What happens when markets stop working?
That is the question at the core of this video, and it matters because we are entering a period in which shortages of essential goods may become impossible to ignore. Oil supplies are already being disrupted. Gas, fertilisers, industrial chemicals and food supply chains are under pressure. And when essentials become scarce, markets ration by price, not by need.
That is, of course, when markets work, when they ration by price.
“Someone willing to publish results opposing what he wishes to be true”.
This is, in fact, fairly pathetic:
Their battered metal safes, filled with millions of Somali shillings, are closed and locked. The paper fortunes inside have suddenly become worthless. “It’s like we went bankrupt overnight,” says Jama.
Last month, fed up with greasy, ripped and aged banknotes, a handful of traders in Mogadishu decided they would no longer accept them. Soon businesses, shops and even bus drivers were following suit, and the decision quickly spread to regions outside the capital.
The impact on prices was immediate, pushing up everyday expenses such as groceries, medicines and public transport. A small bag of powdered milk, for example, more than doubled in price.
Amid global food price rises and Somalia’s ongoing drought, poor people are bearing the brunt of the effects of an economy that is becoming completely “dollarised”.
Of course, as soon as anyone started using something as evil as American dollars then it was the poor who got screwed.
That’s the way The Guardian’s going to play it at least. A simpler explanation dsoes present itself. The Somali shilling lost another 50% of its value and there was a collective decision to “fuck this shit”. A sensible one too, as those shillings seem to have lost even more of their value since, no?
I will admit it’s amusing The G using a currency trader as a source and also being sympathetic to them….
Reform UK’s success has caused trepidation among many members of minority communities across the UK, with concerns there could now be a rise in hostile rhetoric.
Didn’t the people just have their say?
But let me be clear, we do not need a new Labour Prime Minister. Even less do we need a new Conservative Prime Minister. And we most certainly do not need Nigel Farage in Number 10, not that I really think he has any ambition to get there, so keen has he been in the past to avoid responsibility, accountability and the loss of personal income that will go with both.
Instead, we need new politics. The rise of the Green Party of England and Wales reflects that fact, but so far the offering is flawed, potentially by policy incoherence, but also by entryism, which will always be a problem for a party in its position, where its popularity is rising so rapidly.
That is why the foundations matter. And it is to those foundations that I want to dedicate my time.
Cometh the Potato. Perhaps as Leader, perhaps in the more eminent position of eminence graisseux. But cometh all the same, eh?
By keeping everything on a small scale, most micropubs do not make more than £90,000 profit in a year, which keeps them below the VAT registration threshold.
The Tele needs to get with the program. It’s sales, not profits, of under £90k that leaves out VAT.
But, you know journos and numbers. Acshully, journos and knowledge…..they don’t even get booze right these days, O Tempora, O Mores…..
Andrew Mitchell, the Conservative MP for Sutton Coldfield, agreed that the result risked leaving Birmingham “ungovernable”, adding: “There was the hope that there might be a chance for strong and sensible leadership. But I’m afraid that is not the result that the electorate has delivered.
Perhaps the electorate prefers not to have strong leadership?
Now, if I had just been elected there I would have one and only the one constant refrain. Abolish the Equality Act. That binmen’s strike is cause by the insane insistence that the dinner ladies and classroom assistants must be paid the same amounts as the binmen. Work of equal value, see?
So just hammer away at that. We cannot solve this problem while national politics insists upon this. Thus this is something that has to be solved by national politics. And just keep shouting that. Just say it to local newspaper reporters, the local TV station, interviews with anyone, every speech in the council chamber. Go all very boring and Cato on them. Delenda est equalitas.
Sure, it doesn’t help much with everything else but politics is about using the issues available to make the point.
Sir Keir therefore had a 45-minute warning that his premiership was being formally challenged – by an MP almost no one outside Westminster or her north London constituency has ever heard of.
Ms West told the BBC that she already had 10 backers for her “stalking horse” bid, which is designed to trigger a leadership election that another contender would win.
After all, the impossible does happen, sometimes twice before breakfast.
The purpose of this law is to enrch lawyers. Job done.
AI deepfakes reveal exactly what the bird would be saying without deep fakes. Isn’t that, therefore, a glorious revelation?
In our view, that’s a good thing. But as the anti-datacenter movement has grown, it’s come under fire from all sides, including from liberal critics who dismiss it as another privileged form of nimby (not in my backyard) politics with naive demands. A New York Times op-ed, for example, called the fight against datacenters a “myopic” “distraction” from the “real fight”. In truth, anti-datacenter organizing is the real fight, one centered on an industry choke point that people can reach out and touch. This brewing populist resistance isn’t just about limiting local development – it represents a critical new front in the fight against tech-enabled authoritarianism. Where else can people push back on job-eating algorithms, distorting deep fakes, and autonomous drone strikes?
We’ve found some trivial issue we can organise around and thereby haave comfy jobs sa anti-capitalists.
Well done, Lads
While hunting basking sharks he met the author Gavin Maxwell, an SOE instructor at Arisaig. “Frightful little pansy,” said J M Scott. “Wears dark glasses.”
Not only is deep canvassing persuasive but, by contrast to almost all other approaches, the change appears to be durable, at least over the course of months. It seems to have been a decisive factor in the election of Zohran Mamdani as mayor of New York.
What makes the difference is the listening. There’s a solid rule in life: if you don’t listen to other people, they won’t listen to you. I’m often told that people are “too exhausted” to engage in politics. That can mean they’re overwhelmed by work and family life. But it can also refer to the exhaustion of being unheard. The sense that no one is listening is alienating and demoralising.
Another benefit is that deep canvassing allows people to change their minds without losing face. A study in the journal Political Communication found that when someone is heard attentively and without judgment, “they are more likely to become more open-minded and process information in a less defensive manner”. Active listening creates “a sense of shared social identity”, which can build “faith in wider democratic processes”.
The way to change politics is to talk to your neighbours.
Imagine a technique that can heal Britain of division and keep out the hard right. I call it ‘radical listening’
George Monbiot
But the more you talk to your neighbours then the more you will find out that some to more than you thought of your neighbours are, in fact, hard right.
After all, there’s no guarantee at all that the actual culture itself agrees with George now, is there?
Whoever wins today’s elections, democracy is the loser under first past the post
Polly Toynbee
That it is possible to throw the bsatards out is rather the point of an electoral system, no?
On Wednesday, the body published a long-awaited review of Cass’s findings, conducted by 12 union members.
Prof David Strain, the chair of the BMA’s board of science, who led the review, said the Cass report’s methodology was robust and the BMA was no longer opposed to any of its 32 recommendations.
Presumably they found some union members with actual subject expertise rather than political insistences and so the verdict changed.
Watkins was a “particularly notorious and high-profile” prisoner, who had received threats from other prisoners including on the day before he was killed, said Storey.
Gedel, whom prison officers described as “perky” when they detained him after the attack, allegedly said “have a good night’s sleep Watkins lad” when he was taken past the cell where the former singer was receiving medical treatment.
Gedel told police he was jealous of “nonce prisoners” because they “got treated like royalty”, the court heard, and he thought it was disgusting to share a wing with sex offenders at HMP Wakefield, often labelled “monster mansion” because of the number of high-profile prisoners.
Good honest criminals disgusted with sharing a prison with nonces.
This is well enough known that it’s a cliche, isn’t it?
For hundreds of years, he was known only as “Jersey”, an enslaved boy of about 11 rendered in oil on canvas by the great 18th-century portrait painter Sir Joshua Reynolds.
But now the life of the youngster, believed to be Reynolds’ earliest depiction of a person of colour, has begun to emerge, thanks to a research project.
Details found in admiralty records and other archives have unearthed information about Jersey’s identity, his military service and even hint he may eventually have found freedom.
Erm, no. At least, I think no.
He was discharged from another ship in the summer of 1753 and then vanished from the records, not appearing on the musters of other ships Ourry served on. One theory is that he was sold on to someone else, another that he was given his freedom and joined another vessel.
David Olusoga, a historian, broadcaster and National Trust ambassador, said the research had helped bring Boston Jersey out of the shadows.
He said: “This project asks us to look more closely at a familiar past, revealing a life long obscured and reminding us that history is shaped as much by those rendered invisible as by those remembered.
“To tell Jersey’s story is to confront the silences within our history, and to recognise the individuals whose lives have too often been hidden from view.”
NAM Rodgers – a real historian – strongly suggesats, at lesat, that the Navy didn’t recognise slavery when it came to those who served. Obviously it did recognise the institution, slave ships and all that. But in terms of anyone who served it just didn’t recognise it. You couldn’t be a slave and a seaman, the one precluded the other.
Now, whether this applied, wholly and completely, to boy servants is a detail I don’t know. But it’s one of those things that I think is certainly possible. Be interesting to know in fact.
Former China defence ministers convicted of corruption in latest purge of military leaders
Ex-defence ministers, Li Shangfu and Wei Fenghe both sentenced to death with a two-year reprieve, among the most severe sentences in a years-long purge
If you are the authoritarian, dictatorial, type, then you’d quite like all your underlings to be corrupt. For when you do want to get rid of them you’ve got the mechanism right there. Plus, hanging a few scares all.
The idea just doesn’t work so well if all are honest.