Thing about that story where the pot calls the kettle black is the pot isn't wrong though.
Shortly the chancellor of the exchequer will do a budget in which she's expected to cut a wide range of benefits and allowances and generally try and balance the books by taking from the poor to give to the rich.
Rachel the reverse Robinhood.
They won't call it Austerity, because that name is poisoned and they promised not to do anything called that, but that's what it is.
It won't work.
Duh.
Making the poor masses poorer reduces spending in the economy, which reduces government receipts, and makes the deficit bigger not smaller.
Austerity never works. Can't work.
If balancing the books matters it really needs to be done by taxing the rich to spend on the poor, so that the poor spend the money into the economy and grow the economy to increase the government receipts.
The rich end up with the money anyway, once the poor spend it. They always do.
Cutting from the poor to avoid taxing the rich just means more money goes into overseas tax havens and into pumping up the untaxed prices of assets for the rich. No growth, except in asset prices and the hordes of the owner class.
You'd hope a left wing government would get this, but of course Starmer's Labour aren't a left wing government, they are just more tory.
Apparently Elon thinks he's going to send one of his humanoid "Optimus" robots on a rocket to Mars at the end of next year.
🤨
Radiation hardened then are they those things?
Seems a bit pointless to build the robots radiation hardened if they're just going to hang around doing laundry and washing dishes in the suburbs.
And yet without the hardening they won't even survive the trip.
Seems like some people are keen to have the things in their house, but I can't imagine being comfortable giving a corporate spy-bot access to my flat. Those things are gonna be narcs man, totally.
Surprising I haven't seen one doing a nazi salute yet.
#tesla #robot #mars
Because Android is a spying machine from a surveillance capitalist with undeletable cookies before you even log in, and iOS is locked down so hard you have to pay for a license to program it.
Very much looking forward to not having either of those in my pocket and having something open and free instead.
Oh no, if boycotting Tesla is illegal I'll have to buy one, but I haven't got enough money 😭
I'm going to go to jail for my illegal boycott of Tesla's crappy trucks.
Land of the free my arse.
Today is Online Safety Day because the terrible awful Online Safety Law comes into affect this month.
To me, Online Safety means:
* Never use your government name on the internet.
* Use fully end to end encrypted services like Signal.
* Avoid using large online surveillance projects like Facebook, Instagram or Whatsapp.
* Self-host wherever possible to protect your data from Big Tech.
* Alter your software to block ads, use ad-blockers everywhere.
* Use a VPN to help subvert tracking technology.
But the government, and most of the callers to talk radio today, seem to think it means:
* All sites must ID check their users to ensure they aren't children.
* Encryption must have government back doors so the police and state can read all messages.
* Only big tech sites are legitimate because they are more subject to legal control.
* Self hosting should be legally onerous so that only big companies with huge legal compliance departments can run internet sites.
* It should be illegal to alter the software made by big business.
* VPNs should be illegal since they can avoid government blocks.
So that's all pretty depressing.
Good luck everyone. Stay safe.
Big updates to https://dataMachine.ai for profile searches.
Try it out it's nuts!
This type of query is available by API and DVM soon nostr:npub17304velluajf6lylvjynpj2f3ndg396w063gj2gef5qk0nwtcyjqfj9yky
It's broken, it didn't recommend following me! 😆
What happens if they just keep stacking anyway? Does the IMF invade?
"Tone and body language", plus a "lack of respect" are the things which Trump objected to, which blew his deal up and left him failing to reach any agreement.
What a master deal-maker he must be, to let his entire negotiation blow up in anger just because of the tone and respect he thinks he deserves.
Hope he never has to broker a deal with me and anyone else coz Zelenksyy appeared to me to be far too differential, and didn't even swear or try and throw a milkshake over the fascist.
I'd be throwing a milkshake at the very least. Showing full on contempt, never mind lack of respect.
Strange how much these so-called "strong" men require respect and deference to support their fragile masculinity or else they throw all their toys out of the pram.
Don't seem that strong to me. Seems pretty pathetic.
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/03/01/trump-zelenskyy-white-house-tone-elon-musk.html
#trump #ukraine #artOfTheDeal
Mostly because I loaned them things, that's the primary reason.
Sounds like that time when the government gave SpaceX billions of dollars to make a moon mission and got nothing but a failed rocket that blew up trying to carry a banana around the world.
Went to a friend's birthday party, played some songs on the synth with the loop pedal.
Seemed to go down okay, they demanded an encore. Requires more attention in front of an audience somehow. Can feel my concentration shrinking and the timing and voice control slip quite a lot.
Good to see some old friends I don't get to see very often, and some of the more usual crowd. Half the people there are, like me, not drinking due to health reasons. Getting older sucks quite a lot. Does mean I can drive home at least I guess.
Here's one of the songs that only makes me cringe at how terrible it is a couple of times. Suspect there's too much going on by the end of this loop. Self indulgent. Possibly ought to stop the loop of the final guitar solo so it' isn't playing over itself like 3 times.
You'd think they'd wake up.
Well, well. If you want to encrypt your backup data in the UK you'll have to do it yourself with open tools because Apple have removed encryption from uk backups rather than create a master-key to let the government decrypt everything.
Absolutely the right move from Apple, probably nobody should have been trusting Apple to encrypt their backups and so doing it themselves anyway.
Absolutely the wrong move from the UK government, as usual, who seem to think there is such a thing as an encryption braking key which only good-guys can use.
Even though the cops and the government also contain bad-guys.
Tsk. Seems like governments can't make good internet law ever at all.
Went to see a comedian called Rob Auton [www.robauton.co.uk] do a work-in-progress show at the local little theater.
More "first time" than "in progress" really. He was more comfortable and funny when talking about the act than when reading it from the pages.
A strange story where he's pretending to be a motivational speaker called "Can", which has quite a bit of work still to be done.
Good to see a couple of friends and have some food before the show, nice enjoyable evening.
Read "Making Sense Of Chaos" by J Doyne Farmer, in which he describes some of the problems with standard static economic models and his successes with instead using "complexity economics", where he's building giant models of economies out of interactions between software simulated people called agents.
The thing, he reckons, about the mathematical equation driven models is that they are static, and so only really reflect changes when exogenous shocks hit the system. So you can see a change in the model if there's some supply shock caused by a pandemic or whatever, but the economic model won't evolve over time to reflect changes which come from within the economy itself. It always reaches an equilibrium until the next shock.
Whereas his agent-based models are chaotic, and can model the chaotic behavior of a real economy. Dynamic changes within the model can lead to boom and bust cycles, or to market crashes based on nothing but the endogenous behavior of the model without requiring some shock from outside it like a war or a pandemic.
He describes some success stories over his career of models getting increasingly complex as computational power increases, and paints a convincing picture of how better models can help decision makers determine the best courses of action.
Maybe it's because I'm a programmer from the games business, and not really much of a mathematician, but this is the method I'd have used if you asked me to model an economy. Hard to see how it could possibly work with just an equation of demand and supply.
But of course economics as a discipline is older than computers so they couldn't do it that way in the first place.
It would be good to have the field of economics catch up to trying to model the real world instead of just justify their pre-conceived ideas, to validate concepts that allow the rich getting to rule the world and the politicians to do what they were planning anyway.
#reading #books #economics
"Fraud" is the excuse that private health care insurance companies use to deny the care that people need and leave people suffering and dead for the money on the bottom like. Guess that's coming to Medicaie too then. 100 billion dollars wasted on "fraudulently" treating cancer and heart disease.
> Group of Labour MPs urge No 10 to be tougher on migration to fend off Reform
Oh look, it's the Labour party saying "Reform is correct, you shouldn't vote for them, but Reform is correct and have accurately described all your problems"
The more Labour accept the framing Reform offers, instead of arguing against it, the more they ensure a Reform victory.
When Nigel Farage is the prime minister, it will be because the Labour Party agreed with them when they lied that immigration causes everyone's problems and is bad for the country.
It'll be because when Nigel says "Refugees are the cause of house price inflation" they say "Yes, we must do something about refuges" instead of "Bollocks, rich landlords cause house price inflation, we should tax landlordism"
It's hard to underestimate just how awful terrible a job the Labour party is doing of diffusing Reform's lies.
😔
#ukpol #labour #reform #migration
What makes people think they have any right to tell other people where they may or may not live? 🤷♂️