The fundamental causes of ill health – from the corrupting impact of antisocial neoliberal capitalism, to the consequences of excessive interest rates on stress and homelessness, to the obesity caused by ultra-processed foods – are all left untouched by the government.
‘Flu is neoliberal now.
The only branch of Economics that is worse than Man-in-the-pub Economics is Man-banned-from-the-pubs Economics.
‘Course, humans were never ill before neoliberalism or UPF. They lived longer then, too, and never starved.
Obesity is primarily caused by people eating what the government / healthcare experts have been telling us to eat for the last 70 years – a low fat, high sugar diet.
Trofim Murphy rejects “germ theory of disease” and reinstates Miasma Theory.
From Richard to Poorsoft. Around a century ago when anthropologists were first running around the world, they found some isolated tribes that didn’t understand the link between ficky-ficky and pregnancy. Now we have entire nations that don’t understand the link between quantity eaten and obesity. Instead they blame it on evil gods.
Just as bad, they declare some foods evil. UPF is an example. Food of course has no capacity to be good or bad. Results of eating it are Man’s responsibility.
“Pizza makes me fat.”
“No, your eating too much pizza makes you fat.”
Putting responsibility on food is quite the dodge.
It’s “excessive interest rates” again LOL. Another battered hobby horse leaves the Elysian stables for a quick canter.
Just go to a search engine and type “uk interest rates graph 50 years”.
Thing is, in MMT you don’t need interest rates, do you? You just print money and hand it out until all the “unused capacity” in the economy is in use, and then tax it back again to stop inflation. That’s all there is to it, isn’t it? What are interest rates for? There’s no need for a time value of money so no need for interest rates, is there?
Unless the government were going to hand out free cash to anyone who planned to start a business, surely there would be a need for capital for people to start businesses and invest in existing ones? Otherwise where does the money come from for such ventures? How does a person with a great idea but no funds get their business off the ground, other than borrowing some from someone who has made profits/has excess income and has saved it for a rainy day? Surely that saving/investment loop doesn’t disappear in MMT world? MMT just allows the State to spend what it likes, not everyone else.
Jim, I don’t know what the official MMT answer would be, but it’s pretty obvious what to do: since MMT lets you print the cash, you simply go to an appropriate MMT ATM and withdraw the money you need from the machine (obviously, for serious amounts of money, you’d just arrange that the million gets taken from the bank’s MMT account and deposited in yours. What could go wrong?
But if the MMT idea is to enable governments to attain the nirvana of “full employment” and “the economy at full capacity” then surely the purpose of the money printing is for it to be spent on starting businesses and investing in existing ones, as well as public works? So if you need a new tractor or irrigation rig so you can develop that field, the government will give you the money, because you’re bringing unused capacity into use, aren’t you?
Oh, who owns this new capacity? Oh the government. Mmm. Hadn’t thought of that. MMT = nationalisation.
the corrupting impact of antisocial neoliberal capitalism
Lol. Actually, if Ritchie wasn’t retarded, there’s a rare example of this going on in IT.
Sam Altman, of OpenAI massive Enron-style financial bubble fame, recently bought up 40% of the world’s DRAM supply in two simultaneous deals with SK Hynix and Samsung – who are both unlikely to have agreed the deal if they’d known about the other, simultaneously announced deal but by then it was too late.
He did this so OpenAI, which has never made a profit and is very unlikely to ever generate enough value to offset its multi-hundreds-of-billions in losses, can stockpile unfinished wafers in warehouses to stop the competition buying RAM. He’s not buying RAM to help OpenAI in the short term, but to hoard it to harm the competition.
Immediately, RAM prices went through the roof as competitors scrambled to buy what remains of inventory. You’ll be seeing those large price increases, and stock scarcity, filter through to virtually every consumer electronics appliance in 2026. Some products will be cancelled due to lack of supply, apparently Xbox might be in trouble.
So we’ve got a money sink of a company, that has generated exactly nothing so far except a fun chatbot and an alarmingly large debt mountain, deliberately ruining Christmas and further distorting the distressed IT industry, just so Sam Altman could put a spoke in Google and Anthropic’s wheels and try to slow down the development of their AI models.
Personally, I reckon the AI bubble is going to lead to prison sentences and pillories, not the trillions in value investors are dreaming of. It has already imposed huge, unnecessary costs on consumers by fucking up the global GPU market and now RAM, making it more expensive and less profitable for legitimate IT businesses that aren’t selling bullshit and dreams to provide a service.
And that’s why we don’t allow networked computers on this Battlestar.
Roughly this time last year I built a “prosumer” workstation in mini-ITX and spent £200 to put in the max 96GB of DDR5. Today the same 2x 48GB kit would cost me £700. And that increase has happened in the last month.
Nvidia has stopped supplying Vram to aftermarket video card makers. They’ve delayed the “Super” update to the 50 series gaming cards from now until Q3 next year (which means 60 series delayed too). Their own branded 5090 “msrp” card is no longer listed on their website.
Micron has dropped their consumer brand “Crucial” (along with all the compatibility-tested legacy modules and support they offered).
Samsung has announced they are focussing on high end parts and will discontinue items such as SATA SSDs (yes, that’s storage going up in cost as well memory).
It’s going to be a brutal 2026 for small to mid level IT suppliers and buyers.
It’s absolutely mental that consumers and legitimate businesses are getting crucified because of:
* Fake internet money that wastes compute time and electricity to solve pointless crypto puzzles that only exist to create artificial scarcity of Shitcoins
* Catastrophically unprofitable LLM bullshit based around a handful of insanely overvalued and increasingly debt-lousy firms who all promise their shady high-risk circular trading model is totally unlike the financial scams of the past
When this bubble pops, it’s going to look like the Big Bang.
The thing with all this LLM shit is that it’s now fairly open and generic and anyone can build a model. so OpenAI and Anthropic are fucked.
What’s now developing is AI generation within services. Like you access Gemini services within Google Cloud. You can get images generated from within Adobe software. And those images are based on Adobe’s own media libraries so no licensing risks. This costs good money but professionals don’t mind paying. People posting image memes do.
What’s now developing is AI generation within services. Like you access Gemini services within Google Cloud
Yarp. Google Search stopped being useful years ago, but now it also generates often-wrong AI bollocks at the top of the page too. Google Search is still broken, of course.
But unlike OpenAI, Google is ridiculously profitable. They can afford to give Gemini away for free. OpenAI needs massive year on year growth of its paid subscriber base to hit 220 million by 2030 – it’s just not going to happen, is it? Altman will probably be defending himself in court by then.
It will be interesting to see when (not if) OpenAI is unable to pay for that RAM and what happens then.
“Interesting” as in the old Chinese curse that is.
M – based on the circular financing deals they’re doing and accounting tricks to keep massive data centre expenditures off books, I don’t think it’ll be very long before the music stops and several large companies fall on their arse due to lack of chairs. Nvidia was recently forced to publicly deny it’s the next Enron. That’s always a good sign.
“‘Flu is neoliberal now.”
Well yes…. It very much does not pay any heed to the Edicts of Ely, and does its Thing without even paying Tax….., which automatically makes it NeoLiberal and Fascist according to the Elyian Little Red Book.
Flu “might” follow the Laffer curve too therefore is neoliberal, bad, and causes inequality.
If no one has a particular variant of flu the number of new infections is effectively zero. Similarly if everyone has that variant of flu then the rate of new infections is also zero. Somewhere between these two fixed points there will be the peak where the number of people with flu leads to the maximum rate of new infections.
Yes, because, candidly, flu can be eradicated by the government un-neoliberally enforcing social distancing by making people stay at home to benefit more from their mortgage interest and get less obese on the ultra-processed foods they won’t eat when forced to stay at home because they all learn to make sourdough.
Nobody (allegedly) died of Flu while covid measures were in place.
FFS…pure nonsense…
Are there any posts by Spud-u-tease which are factual? Asking for a friend.
Of course, Spud;s a little bit overweight, but that’s what you get with a carb-heavy diet. The poor man, forced to cook/eat at home, since no pub or restaurant will let him in, with a similar understanding to nutrition as his economic competence – it’s very sad.
OT
Tim, dunno if you’ve picked up on the revelations of Oliver Sacks being a bit of a fabulist fraud. Maybe he never actually dreamed of a scandium hamburger but just said he did because it sounded good.
I’m sure your contribution was genuine, but if it was from an old bike frame then no biggie.
Apropos nothing in particular;
North Wales Police chief constable to retire for day to protect pension – BBC News https://share.google/aM0PtszHB0Sl20oTw
Kill. Them. All.
Which, for the avoidance of doubt, includes all of the PCCs, and all of the fellow travellers, useful idiots, who are unable to see a bloody problem with this sort of fucking piss-taking shit.
The response should be to accept her retirement and then not rehire her.
The response should be to fix the stupid pension rules that make the pension reduce for someone who keeps working.