is that unlike some previous fights they are facing a Labour leader who while possibly being a bit boring is not one who is going to be easily undermined. He is not Jeremy Corbyn."
I really don't see a way back for the tories from this and Liz Truss has now come along to remind everyone just how awful it has been.
The tide has indeed turned and, like dear old King Canute, there is nothing Sunak and Co can do to stop it.
The big question is how popular is Starmer in Red Wall areas like Stoke-on-Trent and Grimsby.
If Redfield and Wilton are to be believed, Starmer is probably popular enough;
When asked which would be a better Prime Minister between Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer, Starmer (43%, +1) leads Sunak (33%, +1) by ten points. 24% (-2) say they don’t know.
As things stand Labour can't lose and Tories can't win for simple reasons, including 'Time For A Change'.
If (which I am not) a case were to be made for recovery from the Tories it would be this.
"We can't possibly win in the conventional sense, but in GEs someone has to win even if in ordinary reality they have all lost. Two things need to happen; Labour needs to self destruct - and this is always possible as long as the left exists; and the Tories have to be the default option for both the headbangers of the right and ordinary centrist democrats who want neither Trump nor Stalin running the country".
Sunak's mixture of centrist decency and showing a bit of ankle over ECHR etc, while obviously incoherent nonsense, may be that attempt. Let us hope the cause is hopeless.
Maybe it's just me but I really don't get what this is. How does this differ from the GBP in my bank accounts etc. now?
I don't imagine the NSI are sitting on a pile of £coins or £notes which represent my Premium Bond holdings, nor could my bank point to a vault that holds the money it's got recorded in my accounts.
No, they hold it digitally, surely?
If someone could explain what I'm missing I'd be grateful.
I'm informed this morning that Twitter ad revenue is trending to pre-takeover levels by the end of this month and the cost base has been cut by 60%. The growth rate will take it beyond pre-takeover by the end of March and that user revenue is far, far larger than it has ever been already.
Twitter's next valuation round may see it get a reasonably close to the purchase price once debt is included. I honestly wouldn't be surprised if Elon and crew get an IPO done in ~2026 at a higher valuation that what they bought it for, the gross margin at Twitter is looking incredible and there's been no real drawbacks to getting rid of all those people. In fact the word from tech investors seems to be that twitter's dev pipeline and feature pipeline are stronger now than before all the cuts because they got rid of all the million layers that prevented feature releases.
For all the shit he got, Elon Musk seems to have made this work and I wouldn't be surprised if when everything is counted up he ends up making a huge profit from the deal.
If you believe Musk, that is.
That should not be a given.
(And this is important. Musk lies. He has been proven to lie. It therefore becomes a question of how much the markets should believe him. And whilst he continues to post profits, they probably will.)
This doesn't come from Musk, it's from one of the lenders to the buyout who has seen the actual numbers. There's a reason Musk is also saying it but my information is independent to that.
Talking about war, the Gilmour Waters war is an interesting way to promote the Dark Side of the Moon 50th anniversary box set...
Why buy a box set? It’s all on Spotify.
A Spotify subscription will set you back 1200 Euros over ten years at current rates, and if you find that you've no more money to spend at that point you are left with nothing.
Pretty sure that if I spend 1200 Euros on actual copies of music that I own I would find myself in a better place in ten years time.
Should people in Britain really be starving? I'm sure I saw a 1kg bag of rice going for 35p in Tesco not that long ago. Now you might be malnourished if you rely on that but actually starving? With the number of goods available it's possible that people aren't necessarily aware of what the cheapest staples are.
Of course, once you've got your bag of rice you then need to pay for the energy to cook it.
But the general point is taken. Compared to Michael Buerk's iconic images of skeletal children breathing their last on the barren plains of Ethiopia, who cares about the odd case of rickets here and there?
With fewer than a hundred cases a year, yes, you can afford not to think about rickets. It certainly has next to nothing to do with inflation.
The other relevant factor here is that the minimum wage has risen far faster than other wages. No one is pretending that life is easy for people at the bottom but in a lot of industries inflation outpacing wage increases has led to skilled jobs being paid at little more than the minimum wage. There was for instance the tik tok video of the single, 37 year old primary school teacher with 4 years experience pointing out that after his overheads are paid, he has £177 per month spending money, from a 33k per year job.... in Redcar.
You’d want to know what the overheads were though, to judge.
It was in the video. But roughly... Rent, bills, car, petrol, food, gym, netflix. 600+300+300+150+400+50+25....
He had a solution which was to go to dubai, pay no tax, have the same job with all your accommodation paid for you, and his disposable income rose from £177 to well over £1000 per month.
When I worked for an oil company, way back, they actually boasted their pay was about 2/3 of market. For that you got a non-contributory, final salary pension.
And when you went overseas, accommodation, transport, food, school was all paid for. On the scale of house with car, driver, cook…
Tax was arranged for you - you paid little income tax. So you’d come back from a 3 year secondment with 3 years salary in the bank, mostly.
Some people would buy a house for rental and go and do another secondment, back to back. For their whole career.
I'm informed this morning that Twitter ad revenue is trending to pre-takeover levels by the end of this month and the cost base has been cut by 60%. The growth rate will take it beyond pre-takeover by the end of March and that user revenue is far, far larger than it has ever been already.
Twitter's next valuation round may see it get a reasonably close to the purchase price once debt is included. I honestly wouldn't be surprised if Elon and crew get an IPO done in ~2026 at a higher valuation that what they bought it for, the gross margin at Twitter is looking incredible and there's been no real drawbacks to getting rid of all those people. In fact the word from tech investors seems to be that twitter's dev pipeline and feature pipeline are stronger now than before all the cuts because they got rid of all the million layers that prevented feature releases.
For all the shit he got, Elon Musk seems to have made this work and I wouldn't be surprised if when everything is counted up he ends up making a huge profit from the deal.
If you believe Musk, that is.
That should not be a given.
(And this is important. Musk lies. He has been proven to lie. It therefore becomes a question of how much the markets should believe him. And whilst he continues to post profits, they probably will.)
This doesn't come from Musk, it's from one of the lenders to the buyout who has seen the actual numbers. There's a reason Musk is also saying it but my information is independent to that.
The fact that Twitter hasn't fallen over suggests Musk has been successful. I'm old enough to remember when people on here were saying that it was going to fall off line.
I'm informed this morning that Twitter ad revenue is trending to pre-takeover levels by the end of this month and the cost base has been cut by 60%. The growth rate will take it beyond pre-takeover by the end of March and that user revenue is far, far larger than it has ever been already.
Twitter's next valuation round may see it get a reasonably close to the purchase price once debt is included. I honestly wouldn't be surprised if Elon and crew get an IPO done in ~2026 at a higher valuation that what they bought it for, the gross margin at Twitter is looking incredible and there's been no real drawbacks to getting rid of all those people. In fact the word from tech investors seems to be that twitter's dev pipeline and feature pipeline are stronger now than before all the cuts because they got rid of all the million layers that prevented feature releases.
For all the shit he got, Elon Musk seems to have made this work and I wouldn't be surprised if when everything is counted up he ends up making a huge profit from the deal.
If you believe Musk, that is.
That should not be a given.
(And this is important. Musk lies. He has been proven to lie. It therefore becomes a question of how much the markets should believe him. And whilst he continues to post profits, they probably will.)
Explained, as always, in Yes Prime Minister:
Sir Desmond Glazebrook : They've broken the rules.
Sir Humphrey : What, you mean the insider trading regulations?
Sir Desmond Glazebrook : No.
Sir Humphrey : Oh. Well, that's one relief.
Sir Desmond Glazebrook : I mean of course they've broken those, but they've broken the basic, the basic rule of the City.
Sir Humphrey : I didn't know there were any.
Sir Desmond Glazebrook : Just the one. If you're incompetent you have to be honest, and if you're crooked you have to be clever. See, if you're honest, then when you make a pig's breakfast of things the chaps rally round and help you out.
Sir Humphrey : If you're crooked?
Sir Desmond Glazebrook : Well, if you're making good profits for them, chaps don't start asking questions; they're not stupid. Well, not that stupid.
Sir Humphrey : So the ideal is a firm which is honest and clever.
Sir Desmond Glazebrook : Yes. Let me know if you ever come across one, won't you.
"In my view this is like 1997 where the tide has turned and the public want to see something different. The huge challenge the Tories face is that unlike some previous fights they are facing a Labour leader who while possibly being a bit boring is not one who is going to be easily undermined. He is not Jeremy Corbyn."
I really don't see a way back for the tories from this and Liz Truss has now come along to remind everyone just how awful it has been.
The tide has indeed turned and, like dear old King Canute, there is nothing Sunak and Co can do to stop it.
The big question is how popular is Starmer in Red Wall areas like Stoke-on-Trent and Grimsby.
If Redfield and Wilton are to be believed, Starmer is probably popular enough;
When asked which would be a better Prime Minister between Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer, Starmer (43%, +1) leads Sunak (33%, +1) by ten points. 24% (-2) say they don’t know.
As things stand Labour can't lose and Tories can't win for simple reasons, including 'Time For A Change'.
If (which I am not) a case were to be made for recovery from the Tories it would be this.
"We can't possibly win in the conventional sense, but in GEs someone has to win even if in ordinary reality they have all lost. Two things need to happen; Labour needs to self destruct - and this is always possible as long as the left exists; and the Tories have to be the default option for both the headbangers of the right and ordinary centrist democrats who want neither Trump nor Stalin running the country".
Sunak's mixture of centrist decency and showing a bit of ankle over ECHR etc, while obviously incoherent nonsense, may be that attempt. Let us hope the cause is hopeless.
Add to that cuts in income tax rates, and you have the government's best (if narrow) chance of re-election. Hence the vice-like grip on public spending.
It does all require a degree of cynicism that I don't think Rishi quite possesses. The man they really need is Boris, only without the baggage Boris built up last time.
The time has come for Alex (definitely not Boris) de Pfeffel to have some plastic surgery and a hair transplant.
Maybe it's just me but I really don't get what this is. How does this differ from the GBP in my bank accounts etc. now?
I don't imagine the NSI are sitting on a pile of £coins or £notes which represent my Premium Bond holdings, nor could my bank point to a vault that holds the money it's got recorded in my accounts.
No, they hold it digitally, surely?
If someone could explain what I'm missing I'd be grateful.
It doesnt really answer your question but the Bank of England does have a vault with a bunch of £100m bank notes to cover Scottish and Northern Irish notes!
Maybe it's just me but I really don't get what this is. How does this differ from the GBP in my bank accounts etc. now?
I don't imagine the NSI are sitting on a pile of £coins or £notes which represent my Premium Bond holdings, nor could my bank point to a vault that holds the money it's got recorded in my accounts.
No, they hold it digitally, surely?
If someone could explain what I'm missing I'd be grateful.
Your bank holds your balance.
In a digital currency a company would hold your balance and it it would not be a bank. As the article says "Think Amazon, or Facebook, or maybe Chinese-owned Alibaba or Tiktok having a version of sterling"
Maybe it's just me but I really don't get what this is. How does this differ from the GBP in my bank accounts etc. now?
I don't imagine the NSI are sitting on a pile of £coins or £notes which represent my Premium Bond holdings, nor could my bank point to a vault that holds the money it's got recorded in my accounts.
No, they hold it digitally, surely?
If someone could explain what I'm missing I'd be grateful.
Digital currencies are programmable, i.e. the issuing State will, in theory, be able to determine what it can and can't be spent on.
Keep up the “privately educated Starmer” attacks please. It’s pathetic, and possibly worth even more vote share for Labour.
It's all a bit bizarre. The public have proven many times they don't have a problem voting for posh privately educated twonks, so long as they like them enough (or dislike the alternative enough). So even if he did it wouldn't matter, and it's definitely not firm enough to paint him as some hypocrite.
There are many credible attacks to make on Keir. This ain’t one of them.
It would be if he was portraying himself as an ex-miner who went down’ pit at 14 and learnt to write by practising with chalk on the coal seam.
But he isn’t. He’s portraying himself as an upper middle class lawyer. Which he is.
Talking about war, the Gilmour Waters war is an interesting way to promote the Dark Side of the Moon 50th anniversary box set...
Why buy a box set? It’s all on Spotify.
A Spotify subscription will set you back 1200 Euros over ten years at current rates, and if you find that you've no more money to spend at that point you are left with nothing.
Pretty sure that if I spend 1200 Euros on actual copies of music that I own I would find myself in a better place in ten years time.
But in which format are you buying? Vinyl? Went away, has come back with compression monster 180g reissues. CD? I know many many CDs are still out there. But its long since past its prime. The new thing is Dolby Atmos mixes, but DVD or DVD-A or BluRay?
Personally I still love Minidisc. Playing one as I type this...
Keep up the “privately educated Starmer” attacks please. It’s pathetic, and possibly worth even more vote share for Labour.
It wasn't an attack, just pointing out Labour will likely have only won general elections under privately educated leaders in the last 49 years if Starmer wins next time.
The Tories have won majorities under 2 state educated leaders in that time by contrast, Thatcher and Major and most seats with the state educated May
Indeed. The endless succession of Eton Tories proves how much more working class they are than Labour.
Theresa May went to a grammar school that became a comprehensive and won most seats. Truss went to a comprehensive as did Hague, Howard went to a grammar and IDS a secondary modern.
Thatcher and Major went to state schools and won majorities.
Labour by contrast to win most seats normally need a leader educated at private school. For example since 1945 Attlee and Blair went to privately school as did Starmer.
Only Wilson is a state educated Labour leader to win most seats or a majority
Technically Kesteven Grammar School for Girls was a private school at the time Thatcher went there. You either had to pay to attend it, or get a scholarship (funded by the local council). She got a scholarship.
This was in common with all grammar schools in the land, which were brought fully into the state sector in 1944 under the Butler Education Act.
Ah yes, this gives us a good opportunity to discuss the fact that Mrs Thatcher knew all about the evils of grammar schools, which is why she closed so many as Education Secretary and didn't reverse that during her stint as PM.
Now I have to disappear into a two hour meeting, which is a shame as we don't discuss grammar schools enough on PB.
She didn't. Wilson's government began the process of closing the grammar schools. Mostly Labour local authorities continued under Heath who ordered Thatcher, as his education secretary, to allow them to.
Few grammar schools closed when Thatcher was PM and under Major the number of pupils in grammar schools rose
Maybe it's just me but I really don't get what this is. How does this differ from the GBP in my bank accounts etc. now?
I don't imagine the NSI are sitting on a pile of £coins or £notes which represent my Premium Bond holdings, nor could my bank point to a vault that holds the money it's got recorded in my accounts.
No, they hold it digitally, surely?
If someone could explain what I'm missing I'd be grateful.
Your bank holds your balance.
In a digital currency a company would hold your balance and it it would not be a bank. As the article says "Think Amazon, or Facebook, or maybe Chinese-owned Alibaba or Tiktok having a version of sterling"
My wife reports that the Scottish newsreader this morning apparently reported that Sunak will be having 'some new faeces round the Cabinet table.' Seems appropriate.
You’re like a cross between the Stop Breeeeexit Man and the Goon Show.
The Goon Show?
Many of your references don't ring true for a 20 something girl about town. The "Confessions" reference earlier busted you as a 62 year old Wellingborough plasterer called Keith.
Course. Time for a change pretty soon becomes Long Past Time for a Change. Folk who bemoan a lack of Labour radicalism should note. Starmer isn't Blair.
Starmer isn't Blair, but that may be not such a bad thing.
Well, for example, Starmer didn't go to a posh public school.
Eh? Starmer's old school is an independent HMC school.
He is the first Labour leader to have gone to public school since Blair
Well now, you are the one banging on about every clever kid should have access to a grammar school education, and here we are with the wrong sort of clever kid, and you think he should have transferred to a sink comp when the school became more exclusive.
You are no meritocrat, you are a shameless elitist.
Of course I know about clockwork orange and goon show etc - I went to art college! If it’s 60’s 70’s I’m all over it.
It’s not the only confessions film I’ve seen! The humour is bright and sunny, the tits are great, and it’s probably realistic, I bet window cleaners and tradesman can tell a few stories!
She suddenly appears there in just stockings, a basque and no knickers and says her husband won’t be home for three hours - what you going to do Mex, make your apologies and leave and mail the invoice for the blocked sink?
Talking of stories, the “I” says Labour fear Boris returning and getting a hung Parliament. Are they really in tune with Labour fearing that, or do journalists just make this up?
Forty years too late for me Moon Dance, and back in the day I'd have hi-tailed it out of there, I was no Timmy Lea.
As for Johnson. I don't see the Emperor's New Clothes but plenty do. The irony of many of Sunak's problems is Johnson was the architect. Are there still enough voters who see the tailored finery or just a fat naked blob? I am not sure.
I keep forgetting some of you are so old, you haven’t lived with internet, YouTube, Wikipedia and people sending you links all your life, so you can’t comprehend how much Gen Z have been able to learn about and see of your own era! I might have seen more 60s 70s culture now than even you who were around at the time, but in a pub the night it was shown on one of 3 telly channels 😆 I prefer Pete and Dud to goon show, and once you like something you stream all you can off YouTube. 80s I’m not so interested in though, the horrible hair cuts are a giveaway and off putting. The best Macbeth film I have seen is a 70s one made by Polanski.
I subscribe to the theory if Boris were to lead Tories into next election they would get a far better result than under Sunak or anybody else. I think he’s just a lot more popular and can reach voters in all the walls Sunak can’t.
You’re like a cross between the Stop Breeeeexit Man and the Goon Show.
The Goon Show?
Many of your references don't ring true for a 20 something girl about town. The "Confessions" reference earlier busted you as a 62 year old Wellingborough plasterer called Keith.
Course. Time for a change pretty soon becomes Long Past Time for a Change. Folk who bemoan a lack of Labour radicalism should note. Starmer isn't Blair.
Starmer isn't Blair, but that may be not such a bad thing.
Well, for example, Starmer didn't go to a posh public school.
Eh? Starmer's old school is an independent HMC school.
He is the first Labour leader to have gone to public school since Blair
Well now, you are the one banging on about every clever kid should have access to a grammar school education, and here we are with the wrong sort of clever kid, and you think he should have transferred to a sink comp when the school became more exclusive.
You are no meritocrat, you are a shameless elitist.
Of course I know about clockwork orange and goon show etc - I went to art college! If it’s 60’s 70’s I’m all over it.
It’s not the only confessions film I’ve seen! The humour is bright and sunny, the tits are great, and it’s probably realistic, I bet window cleaners and tradesman can tell a few stories!
She suddenly appears there in just stockings, a basque and no knickers and says her husband won’t be home for three hours - what you going to do Mex, make your apologies and leave and mail the invoice for the blocked sink?
Talking of stories, the “I” says Labour fear Boris returning and getting a hung Parliament. Are they really in tune with Labour fearing that, or do journalists just make this up?
Forty years too late for me Moon Dance, and back in the day I'd have hi-tailed it out of there, I was no Timmy Lea.
As for Johnson. I don't see the Emperor's New Clothes but plenty do. The irony of many of Sunak's problems is Johnson was the architect. Are there still enough voters who see the tailored finery or just a fat naked blob? I am not sure.
The Confessions films were erotic comedies that were neither erotic nor comedies.
Though not subtle, It’s a warm and cheeky sense of humour. All people have different sense of humour hence we argue all about it.
Course. Time for a change pretty soon becomes Long Past Time for a Change. Folk who bemoan a lack of Labour radicalism should note. Starmer isn't Blair.
Starmer isn't Blair, but that may be not such a bad thing.
@Richard_Tyndall I was discussing this with a Conservative member friend who came for dinner tonight - I know, I know, I can even entertain the other side. We both agreed that the tories are in for a hammering but of course had different views about what happens after that. My take is that we HAVE to rejoin the EU. There is a desperate shortage of flexible labour in a free trade zone. If Labour can make the case for this then it will go some way to helping get this country's economy back on track.
I don't see a solution for the UK economy but to rejoin the single market, WITH freedom of movement.
Did you see my response to you from a few days ago? Rejoining the single market won't recreate the labour market conditions of the decade after 2004 because the A8 member states are now much more prosperous. This trend would have happened with or without Brexit.
Probably true - though Brexit provided a large one off shock which can hardly be described as part of a trend. (And zero Brexiteers were arguing your point ahead of Brexit.)
It was a pleasant one-off shock for many unskilled and semi-skilled workers in the UK, many of whom now earn 20-30% more than they did under FoM, when the legal minimum wage was seen as the maximum wage in a huge number of industries. Those people will be paying more taxes and claiming fewer benefits now, than they did two or three years ago.
Whatever the particular case, though, if you look at the UK statistics for the last decade, it's undeniable that the percentage of those on the lowest hourly rates has fallen since 2016 (though there were already some signs of that trend pre-Brexit - and also it's more true of those paid by the hour than those paid weekly).
The argument is really about how fast that trend would have happened anyway, and whether the economic shock of Brexit was worth it.
It also seems to be true, around the developed world, that COVID created a sort of reset in the mentality of employees and employers in the lowest paid jobs.
I don’t think, unless you bring a lot of workers from really, really poor countries, that bringing wages back down to the share of the pie, in the low paid/skilled areas will happen.
In case you missed it, you’re losing hundreds of mobliks and a dozen tanks every day in Ukraine at the moment. Not too sure there’s much left of the once-mighty Russian military to go around.
What gets me are the idiots - and idiots are a nice term for them - who excuse Russia's actions. It's not their fault. It's ours (wrong). We promised no eastwards NATO expansion (wrong). The Ukrainians are Nazis (wrong). Russia deserves a hinterland for protection (wrong). wibble wibble Stepan Bandera (wrong). Russia wants peace (wrong). We 'poked' Russia into this war (wrong). The war needs to end now (wrong, sadly).
All you need to do is listen to what Lavrov and Putin say to see the real cause of this war: Russian fascist imperialism. Whatever we said or did, they would have made a play for Ukraine or another state. Because that's their world view.
You can read exactly those arguments from the MAGA’s.
It's yet another example where hard left and hard right meet in the middle.
It's easy to see why the hard left come up with this stuff: a combination of still liking Russia because of the USSR and Communism (even though modern Russia only takes the 'enriches those in power' from Communism); a hatred of the West and our institutions, and an utter loathing of the 'wrong' people.
It's less easy to see what the hard right get it from. Yes, there will be a few neo-Nazis and fascists who quite like Putin's strongman act. There will be some who hate the government in power, and therefore oppose what that government supports. And there will be a few loud moths directly or indirectly in Russia's pay.
But if you wanted America to be Great Again, then spending a relatively tiny amount of money to defeat what was your #1 enemy is surely a good thing, especially as it does not cost American lives?
Maybe it's just me but I really don't get what this is. How does this differ from the GBP in my bank accounts etc. now?
I don't imagine the NSI are sitting on a pile of £coins or £notes which represent my Premium Bond holdings, nor could my bank point to a vault that holds the money it's got recorded in my accounts.
No, they hold it digitally, surely?
If someone could explain what I'm missing I'd be grateful.
Doesn't make much sense to me either. Reading the article, the thing that stands out to me is this: "...ensure the public has access to safe money that is easy to use in the digital age."
As I understand the status quo, it provides a duopoly to VISA and Mastercard who make vast piles of cash processing current digital transactions of your pounds Sterling. What a new digital coin could do, if designed right, is provide a means for transactions of the digital pound to be processed by a much wider variety of people, and therefore open up payment processing to a wider market and drive down costs.
The other thing that stands out, and surprises me, is this bit: "Neither the Bank of England nor Government would have access to the data on transactions with a digital pound. But consumers could pick providers, not just banks, to hold their cash in digital wallets, with varying degrees of privacy. Some users might be comfortable with their wallet provider knowing all their transactions, if they received a discount for example. Others might want to stay as private as possible."
A lot of concern has been expressed about the death of cash making it possible for bad actors to track your every financial transaction, and that this represents a severe erosion of our privacy rights. At first glance, the above excerpt from the article suggests that the intent is to make it possible to enable untraceable cash-style transactions with a digital Pound.
You'd imagine that the police would be aghast at such a suggestion, but, if it comes to pass, it would be a major win for privacy rights that would last generations.
So, well, my first reaction was one of befuddlement, but I'm now reasonably hopeful that the people involved know what they are doing, and may achieve something worthwhile.
Talking about war, the Gilmour Waters war is an interesting way to promote the Dark Side of the Moon 50th anniversary box set...
Why buy a box set? It’s all on Spotify.
A Spotify subscription will set you back 1200 Euros over ten years at current rates, and if you find that you've no more money to spend at that point you are left with nothing.
Pretty sure that if I spend 1200 Euros on actual copies of music that I own I would find myself in a better place in ten years time.
I’m paying €1,995 over ten years at current rate, but that’s for 5 people. Very reasonable. I listen to a huge amount of music I would never have heard if I’d been forced to purchase a tiny number of hard copies. I have nearly 26,000 Liked songs. Wonder how many I’ll manage to listen to in the coming decade?
"In my view this is like 1997 where the tide has turned and the public want to see something different. The huge challenge the Tories face is that unlike some previous fights they are facing a Labour leader who while possibly being a bit boring is not one who is going to be easily undermined. He is not Jeremy Corbyn."
I really don't see a way back for the tories from this and Liz Truss has now come along to remind everyone just how awful it has been.
The tide has indeed turned and, like dear old King Canute, there is nothing Sunak and Co can do to stop it.
The big question is how popular is Starmer in Red Wall areas like Stoke-on-Trent and Grimsby.
If Redfield and Wilton are to be believed, Starmer is probably popular enough;
When asked which would be a better Prime Minister between Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer, Starmer (43%, +1) leads Sunak (33%, +1) by ten points. 24% (-2) say they don’t know.
As things stand Labour can't lose and Tories can't win for simple reasons, including 'Time For A Change'.
If (which I am not) a case were to be made for recovery from the Tories it would be this.
"We can't possibly win in the conventional sense, but in GEs someone has to win even if in ordinary reality they have all lost. Two things need to happen; Labour needs to self destruct - and this is always possible as long as the left exists; and the Tories have to be the default option for both the headbangers of the right and ordinary centrist democrats who want neither Trump nor Stalin running the country".
Sunak's mixture of centrist decency and showing a bit of ankle over ECHR etc, while obviously incoherent nonsense, may be that attempt. Let us hope the cause is hopeless.
Add to that cuts in income tax rates, and you have the government's best (if narrow) chance of re-election. Hence the vice-like grip on public spending.
It does all require a degree of cynicism that I don't think Rishi quite possesses. The man they really need is Boris, only without the baggage Boris built up last time.
The time has come for Alex (definitely not Boris) de Pfeffel to have some plastic surgery and a hair transplant.
Good point; but I'm not sure whether borrowing £175bn a year is quite a vice like grip; and (I hope) a good number of people of the sort who often vote Tory but don't watch/listen to GB News would not vote for Boris on moral grounds alone.
Where are the young Heseltines and Clarkes when you need them?
I'm informed this morning that Twitter ad revenue is trending to pre-takeover levels by the end of this month and the cost base has been cut by 60%. The growth rate will take it beyond pre-takeover by the end of March and that user revenue is far, far larger than it has ever been already.
Twitter's next valuation round may see it get a reasonably close to the purchase price once debt is included. I honestly wouldn't be surprised if Elon and crew get an IPO done in ~2026 at a higher valuation that what they bought it for, the gross margin at Twitter is looking incredible and there's been no real drawbacks to getting rid of all those people. In fact the word from tech investors seems to be that twitter's dev pipeline and feature pipeline are stronger now than before all the cuts because they got rid of all the million layers that prevented feature releases.
For all the shit he got, Elon Musk seems to have made this work and I wouldn't be surprised if when everything is counted up he ends up making a huge profit from the deal.
I do feel a bit silly for taking at face value the statements from some tech sources that Musk had done so much damage to the company they wouldn't be able to keep the website running. I will be a bit more sceptical of these sources in the future.
The other thing it shows is the value of the grand old military principle of maintenance of aim. Musk had a plan, stuck to it despite all the warnings of imminent disaster, and, trusting Max as a reputable source, sounds like it is beginning to pay off.
It's interesting to compare this with Liz Truss' experience as PM. Die-hard Trussites will draw the lesson that, if only Conservative MPs had allowed Truss to see her plan through, then Britain would also soon be seeing the benefits of a bold plan seen through against stiff opposition.
I think the difference here is that Musk had the financial and organisational means to see his plan through, whereas Truss had not laid the groundwork for retaining the support of her MPs, or the trust of the financial markets, and so lacked the financial and organisational means to see her plan through. The fruitful comparison is with Thatcher, who prepared carefully for the Miner's Strike of 1984-5, and so she was able to see that through to a victorious conclusion.
This then brings us to Sunak, and the public sector strikes that he is now enduring, for longer than many would have thought possible, and yet with no preparation. Can he wait this out for longer than the Unions? I don't see any obvious means for the Unions to force his hand. By the time the May local elections damages his electoral credibility, it is possible that inflation will be considerably lower, and public support for higher pay settlements may erode.
I think Sunak is going to see this one through, and thereby avoid having to court more unpopularity later by imposing further tax rises to balance the books.
The main difference between Musk’s Twitter takeover and a politician, is that Musk was much more like a king than a prime minister. He didn’t have a large bunch of shareholders or board members plotting against him from the day he arrived there, and those of that mentality could be fired with no comeback as he got on with the job.
Maybe it's just me but I really don't get what this is. How does this differ from the GBP in my bank accounts etc. now?
I don't imagine the NSI are sitting on a pile of £coins or £notes which represent my Premium Bond holdings, nor could my bank point to a vault that holds the money it's got recorded in my accounts.
No, they hold it digitally, surely?
If someone could explain what I'm missing I'd be grateful.
At the moment we use two different kinds of money - notes and coins, and bank deposits. The former are liabilities of the state, the latter are liabilities of the banking system. The latter are "digital" in the sense that they are simply book keeping entries on banks' balance sheets. When you pay with a debit card, your deposit at your bank goes down and the deposit of the vendor at their bank goes up, and it is cleared via the banking system. As I understand it a "digital pound" would be like a digital replacement for notes and coins. It could be anonymous. It would exist outside of the banking system. It would be a token rather than a book keeping entry. Right now it's not something that is really needed. I struggle a bit to see why it might be needed in the future. Perhaps a digital token technology is cheaper to administer than the bank payment and clearing system, or at least could become cheaper, and therefore more useful for small transactions? I remain intensely sceptical about crypto but this is something a bit different.
I'm informed this morning that Twitter ad revenue is trending to pre-takeover levels by the end of this month and the cost base has been cut by 60%. The growth rate will take it beyond pre-takeover by the end of March and that user revenue is far, far larger than it has ever been already.
Twitter's next valuation round may see it get a reasonably close to the purchase price once debt is included. I honestly wouldn't be surprised if Elon and crew get an IPO done in ~2026 at a higher valuation that what they bought it for, the gross margin at Twitter is looking incredible and there's been no real drawbacks to getting rid of all those people. In fact the word from tech investors seems to be that twitter's dev pipeline and feature pipeline are stronger now than before all the cuts because they got rid of all the million layers that prevented feature releases.
For all the shit he got, Elon Musk seems to have made this work and I wouldn't be surprised if when everything is counted up he ends up making a huge profit from the deal.
Can he please come in and remove the million unnecessary layers in our government and health service?
You’re like a cross between the Stop Breeeeexit Man and the Goon Show.
The Goon Show?
Many of your references don't ring true for a 20 something girl about town. The "Confessions" reference earlier busted you as a 62 year old Wellingborough plasterer called Keith.
Course. Time for a change pretty soon becomes Long Past Time for a Change. Folk who bemoan a lack of Labour radicalism should note. Starmer isn't Blair.
Starmer isn't Blair, but that may be not such a bad thing.
Well, for example, Starmer didn't go to a posh public school.
Eh? Starmer's old school is an independent HMC school.
He is the first Labour leader to have gone to public school since Blair
Well now, you are the one banging on about every clever kid should have access to a grammar school education, and here we are with the wrong sort of clever kid, and you think he should have transferred to a sink comp when the school became more exclusive.
You are no meritocrat, you are a shameless elitist.
Of course I know about clockwork orange and goon show etc - I went to art college! If it’s 60’s 70’s I’m all over it.
It’s not the only confessions film I’ve seen! The humour is bright and sunny, the tits are great, and it’s probably realistic, I bet window cleaners and tradesman can tell a few stories!
She suddenly appears there in just stockings, a basque and no knickers and says her husband won’t be home for three hours - what you going to do Mex, make your apologies and leave and mail the invoice for the blocked sink?
Talking of stories, the “I” says Labour fear Boris returning and getting a hung Parliament. Are they really in tune with Labour fearing that, or do journalists just make this up?
Forty years too late for me Moon Dance, and back in the day I'd have hi-tailed it out of there, I was no Timmy Lea.
As for Johnson. I don't see the Emperor's New Clothes but plenty do. The irony of many of Sunak's problems is Johnson was the architect. Are there still enough voters who see the tailored finery or just a fat naked blob? I am not sure.
I keep forgetting some of you are so old, you haven’t lived with internet, YouTube, Wikipedia and people sending you links all your life, so you can’t comprehend how much Gen Z have been able to learn about and see of your own era! I might have seen more 60s 70s culture now than even you who were around at the time, but in a pub the night it was shown on one of 3 telly channels 😆 I prefer Pete and Dud to goon show, and once you like something you stream all you can off YouTube. 80s I’m not so interested in though, the horrible hair cuts are a giveaway and off putting. The best Macbeth film I have seen is a 70s one made by Polanski.
I subscribe to the theory if Boris were to lead Tories into next election they would get a far better result than under Sunak or anybody else. I think he’s just a lot more popular and can reach voters in all the walls Sunak can’t.
Boris is what he always was- a bit of a letch, able to charm anyone into bed until he annoys them.enough that they chuck him out. It's a story that has played out again and again in his personal and professional lives.
Boris's problem is that he's now annoyed enough British voters to the extent that they won't forgive him.
In case you missed it, you’re losing hundreds of mobliks and a dozen tanks every day in Ukraine at the moment. Not too sure there’s much left of the once-mighty Russian military to go around.
What gets me are the idiots - and idiots are a nice term for them - who excuse Russia's actions. It's not their fault. It's ours (wrong). We promised no eastwards NATO expansion (wrong). The Ukrainians are Nazis (wrong). Russia deserves a hinterland for protection (wrong). wibble wibble Stepan Bandera (wrong). Russia wants peace (wrong). We 'poked' Russia into this war (wrong). The war needs to end now (wrong, sadly).
All you need to do is listen to what Lavrov and Putin say to see the real cause of this war: Russian fascist imperialism. Whatever we said or did, they would have made a play for Ukraine or another state. Because that's their world view.
You can read exactly those arguments from the MAGA’s.
It's yet another example where hard left and hard right meet in the middle.
It's easy to see why the hard left come up with this stuff: a combination of still liking Russia because of the USSR and Communism (even though modern Russia only takes the 'enriches those in power' from Communism); a hatred of the West and our institutions, and an utter loathing of the 'wrong' people.
It's less easy to see what the hard right get it from. Yes, there will be a few neo-Nazis and fascists who quite like Putin's strongman act. There will be some who hate the government in power, and therefore oppose what that government supports. And there will be a few loud moths directly or indirectly in Russia's pay.
But if you wanted America to be Great Again, then spending a relatively tiny amount of money to defeat what was your #1 enemy is surely a good thing, especially as it does not cost American lives?
Woke?
What Putins Russia sells is that all of Russian history is glorious, wonderful and morally perfect. Think Henty and his works, as their vision of history.
Their fear of “Western self doubt and self loathing” is based on the idea that their power (such as it is) comes from belief. The willingness of the human waves to bayonet charge….. I their world, once you allow the Head Count to doubt The System, your culture collapses and the cold wind blows.
It was a meme on the extreme right, before the invasion, that the proper, manly Russian army would demonstrate that their Big Weapons would annihilate Western FeminizedTransWoke armies.
The other interesting note from Twitter is that London has been retained alongside NY and SF as a primary engineering hub. Some had expected it to move to Berlin and London downgraded to secondary for cost cutting reasons but it hasn't, instead the other European locations are being gutted.
Maybe it's just me but I really don't get what this is. How does this differ from the GBP in my bank accounts etc. now?
I don't imagine the NSI are sitting on a pile of £coins or £notes which represent my Premium Bond holdings, nor could my bank point to a vault that holds the money it's got recorded in my accounts.
No, they hold it digitally, surely?
If someone could explain what I'm missing I'd be grateful.
It doesnt really answer your question but the Bank of England does have a vault with a bunch of £100m bank notes to cover Scottish and Northern Irish notes!
Personally I still love Minidisc. Playing one as I type this...
Minidisc was brilliant for playback of spot cues and sound effects. An erstwhile colleague of mine claimed to be able to hear the compression algorithm at work and therefore didn't like them for general listening. He did have better hearing than me though.
Maybe it's just me but I really don't get what this is. How does this differ from the GBP in my bank accounts etc. now?
I don't imagine the NSI are sitting on a pile of £coins or £notes which represent my Premium Bond holdings, nor could my bank point to a vault that holds the money it's got recorded in my accounts.
No, they hold it digitally, surely?
If someone could explain what I'm missing I'd be grateful.
It doesnt really answer your question but the Bank of England does have a vault with a bunch of £100m bank notes to cover Scottish and Northern Irish notes!
Wikipedia says that these are A4 sized and printed internally - wonder what printer they use?
From a documentary I saw a while back, they were a bit like the really old massive banknotes from before WWII - huge, on thin paper. Kept in a cash box in the chief cashiers desk IIRC.
HYUFD's opinion seems to be that 8 year old Starmer should have built a time machine and checked that his school would become fee-paying just before he left, so that forty years later when he became Labour leader he could have not gone to that school and gone to another
"In my view this is like 1997 where the tide has turned and the public want to see something different. The huge challenge the Tories face is that unlike some previous fights they are facing a Labour leader who while possibly being a bit boring is not one who is going to be easily undermined. He is not Jeremy Corbyn."
I really don't see a way back for the tories from this and Liz Truss has now come along to remind everyone just how awful it has been.
The tide has indeed turned and, like dear old King Canute, there is nothing Sunak and Co can do to stop it.
The big question is how popular is Starmer in Red Wall areas like Stoke-on-Trent and Grimsby.
If Redfield and Wilton are to be believed, Starmer is probably popular enough;
When asked which would be a better Prime Minister between Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer, Starmer (43%, +1) leads Sunak (33%, +1) by ten points. 24% (-2) say they don’t know.
As things stand Labour can't lose and Tories can't win for simple reasons, including 'Time For A Change'.
If (which I am not) a case were to be made for recovery from the Tories it would be this.
"We can't possibly win in the conventional sense, but in GEs someone has to win even if in ordinary reality they have all lost. Two things need to happen; Labour needs to self destruct - and this is always possible as long as the left exists; and the Tories have to be the default option for both the headbangers of the right and ordinary centrist democrats who want neither Trump nor Stalin running the country".
Sunak's mixture of centrist decency and showing a bit of ankle over ECHR etc, while obviously incoherent nonsense, may be that attempt. Let us hope the cause is hopeless.
Add to that cuts in income tax rates, and you have the government's best (if narrow) chance of re-election. Hence the vice-like grip on public spending.
It does all require a degree of cynicism that I don't think Rishi quite possesses. The man they really need is Boris, only without the baggage Boris built up last time.
The time has come for Alex (definitely not Boris) de Pfeffel to have some plastic surgery and a hair transplant.
Good point; but I'm not sure whether borrowing £175bn a year is quite a vice like grip; and (I hope) a good number of people of the sort who often vote Tory but don't watch/listen to GB News would not vote for Boris on moral grounds alone.
Where are the young Heseltines and Clarkes when you need them?
The obvious example would be someone like Rory Stewart, in which case the answer is "pushed out by Boris and now hosting a podcast".
If the way back for the Conservatives is to disown Boris'n'Liz and shuffle back towards the centre (and I accept it may not be), it's not going to be easy for them.
Talking about war, the Gilmour Waters war is an interesting way to promote the Dark Side of the Moon 50th anniversary box set...
Why buy a box set? It’s all on Spotify.
A Spotify subscription will set you back 1200 Euros over ten years at current rates, and if you find that you've no more money to spend at that point you are left with nothing.
Pretty sure that if I spend 1200 Euros on actual copies of music that I own I would find myself in a better place in ten years time.
But in which format are you buying? Vinyl? Went away, has come back with compression monster 180g reissues. CD? I know many many CDs are still out there. But its long since past its prime. The new thing is Dolby Atmos mixes, but DVD or DVD-A or BluRay?
Personally I still love Minidisc. Playing one as I type this...
The format doesn't matter provided I retain the means to play it back.
You say that vinyl "went away", but for the entire period it did so, my mother had her old vinyl records and a vinyl player, and no-one stopped her form playing her old records because she'd stopped paying them ten Euros a month.
Maybe it's just me but I really don't get what this is. How does this differ from the GBP in my bank accounts etc. now?
I don't imagine the NSI are sitting on a pile of £coins or £notes which represent my Premium Bond holdings, nor could my bank point to a vault that holds the money it's got recorded in my accounts.
No, they hold it digitally, surely?
If someone could explain what I'm missing I'd be grateful.
At the moment we use two different kinds of money - notes and coins, and bank deposits. The former are liabilities of the state, the latter are liabilities of the banking system. The latter are "digital" in the sense that they are simply book keeping entries on banks' balance sheets. When you pay with a debit card, your deposit at your bank goes down and the deposit of the vendor at their bank goes up, and it is cleared via the banking system. As I understand it a "digital pound" would be like a digital replacement for notes and coins. It could be anonymous. It would exist outside of the banking system. It would be a token rather than a book keeping entry. Right now it's not something that is really needed. I struggle a bit to see why it might be needed in the future. Perhaps a digital token technology is cheaper to administer than the bank payment and clearing system, or at least could become cheaper, and therefore more useful for small transactions? I remain intensely sceptical about crypto but this is something a bit different.
Say you had about £20m-£30m held in an offshore trust but it was nominally in your parents name and if you brought it back via normal banking the taxman would claim a significant chunk of it. Wouldn't a digital pound help such an individual to the tune of about £4m?
Maybe it's just me but I really don't get what this is. How does this differ from the GBP in my bank accounts etc. now?
I don't imagine the NSI are sitting on a pile of £coins or £notes which represent my Premium Bond holdings, nor could my bank point to a vault that holds the money it's got recorded in my accounts.
No, they hold it digitally, surely?
If someone could explain what I'm missing I'd be grateful.
It’s a centralised version of Bitcoin, which would become an alternative over time to using cash and cards.
The concerns against such systems, are that anonymity becomes impossible, and that a scammer or state actor could ‘un-person’ an individual trivially and with no recourse.
Talking about war, the Gilmour Waters war is an interesting way to promote the Dark Side of the Moon 50th anniversary box set...
Why buy a box set? It’s all on Spotify.
A Spotify subscription will set you back 1200 Euros over ten years at current rates, and if you find that you've no more money to spend at that point you are left with nothing.
Pretty sure that if I spend 1200 Euros on actual copies of music that I own I would find myself in a better place in ten years time.
But in which format are you buying? Vinyl? Went away, has come back with compression monster 180g reissues. CD? I know many many CDs are still out there. But its long since past its prime. The new thing is Dolby Atmos mixes, but DVD or DVD-A or BluRay?
Personally I still love Minidisc. Playing one as I type this...
Really?! If I'm not missing sarcasm here, that's the strangest thing I've heard on here for months. I did like minidisc. Tape, only better. For a brief window, they did their job better than anything else. But they very quickly became redundant with a) writable CDs, b) being able to store music on computer and c) MP3 players, all of which did the job of a minidisc better than a minidisc. I own music rather than rent it. As a 47 year old who has spent over 30 years building up a music collection it makes sense. I have spent thousands on music over the years and 90% of what I listen to (apart from the radio) is stuff I already own. It doesn't make sense for me to pay to rent what I could listen to for free now. But it probably makes more sense for my children to rent it.
That said, my 12 year old daughter has recently got into vinyl. And vinyl is so very desirable. Sadly I lost most of my vinyl in a house move some time in the noughties. I still own the music on CD, but I miss the actual objects of vinyl records that I owned - particularly one or two cherishable ones. (The double album of London Calling - not rare, but an absolute work of art - and the original cover of Appetite for Destruction - horrible to look at, but rare and therefore cherishable.) I went with her to a record shop recently and had to hold myself back from buying vinyl copies of all sorts of records I already own on CD even though the only record player in the house now is her new cheap one and even though new records are £30 a pop. (Which is roughly where you'd expect them to be had the price of music since the 80s kept pace with inflation, but a bit of a shock when you are used to CDs for £7.) I keep going into her room just to look fondly at a shelf full of records. It is such a lovely thing to see. When we redo her room in her few months I am going to get her a decent record player with a good set of speakers. Other family members are cheerfully buying her their favourite records in a way they wouldn't think to with electronic music. There's something about a record which engenders a visceral reaction in the same way that a baby cuckoo's open mouth does in birds - a need to touch, to interact, to make it work, in a way that defies rationality. It is so very satisfyingly physical a thing.
"In my view this is like 1997 where the tide has turned and the public want to see something different. The huge challenge the Tories face is that unlike some previous fights they are facing a Labour leader who while possibly being a bit boring is not one who is going to be easily undermined. He is not Jeremy Corbyn."
I really don't see a way back for the tories from this and Liz Truss has now come along to remind everyone just how awful it has been.
The tide has indeed turned and, like dear old King Canute, there is nothing Sunak and Co can do to stop it.
The big question is how popular is Starmer in Red Wall areas like Stoke-on-Trent and Grimsby.
If Redfield and Wilton are to be believed, Starmer is probably popular enough;
When asked which would be a better Prime Minister between Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer, Starmer (43%, +1) leads Sunak (33%, +1) by ten points. 24% (-2) say they don’t know.
As things stand Labour can't lose and Tories can't win for simple reasons, including 'Time For A Change'.
If (which I am not) a case were to be made for recovery from the Tories it would be this.
"We can't possibly win in the conventional sense, but in GEs someone has to win even if in ordinary reality they have all lost. Two things need to happen; Labour needs to self destruct - and this is always possible as long as the left exists; and the Tories have to be the default option for both the headbangers of the right and ordinary centrist democrats who want neither Trump nor Stalin running the country".
Sunak's mixture of centrist decency and showing a bit of ankle over ECHR etc, while obviously incoherent nonsense, may be that attempt. Let us hope the cause is hopeless.
Add to that cuts in income tax rates, and you have the government's best (if narrow) chance of re-election. Hence the vice-like grip on public spending.
It does all require a degree of cynicism that I don't think Rishi quite possesses. The man they really need is Boris, only without the baggage Boris built up last time.
The time has come for Alex (definitely not Boris) de Pfeffel to have some plastic surgery and a hair transplant.
Good point; but I'm not sure whether borrowing £175bn a year is quite a vice like grip; and (I hope) a good number of people of the sort who often vote Tory but don't watch/listen to GB News would not vote for Boris on moral grounds alone.
Where are the young Heseltines and Clarkes when you need them?
The obvious example would be someone like Rory Stewart, in which case the answer is "pushed out by Boris and now hosting a podcast".
If the way back for the Conservatives is to disown Boris'n'Liz and shuffle back towards the centre (and I accept it may not be), it's not going to be easy for them.
In the case of Rory Stewart, the answer is "walked away". Specifically, you don't get to vote as a member of the government party for it not to be the government and stay in the party.
I'm informed this morning that Twitter ad revenue is trending to pre-takeover levels by the end of this month and the cost base has been cut by 60%. The growth rate will take it beyond pre-takeover by the end of March and that user revenue is far, far larger than it has ever been already.
Twitter's next valuation round may see it get a reasonably close to the purchase price once debt is included. I honestly wouldn't be surprised if Elon and crew get an IPO done in ~2026 at a higher valuation that what they bought it for, the gross margin at Twitter is looking incredible and there's been no real drawbacks to getting rid of all those people. In fact the word from tech investors seems to be that twitter's dev pipeline and feature pipeline are stronger now than before all the cuts because they got rid of all the million layers that prevented feature releases.
For all the shit he got, Elon Musk seems to have made this work and I wouldn't be surprised if when everything is counted up he ends up making a huge profit from the deal.
I do feel a bit silly for taking at face value the statements from some tech sources that Musk had done so much damage to the company they wouldn't be able to keep the website running. I will be a bit more sceptical of these sources in the future.
The other thing it shows is the value of the grand old military principle of maintenance of aim. Musk had a plan, stuck to it despite all the warnings of imminent disaster, and, trusting Max as a reputable source, sounds like it is beginning to pay off.
It's interesting to compare this with Liz Truss' experience as PM. Die-hard Trussites will draw the lesson that, if only Conservative MPs had allowed Truss to see her plan through, then Britain would also soon be seeing the benefits of a bold plan seen through against stiff opposition.
I think the difference here is that Musk had the financial and organisational means to see his plan through, whereas Truss had not laid the groundwork for retaining the support of her MPs, or the trust of the financial markets, and so lacked the financial and organisational means to see her plan through. The fruitful comparison is with Thatcher, who prepared carefully for the Miner's Strike of 1984-5, and so she was able to see that through to a victorious conclusion.
This then brings us to Sunak, and the public sector strikes that he is now enduring, for longer than many would have thought possible, and yet with no preparation. Can he wait this out for longer than the Unions? I don't see any obvious means for the Unions to force his hand. By the time the May local elections damages his electoral credibility, it is possible that inflation will be considerably lower, and public support for higher pay settlements may erode.
I think Sunak is going to see this one through, and thereby avoid having to court more unpopularity later by imposing further tax rises to balance the books.
That point on inflation is a good one.
If inflation drops to 4%, will there still be public support for unions asking for 10% or so? Of course, to avoid a real terms pay cut, they'd still need 10% (plus the extra inflation since then) but the public at large may see a 10% demand, with inflation at 4% at the time as a pay rise way above inflation, even though it would cover a period in which cost of living had increased by well over 10%.
Waiting this out may have benefits for Sunak, short term. Longer term issues of nurses/teachers etc giving up and quitting to get better paid jobs elsewhere will of course remain.
I'm informed this morning that Twitter ad revenue is trending to pre-takeover levels by the end of this month and the cost base has been cut by 60%. The growth rate will take it beyond pre-takeover by the end of March and that user revenue is far, far larger than it has ever been already.
Twitter's next valuation round may see it get a reasonably close to the purchase price once debt is included. I honestly wouldn't be surprised if Elon and crew get an IPO done in ~2026 at a higher valuation that what they bought it for, the gross margin at Twitter is looking incredible and there's been no real drawbacks to getting rid of all those people. In fact the word from tech investors seems to be that twitter's dev pipeline and feature pipeline are stronger now than before all the cuts because they got rid of all the million layers that prevented feature releases.
For all the shit he got, Elon Musk seems to have made this work and I wouldn't be surprised if when everything is counted up he ends up making a huge profit from the deal.
I do feel a bit silly for taking at face value the statements from some tech sources that Musk had done so much damage to the company they wouldn't be able to keep the website running. I will be a bit more sceptical of these sources in the future.
The other thing it shows is the value of the grand old military principle of maintenance of aim. Musk had a plan, stuck to it despite all the warnings of imminent disaster, and, trusting Max as a reputable source, sounds like it is beginning to pay off.
It's interesting to compare this with Liz Truss' experience as PM. Die-hard Trussites will draw the lesson that, if only Conservative MPs had allowed Truss to see her plan through, then Britain would also soon be seeing the benefits of a bold plan seen through against stiff opposition.
I think the difference here is that Musk had the financial and organisational means to see his plan through, whereas Truss had not laid the groundwork for retaining the support of her MPs, or the trust of the financial markets, and so lacked the financial and organisational means to see her plan through. The fruitful comparison is with Thatcher, who prepared carefully for the Miner's Strike of 1984-5, and so she was able to see that through to a victorious conclusion.
This then brings us to Sunak, and the public sector strikes that he is now enduring, for longer than many would have thought possible, and yet with no preparation. Can he wait this out for longer than the Unions? I don't see any obvious means for the Unions to force his hand. By the time the May local elections damages his electoral credibility, it is possible that inflation will be considerably lower, and public support for higher pay settlements may erode.
I think Sunak is going to see this one through, and thereby avoid having to court more unpopularity later by imposing further tax rises to balance the books.
That point on inflation is a good one.
If inflation drops to 4%, will there still be public support for unions asking for 10% or so? Of course, to avoid a real terms pay cut, they'd still need 10% (plus the extra inflation since then) but the public at large may see a 10% demand, with inflation at 4% at the time as a pay rise way above inflation, even though it would cover a period in which cost of living had increased by well over 10%.
Waiting this out may have benefits for Sunak, short term. Longer term issues of nurses/teachers etc giving up and quitting to get better paid jobs elsewhere will of course remain.
Is it true that Twitter has been unavailable a lot more since he took over. And that the quality of the app has gone down drastically. And that he has banned all thirty party clients.
This probably doesn't impact on revenue at all - but it does make the service worse than it was.
Comments
In many seats Labour win with a collapse in the 2019 Tory vote even if those voters stay at home. Tory voters sitting on their hands is the reason why Blair won a landslide in 1997...
Other countries are also looking at this, but not a fan of digital currency:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-64536593
Whoever can couple this with decent customer service has a real shot, if Amazon doesn't cannibalise their own business.
Amazon won retail with One-Click Checkout.
Amazon will lose retail to Zero-Click Checkout.
Zero-Click Checkout: Tell the AI what you want. It shows you the best options, you choose, it orders it for you from the cheapest/fastest store.
https://mobile.twitter.com/TimSuzman/status/1622813622551605248
Twitter's next valuation round may see it get a reasonably close to the purchase price once debt is included. I honestly wouldn't be surprised if Elon and crew get an IPO done in ~2026 at a higher valuation that what they bought it for, the gross margin at Twitter is looking incredible and there's been no real drawbacks to getting rid of all those people. In fact the word from tech investors seems to be that twitter's dev pipeline and feature pipeline are stronger now than before all the cuts because they got rid of all the million layers that prevented feature releases.
For all the shit he got, Elon Musk seems to have made this work and I wouldn't be surprised if when everything is counted up he ends up making a huge profit from the deal.
One of GB News’s leading presenters has quit after the channel tried to make him personally responsible for paying fines issued by the media regulator Ofcom.
Mark Steyn, who presented the station’s 8pm peak-time slot, is already subject to two investigations by the media regulator after he used his show to cast doubt on the safety of Covid vaccines.
The presenter’s departure has led some viewers of GB News – which has given airtime to conspiracy theorists warning of a globalist elite takeover – to suggest the channel has itself sold out to shadowy globalist forces.
Steyn, who has been off-air since last year after suffering two heart attacks, told fans on his personal website that the station bosses initially insisted he could not return unless a defibrillator was fitted in the studio.
He said this was fixed with a call to “Defibrillators R Us”, only for Angelos Frangopoulos, GB News’s chief executive, to demand Steyn agree to personally cover the costs of dealing with Ofcom and paying any fines for breaches of the broadcasting code. This is a highly unusual situation given the fines are the legal responsibility of the broadcast licence holder, not the individual presenter.
Steyn, who was employed on a freelance basis, said his response was that “you may be a homicidal maniac intent on bringing on a third fatal heart attack but you’ll have to do better than this”.
The presenter said he used to call GB News’s in-house compliance officer “Ofcom’s bitch” when they argued about what he was allowed to say on air.
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2023/feb/06/gb-news-presenter-quits-after-channel-tries-to-make-him-pay-ofcom-fines
For once he was being honest.
It's worth being remembered. By comparison the next British GE is small beer. It's Starmers to lose.
EDIT: All he has to do is not be Corbyn.
https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/media/2023/02/mark-steyn-quits-gb-news
Are we really wanting to head for American levels of work attendance where 60+ hours per week is considered the norm and everyone is terrified to take any time off? Even for maternity?
https://twitter.com/michaelpforan/status/1622566262588026881
That should not be a given.
(And this is important. Musk lies. He has been proven to lie. It therefore becomes a question of how much the markets should believe him. And whilst he continues to post profits, they probably will.)
This, at any rate, was the first minister’s latest line. Last week she seemed to indicate some sympathy for the view that Bryson, a trans woman, was not perhaps as unavoidably committed to being a woman as, say, the first minister herself. Today, however, Bryson was very much a “she”, albeit a woman now incarcerated in a male prison.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/sturgeon-is-being-damaged-by-her-stand-on-the-isla-bryson-row-mfvrtlcdp
As for Johnson. I don't see the Emperor's New Clothes but plenty do. The irony of many of Sunak's problems is Johnson was the architect. Are there still enough voters who see the tailored finery or just a fat naked blob? I am not sure.
I hate that they release Super Bowl ads early now but this is amazing
https://twitter.com/WUTangKids/status/1622718885228150798
Every word demonstrably true
https://twitter.com/davidgilmour/status/1622735222562226176
I was amazed to read that they have a compliance officer. Isn't OFCOM just part of the remoaner liberal elite which is ruining the lives of all the loyal Clacton-on-Sea GBeebies viewers?
So more a loss for them than him. Portillo may be the only presenter they have who is brighter than Steyn but he isn't as funny as Steyn can be
The WAAAH! Transphobe! contributors who add so much to this site should be required by convention to preface every post with a statement of their own personal position on the Isla m/w/r issue.
The Tories have won majorities under 2 state educated leaders in that time by contrast, Thatcher and Major
On Spotify, remastered, on headphones, at reasonable “old man volume”, er… not so mindblowing.
Do you consider her to have had a comprehensive education?
But, truthfully, I think that was confirmed a long, long time ago.
Thatcher and Major went to state schools and won majorities.
Labour by contrast to win most seats or a majority normally need a leader educated at private school. For example since 1945 Attlee and Blair went to private school as did Starmer.
Only Wilson is a fully state educated Labour leader to win most seats or a majority since 1945.
The only LD leader to lead his party into government also went to private school. Clegg was at Westminster
This was in common with all grammar schools in the land, which were brought fully into the state sector in 1944 under the Butler Education Act.
Now I have to disappear into a two hour meeting, which is a shame as we don't discuss grammar schools enough on PB.
The other thing it shows is the value of the grand old military principle of maintenance of aim. Musk had a plan, stuck to it despite all the warnings of imminent disaster, and, trusting Max as a reputable source, sounds like it is beginning to pay off.
It's interesting to compare this with Liz Truss' experience as PM. Die-hard Trussites will draw the lesson that, if only Conservative MPs had allowed Truss to see her plan through, then Britain would also soon be seeing the benefits of a bold plan seen through against stiff opposition.
I think the difference here is that Musk had the financial and organisational means to see his plan through, whereas Truss had not laid the groundwork for retaining the support of her MPs, or the trust of the financial markets, and so lacked the financial and organisational means to see her plan through. The fruitful comparison is with Thatcher, who prepared carefully for the Miner's Strike of 1984-5, and so she was able to see that through to a victorious conclusion.
This then brings us to Sunak, and the public sector strikes that he is now enduring, for longer than many would have thought possible, and yet with no preparation. Can he wait this out for longer than the Unions? I don't see any obvious means for the Unions to force his hand. By the time the May local elections damages his electoral credibility, it is possible that inflation will be considerably lower, and public support for higher pay settlements may erode.
I think Sunak is going to see this one through, and thereby avoid having to court more unpopularity later by imposing further tax rises to balance the books.
If (which I am not) a case were to be made for recovery from the Tories it would be this.
"We can't possibly win in the conventional sense, but in GEs someone has to win even if in ordinary reality they have all lost. Two things need to happen; Labour needs to self destruct - and this is always possible as long as the left exists; and the Tories have to be the default option for both the headbangers of the right and ordinary centrist democrats who want neither Trump nor Stalin running the country".
Sunak's mixture of centrist decency and showing a bit of ankle over ECHR etc, while obviously incoherent nonsense, may be that attempt. Let us hope the cause is hopeless.
I don't imagine the NSI are sitting on a pile of £coins or £notes which represent my Premium Bond holdings, nor could my bank point to a vault that holds the money it's got recorded in my accounts.
No, they hold it digitally, surely?
If someone could explain what I'm missing I'd be grateful.
Pretty sure that if I spend 1200 Euros on actual copies of music that I own I would find myself in a better place in ten years time.
And when you went overseas, accommodation, transport, food, school was all paid for. On the scale of house with car, driver, cook…
Tax was arranged for you - you paid little income tax. So you’d come back from a 3 year secondment with 3 years salary in the bank, mostly.
Some people would buy a house for rental and go and do another secondment, back to back. For their whole career.
Sunak might as well set up the Ministry of Silly Walks, for all the good it will do him.
Change for the sake of change.
But good news for the makers of brass plaques.
Sir Desmond Glazebrook : They've broken the rules.
Sir Humphrey : What, you mean the insider trading regulations?
Sir Desmond Glazebrook : No.
Sir Humphrey : Oh. Well, that's one relief.
Sir Desmond Glazebrook : I mean of course they've broken those, but they've broken the basic, the basic rule of the City.
Sir Humphrey : I didn't know there were any.
Sir Desmond Glazebrook : Just the one. If you're incompetent you have to be honest, and if you're crooked you have to be clever. See, if you're honest, then when you make a pig's breakfast of things the chaps rally round and help you out.
Sir Humphrey : If you're crooked?
Sir Desmond Glazebrook : Well, if you're making good profits for them, chaps don't start asking questions; they're not stupid. Well, not that stupid.
Sir Humphrey : So the ideal is a firm which is honest and clever.
Sir Desmond Glazebrook : Yes. Let me know if you ever come across one, won't you.
It does all require a degree of cynicism that I don't think Rishi quite possesses. The man they really need is Boris, only without the baggage Boris built up last time.
The time has come for Alex (definitely not Boris) de Pfeffel to have some plastic surgery and a hair transplant.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bank_of_England_£100,000,000_note#:~:text=The Bank of England £,by the Bank of England.
In a digital currency a company would hold your balance and it it would not be a bank. As the article says "Think Amazon, or Facebook, or maybe Chinese-owned Alibaba or Tiktok having a version of sterling"
Do you really want Amazon to manage your money?
But he isn’t. He’s portraying himself as an upper middle class lawyer. Which he is.
Vinyl? Went away, has come back with compression monster 180g reissues.
CD? I know many many CDs are still out there. But its long since past its prime.
The new thing is Dolby Atmos mixes, but DVD or DVD-A or BluRay?
Personally I still love Minidisc. Playing one as I type this...
Few grammar schools closed when Thatcher was PM and under Major the number of pupils in grammar schools rose
I subscribe to the theory if Boris were to lead Tories into next election they would get a far better result than under Sunak or anybody else. I think he’s just a lot more popular and can reach voters in all the walls Sunak can’t.
I don’t think, unless you bring a lot of workers from really, really poor countries, that bringing wages back down to the share of the pie, in the low paid/skilled areas will happen.
It's easy to see why the hard left come up with this stuff: a combination of still liking Russia because of the USSR and Communism (even though modern Russia only takes the 'enriches those in power' from Communism); a hatred of the West and our institutions, and an utter loathing of the 'wrong' people.
It's less easy to see what the hard right get it from. Yes, there will be a few neo-Nazis and fascists who quite like Putin's strongman act. There will be some who hate the government in power, and therefore oppose what that government supports. And there will be a few loud moths directly or indirectly in Russia's pay.
But if you wanted America to be Great Again, then spending a relatively tiny amount of money to defeat what was your #1 enemy is surely a good thing, especially as it does not cost American lives?
As I understand the status quo, it provides a duopoly to VISA and Mastercard who make vast piles of cash processing current digital transactions of your pounds Sterling. What a new digital coin could do, if designed right, is provide a means for transactions of the digital pound to be processed by a much wider variety of people, and therefore open up payment processing to a wider market and drive down costs.
The other thing that stands out, and surprises me, is this bit: "Neither the Bank of England nor Government would have access to the data on transactions with a digital pound. But consumers could pick providers, not just banks, to hold their cash in digital wallets, with varying degrees of privacy. Some users might be comfortable with their wallet provider knowing all their transactions, if they received a discount for example. Others might want to stay as private as possible."
A lot of concern has been expressed about the death of cash making it possible for bad actors to track your every financial transaction, and that this represents a severe erosion of our privacy rights. At first glance, the above excerpt from the article suggests that the intent is to make it possible to enable untraceable cash-style transactions with a digital Pound.
You'd imagine that the police would be aghast at such a suggestion, but, if it comes to pass, it would be a major win for privacy rights that would last generations.
So, well, my first reaction was one of befuddlement, but I'm now reasonably hopeful that the people involved know what they are doing, and may achieve something worthwhile.
Where are the young Heseltines and Clarkes when you need them?
As I understand it a "digital pound" would be like a digital replacement for notes and coins. It could be anonymous. It would exist outside of the banking system. It would be a token rather than a book keeping entry. Right now it's not something that is really needed. I struggle a bit to see why it might be needed in the future. Perhaps a digital token technology is cheaper to administer than the bank payment and clearing system, or at least could become cheaper, and therefore more useful for small transactions?
I remain intensely sceptical about crypto but this is something a bit different.
Boris's problem is that he's now annoyed enough British voters to the extent that they won't forgive him.
What Putins Russia sells is that all of Russian history is glorious, wonderful and morally perfect. Think Henty and his works, as their vision of history.
Their fear of “Western self doubt and self loathing” is based on the idea that their power (such as it is) comes from belief. The willingness of the human waves to bayonet charge….. I their world, once you allow the Head Count to doubt The System, your culture collapses and the cold wind blows.
It was a meme on the extreme right, before the invasion, that the proper, manly Russian army would demonstrate that their Big Weapons would annihilate Western FeminizedTransWoke armies.
If the way back for the Conservatives is to disown Boris'n'Liz and shuffle back towards the centre (and I accept it may not be), it's not going to be easy for them.
https://twitter.com/PeteWishart/status/1622715640426496023?s=20&t=oykH1gw0pA6GLsIWd05DjA
You say that vinyl "went away", but for the entire period it did so, my mother had her old vinyl records and a vinyl player, and no-one stopped her form playing her old records because she'd stopped paying them ten Euros a month.
The concerns against such systems, are that anonymity becomes impossible, and that a scammer or state actor could ‘un-person’ an individual trivially and with no recourse.
I did like minidisc. Tape, only better. For a brief window, they did their job better than anything else. But they very quickly became redundant with a) writable CDs, b) being able to store music on computer and c) MP3 players, all of which did the job of a minidisc better than a minidisc.
I own music rather than rent it. As a 47 year old who has spent over 30 years building up a music collection it makes sense. I have spent thousands on music over the years and 90% of what I listen to (apart from the radio) is stuff I already own. It doesn't make sense for me to pay to rent what I could listen to for free now. But it probably makes more sense for my children to rent it.
That said, my 12 year old daughter has recently got into vinyl. And vinyl is so very desirable. Sadly I lost most of my vinyl in a house move some time in the noughties. I still own the music on CD, but I miss the actual objects of vinyl records that I owned - particularly one or two cherishable ones. (The double album of London Calling - not rare, but an absolute work of art - and the original cover of Appetite for Destruction - horrible to look at, but rare and therefore cherishable.) I went with her to a record shop recently and had to hold myself back from buying vinyl copies of all sorts of records I already own on CD even though the only record player in the house now is her new cheap one and even though new records are £30 a pop. (Which is roughly where you'd expect them to be had the price of music since the 80s kept pace with inflation, but a bit of a shock when you are used to CDs for £7.) I keep going into her room just to look fondly at a shelf full of records. It is such a lovely thing to see. When we redo her room in her few months I am going to get her a decent record player with a good set of speakers. Other family members are cheerfully buying her their favourite records in a way they wouldn't think to with electronic music. There's something about a record which engenders a visceral reaction in the same way that a baby cuckoo's open mouth does in birds - a need to touch, to interact, to make it work, in a way that defies rationality. It is so very satisfyingly physical a thing.
In fact why don't we sack the Tories altogether who caused this mess in the first place?
If inflation drops to 4%, will there still be public support for unions asking for 10% or so? Of course, to avoid a real terms pay cut, they'd still need 10% (plus the extra inflation since then) but the public at large may see a 10% demand, with inflation at 4% at the time as a pay rise way above inflation, even though it would cover a period in which cost of living had increased by well over 10%.
Waiting this out may have benefits for Sunak, short term. Longer term issues of nurses/teachers etc giving up and quitting to get better paid jobs elsewhere will of course remain.
This probably doesn't impact on revenue at all - but it does make the service worse than it was.