The FTX bankruptcy. Looks like the Chapter 11 will in fact make a profit. That is, there will be something for shareholders as well as creditors.
No, this doesn’t mean Sam did nothing wrong. It does mean that crypto is well up since the bankruptcy. So they’ve been able to sell the rubble and collect cash to pay people back at the crypto prices of Nov 22.
As, in fact, happened at Mt Gox as well.
Time after time, I heard the claim that Israeli actions are justified by self-defence when no sane person can pretend that the disproportionate response to its own security failure can justify its offensive action in many countries.
Somehow it’s always the Joos at fault.
Look at this photo of Ursula von der Leyen’s new team – and tell me the EU doesn’t have a diversity problem
Shada Islam
How very dare ethnic Europeans run Europe?
For illustration’s sake run this the other way around. Howsabout a European running Gaza?
Isn’t that what they’re complaining about there?
A relaxation of official rules around the correct use of apostrophes in German has not only irritated grammar sticklers but triggered existential fears around the pervasive influence of English.
Establishments that feature their owners’ names, with signs like “Rosi’s Bar” or “Kati’s Kiosk” are a common sight around German towns and cities, but strictly speaking they are wrong: unlike English, German does not traditionally use apostrophes to indicate the genitive case or possession. The correct spelling, therefore, would be “Rosis Bar”, “Katis Kiosk”, or, as in the title of a recent viral hit, Barbaras Rhabarberbar.
However, guidelines issued by the body regulating the use of Standard High German orthography have clarified that the use of the punctuation mark colloquially known as the Deppenapostroph (“idiot’s apostrophe”) has become so widespread that it is permissible – as long as it separates the genitive ‘s’ within a proper name.
We should ship them some of ours – soon relax that rule again, no?
Scientists have called for people to go “urban mining” after a study revealed that old cables, phone chargers and other unused electrical goods thrown away or stored in cupboards or drawers could stave off a looming shortage of copper.
The research found that in the UK there are approximately 823m unused or broken tech items hiding in “drawers of doom” containing as much as 38,449 tonnes of copper – including 627m cables – enough to provide 30% of the copper needed for the UK’s planned transition to a decarbonised electricity grid by 2030.
Well, that’s true, and if copper prices rise substantially then people will dig them out. This always does happen too – it’s why the Hunt Brothers couldn’t corner the silver market. They tried, prices rose and the household stashes came flooding out to the refiners.
But this?
The study found that unused electrical goods could contain as much as £266m worth of copper. Scott Butler, from Recycle Your Electricals, which produced the study, called on the public to start recycling their unwanted electrical goods.
The group is now urging everyone to check its “recycling locator” for their nearest facility.
Congratulations to the PR bod there then. That’s £50k of free advertising gained by feeding The Guardian a story. Well done that man, vry well done.
It would mean households and businesses across the country would pay different amounts for electricity depending on which zone they were in, with prices determined by how close they are to generators such as wind farms and the quality of local grid infrastructure.
Advocates say the changes will result in overall savings for every household by forcing developers to locate wind and solar farms closer to where they are needed. This should reduce the need for new power lines and therefore cut bills.
It would also potentially eliminate market quirks that can see wind farms paid to switch off when the grid is congested, or see power sent abroad via interconnectors even when it is needed domestically.
If you slice up the national market into regional ones then it’s possible for each regional market to have the same problems as the national one. Like sending across interconnectors and switching off wind when there’s a local surplus instead of only when there’s a national one.
The claim simply does not work.
News broke in May 2021 that the remains of 215 children had apparently been found at a former Indian Residential School site in Kamloops, British Columbia, through the use of ground-penetrating radar. It ignited a dramatic chain of events in which more than 2,000 unmarked graves were supposedly discovered at other former residential schools between 2021 and 2022. A media fervor began, including a New York Times expose and various BBC reports. There was even an apology from Pope Francis in July 2022 on behalf of Catholic priests involved in the old residential school system.
Others, however, have pushed back against this narrative. Three years later, no remains have been exhumed and identified, leading to justified scepticism about the initial claims. “Canada is already very far down the path not just of accepting, but of legally entrenching, a narrative for which no serious evidence has been proffered,” C.P. Champion and Tom Flanagan wrote in Grave Error: How The Media Misled Us (and the Truth about Residential Schools).”All the major elements of the story are either false or highly exaggerated,” the authors argue.
Alas, some Canadians decided to play judge, jury and executioner without a fair trial and considering all the evidence. Blame has largely been placed at the feet of the Catholic Church – and houses of worship have been targeted.
So they’re burning down churches based on simple lies about those Indian graves. And yet if you were to listen to the misinformation experts it’s only the right which misinforms, right?
Further, as I’ve been pointing out. If the graves did exist this would just be normal. We’re talking about schools stretching back up to two centuries. Back when the child death rate was high – up to 50% were expected to die before puberty. It would be odd if no children died in such schools, not odd if they did.
A close friend of a government minister wrote a report Labour has used to justify the party’s private school VAT raid.
Matthew Pennycook, a minister in the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, was reported to have been the best man at the wedding of Luke Sibieta, who authored the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) paper on Labour’s plans.
Just how the ruling class works.
The same sort of people, that same class, run the government and the surrounding apparatus. It’s different from the old ruling class but still there.
The idea that government surpluses are good because they create piles of cash waiting to be spent in the event of a national emergency is absurd. All money paid in tax is cancelled on receipt by the government. So, all government surpluses actually do is reduce the amount of cash in the private sector economy.
Quite so. That then increases the amount of cash govt can pump into the economy – without generating inflation – if there’s a crisis and it needs to. It doesn’t save money, true. But it does save the ability to issue money, which is good.
Last year, the largest increase in the gender pay gap was among employees aged 30 to 39 years, where it increased from 2.3% to 4.7%, official figures show.
Average age of first birth is now 31. So, and?
Rachel Reeves should launch a tax raid on wealthy people fleeing Britain as part of sweeping changes to capital gains rates, a leading think tank has said.
The Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) has called on Ms Reeves to impose an exit tax on investors moving their money out of the country, which it said would reduce incentives for them to flee.
The IFS proposals are odd, most odd. I don’t trust the two who have written them as far as the Vunipola brothers could throw them. I take their writing for the IFS as being a proof of Conquest’s Second Law.
There’s not a hope in hell of the overall proposals being accepted. Even though some of them are economically sensible.
But the effect of that overall set of changes. It would be to tax, and hugely heavily, successful entrepreneurs. And to not really tax anyone else very much. Which, – incentives, you know? – doesn’t really seem like quite the right thing to be doing.
Britain is home to more illegal migrants than any other European nation, a new study has found.
There are up to 745,000 illegal migrants in the UK, accounting for one in 100 of the population, according to the research led by Oxford University experts.
This is more than double the 300,000 in France and ahead even of the upper estimate of 700,000 in Germany, which has the second-largest population of illegal migrants in Europe.
When is too many?
Chris Packham has been forced to pay £200,000 to a pensioner and country sportsman he was accused of pursuing ‘vindictively” through the courts, it has been claimed.
In 2023, the naturalist and BBC presenter was awarded £90,000 in damages after the High Court upheld his defamation claims against two contributors to Country Squire, an online magazine that wrongly accused him of misleading people into donating to a tiger rescue charity.
But his case against Paul Read, a 70-year-old grandfather who was the proofreader for some of the magazine articles, was thrown out by the High Court judge.
It meant Packham, 63, became liable for the pensioner’s legal costs, and Mr Read has now claimed his damages have been dwarfed by that bill.
I mean, seriously, going after the proofreader?
Tessa Gregory, of Leigh Day,
Oh, those grifters? No wonder…..
Wes Streeting strips jailed breast cancer surgeon of £1m pension
So we’ve broached that point that employees of the state who harm citizens can have their pensions confiscated.
I’ve a little list here…….acshully, a fairly long list……..
Farmer and author James Rebanks: ‘I hate the word rewilding – it’s been weaponised’
Upland sheep farmers exist only because of subsidy. The first act of reqilding would be to stop the subsidy to upland sheep farmers so as to rewild the uplands. You’ve only got to listen to Monbiot on the subject for 30 seconds to grasp that.
Whether any of that is the right thing to do or not is another matter. But he would say that, wouldn’t he?
Rachel Reeves’s plan to significantly increase borrowing in the Budget risks pushing up mortgage rates, Treasury analysis suggests.
An official modelling exercise indicates that the Chancellor’s plans to rewrite Britain’s fiscal rules could increase the cost of debt for consumers and businesses.
The Treasury research paper warns that a “fiscal loosening” of just one per cent of GDP could lead to a “peak increase in interest rates” of up to 1.25 percentage points.
The document goes on to warn that every increase in annual borrowing of £25 billion could increase interest rates by between 0.5 and 1.25 percentage points.
The actual numbers there, well, mebbe. But the general idea is obviously true. In order to attract mre money – as Spud would say, in order to gain more who wish to save with the government – the rates on offer will have to rise. For the standard supply and demand reasons. If there were more who wanted to lend more at current rates then they’d be doing so and so bidding up prices/down yields. Thus to gain more we need to change the price on offer to move along that demand curve.
Volume on offer and price are not independent of each others…..D’Oh.
What’s actually going to be interesting here is watching who tries to deny this.
Vaping could be banned outside schools and hospitals
If women were in fact having four children, two daughters in law and 16 grandchildren then they’d have no damn time to institute stupid ideas like this.
Ban both abortions and the pill in order to preserve some modicum of freedom in our society.
Single parents bear the brunt of the rental crisis in regional Victoria
Only the one income in a household makes renting more difficult. Who would have thought it, eh?
When that assisted dying becomes possible:
Police say sorry after putting down family’s dog by mistake
Soon enough it’ll be:
Police say sorry after putting down family’s Granny by mistake
After all, that is what happened at Gosport Memorial Hospital, isn’t it? 456 times?
Pete Buttigieg, the transportation secretary, shot down criticism by Elon Musk on the government’s handling of Hurricane Helene relief efforts, accusing the SpaceX CEO of spreading misinformation.
Musk accused the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) of blocking his satellite internet company, Starlink, from delivering to parts of North Carolina decimated by the hurricane, a claim both Fema and Buttigieg said was false.
“No one is shutting down the airspace and FAA doesn’t block legitimate rescue and recovery flights. If you’re encountering a problem give me a call,” Buttigieg wrote. Musk replied that he had seen hundreds of such reports and would phone.
Yes, well done, “legitimate“. Who decides that then?