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Tim Worstall

Man uses internet to bemoan effect of internet

Banks are closing branches across the UK. Post offices are disappearing. HMRC no longer offers local tax offices. Local authorities increasingly expect everything to be done online. Face-to-face support is becoming increasingly hard to find.

We are facing the disappearance of functioning communities, the loss of public services, and the growing assumption that efficiency matters more than people.

In this video, I ask why so many institutions are retreating from local life. Why is it becoming so difficult to get help with banking, tax, benefits, council services, or basic advice?

EU Digital Sovereignty!

Brussels fails to recognise that digital sovereignty isn’t just about who owns or controls your technology. It’s also about having an independent vision for how that technology is designed, developed and deployed.

Well, there are those of us who say that the absence of such a vision is a damn good thing. What the Fuck’s it got to do with government – whether national or EU – how people use a new technology. That’s up to the people, not the rulers.

Men of plan, eh? Always with us and yet we have to shout them down every damn time.

Tumbled?

The peace deal agreed between Iran and the US is sending a wave of relief through the markets today.

Oil has tumbled 4%,

4%, on something generally as volatile as oil, is not exactly tumbled. But, you know…..

This is fairly ballsy

Foreign nationals living in social housing would be given three months to find private accommodation or face being deported under a Reform UK government, Nigel Farage has announced.

Not that the Lanyard Classes will allow this to happen. Would require primary legislation that overrides every possible roadblock, obviously.

But ballsy, deffo.

A source close to Steve Reed, the Housing Secretary, hit out at the proposals, claiming they would create an “ICE-style” system in Britain.
“Farage knows there’s no way of this happening without establishing a Trump ICE-style deportation police force in the UK. Something he will presumably be trialling in Manchester should he win the mayoralty election.”
They added: “If he thinks Brits look at American politics longingly,

Well, some do acshully. And the point of democracy is to find out how many, no?

Customs documents

So, clearing out Mum’s old house. Shipping some of the furniture to me. One removals company is asking for:

Death Certificate

Will of deceased

Passport of deceased

Inventory list

Passport of person inheriting the items

I refuse to believe that such documentation is necessary to ship a few bits of furniture from the UK into Portugal. Just cannot see that this is eve possibly necessary.

So, what’s the scam being run here?

One of those little signals, eh?

Ricardo Gama, a partner at the law firm Leigh Day, which is representing

So we know that argument, whatever it is, is bollocks then, don’t we?

Its consultation proposed that the HSE should be allowed to fast-track chemical hazard classifications from other countries into British law. When the HSE published its response to the consultation findings, it said it would recognise the EU’s standards when adopting such hazard classifications. The EU has the highest standards on chemical safety globally.

But when the government laid the regulations before parliament earlier this year, the EU and its standards were not mentioned. Fighting Dirty is taking legal action against the government over concerns that this omission may expose the public to more hazardous chemicals.

Ricardo Gama, a partner at the law firm Leigh Day, which is representing Fighting Dirty in the proceedings, said the absence of this “safeguard” meant the government, or any future government, “could approve chemicals from places that have lower standards than the UK and EU”.

And, you know, how in buggery did this become justiciable? And who’s paying for it, obviously.

Discretion means censorship

Teenagers under the age of 16 are to be banned from accessing “high-risk” social media apps while safer platforms will be subjected to restrictions, under a sweeping government crackdown.

What will happen – no, will – is that those in power will decide that safe means not showing stuff that discomfits those in power. After all, who would argue that the kiddies should see something as high risk as Nigel? Quite, quite.

It’s the very discretion that leads to the censorship, isn’t it?

Ms French Gates

The philanthropist always saw Epstein for who he really was – despite his meetings with her then husband Bill Gates. Now carving out a life on her own terms, she explains why she’s focused on the fight for women’s health

That fight for women’s health taking place by buying lots of articles in places like The Guardian. Which then returns the favour by large and adulatory pieces on Ms French Gates.

Of course, “on her own terms” would be rather more powerful if she were spending money she herself had made.

But.

Bobbie Reich’s Lament

The closer you look at the SpaceX IPO, the more it looks like Musk’s ill-fated Doge. It also bears a striking resemblance to Trump’s takeover of the US government.

All of it is arbitrary – based on the hype and will of one man with a giant ego and an insatiable thirst for money and power. It’s built on self-dealing. There’s no accountability. No checks. No balances.

But, but, millions of people are just doing their own thing! Without asking me, without being advised by me, they’re just at liberty to do whatever!

Stop it!

Since then, Carr has approved regulatory requests for Elon Musk’s SpaceX and its Starlink satellite internet – allowing Musk to gain control of two-thirds of all active satellites, more than 10,300, in low Earth orbit, and giving SpaceX dominance over global internet access and defense communications.

See? The administrative state should stop anyone making cheap internet for everywhere! As, in fact, a previous version did – the Federal cash to put internet everywhere deliberately excluded satellite – therefore SpaceX – from contention.

That’s balance, see? Better that no one has it than that the wrong person provide it.

New argument – well, to me anyway

Much of this is broadcast in real time from the phones of bystanders. That includes the horrific footage out of Belfast this week, of a Sudanese refugee alleged to have carried out a knife attack on a white man, gleefully circulated on X by the likes of far-right activist Tommy Robinson. Considerations of the decency of sharing such footage, of how the circulation of graphic, violent crime images can indignify and rob victims of bodily agency, are nullified by what are considered greater political priorities: to identify and profile the ethnic violence that is supposedly tearing the fabric of the nation.

Don’t show furriners doing naughty stuff as it’s unfair to the victims?

That knife-attack image is potent. In solidarity protests in Southampton, the scene of riots over Henry Nowak’s murder last week, it is illustrated on banners. It has perfectly landed within a pre-existing online visual language that has, for some time, cast the United Kingdom as in decline, and besieged by “invaders”, with ordinary white people betrayed by the state that was meant to protect and privilege them.

Some stories jibe with reality a little less than others perhaps?

To answer a Guardian question

How much money did Elon Musk make in SpaceX’s stock market debut?

None?

There’s now a valuation on some of what he owns. That valuation might be higher than before. But Elon’s not received any more money as a result so “make” isn’t quite right, is it?

General Potato

That question seems to me to go to the core of the real defence crisis we face, which is not financial at all.

And therefore we will repel the Frenchies by having more universities and social housing.

Ho Hum.

The correct answer is that the British military is proof that we shouldn;t allow government to plan nor run things. And Army – and even more a Navy – is a large scale, capital intensive, long duration asset. Either and both take decades to build, require constant upkeep and maintenance and these are – the proof is in that pudding – exactly the things government is observably bad at.

Now there’s no real alternative to having govt running the Armed Force – we didn’t like that private era of the Wars of the Roses – but the fact that govt is clearly fucking useless at it shows that we should not entrust them with any other long duration, high capital requirement, high maintenance things. You know, like the economy, or electricity, water and so on….

Shouddaknowed

A surge in migration across Northern Ireland had already caused racial tensions to spiral long before Monday night’s knife attack.

The country’s foreign population has risen at almost twice the rate of that of mainland Britain.

NI really is one place where migration has already been shown to be an issue, no?

However, for some, it is confirmation that Northern Ireland’s sectarianism does not offer protection against anti-immigrant sentiment.

If you run this through history the sectarianism *is* anti-immigrant sentiment, no?

Andy Beckett is slightly odd, no?

In a broader sense, too, Farage and Lowe make the same promise: that Britain’s supposed decline will be reversed through a population purge, tougher policing, the promotion of Christianity and traditional patriotism, the removal of red tape and environmental targets, and the elevation of self-reliant, entrepreneurial citizens.

I’ve not known Nige to say anything at all about Christianity, tbh.

But isn’t it lovely how Beckett just throws that in there as part of the list of sins?

So, err, what’s the solution here then?

Ever since the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, women’s bodies have been the business of the state. In the 1950s, labour for state-controlled work units was organised according to women’s menstrual cycles. Then for decades, there was the one-child policy.

Across vast swathes of the country the policy was enforced with a brutal severity. As well as fines for additional children, women were forced to have abortions and subjected to forced sterilisations.

Now, women in China are facing new forms of pressure from the government as China battles a fresh challenge – a falling birth rate. Women are under pressure to devote their bodies to childbearing as the government tries to encourage more pregnancies. Increasingly, women are pushing back in ways that weren’t possible in the past, while the painful legacy of the one-child policy continues to echo and reshape expectations around family today.

Limited government perhaps?

Other funding methods, eh?

Healey’s decision appeared to have taken No 10 by surprise despite a protracted row over defence spending, during which he had called on ministers to consider “creative funding” mechanisms like those adopted by other European countries, based on more borrowing.

Or why not just print the money? After all, as Spud says, most of it comes back in tax anyway, right?

To answer a Spud question

This is one answer

This is another

The question being:

What motivates neoliberals?

We neoliberals believe that poverty – no, poverty, not inequality – is a bad thing. Therefore we need to run the economy in a manner that reduces poverty.

So, free market capitalism it is then. Doing a grand job, we need more of it.