Seems like they want to fix the balance of trade with the rest of the world, which may be a laudable aim, but there's a reason it's so skewed: The dollar. You can't print all the global reserve currency that the world needs and supply the world with money while also having a balanced trade sheet. The world is taking your money, your promises to pay, and giving you consumer products in return. If you want to give them consumer products in return instead, then they no longer take your money, and the world has to find something new to trade among themselves other than dollars because they no longer have dollars. Perhaps it really is time to destroy the petrodollar as the world reserve currency. Would likely be good for American workers to do that. But this seems a somewhat chaotic method to pick.

Really amazing how they can label the biggest tax rises on America seen since the big wars as "liberation day" and people swallow it. Look forward to being liberated by having these giant tax increases, expect the big price prices to be very liberating, the reduction in choice at the checkouts to be a liberating experience. Increases in poverty and shifts in the tax burden towards the poor? How liberating!

Water bill is up 30%, primarily to pay interest in bad debt borrowed to enrich shareholders. Gotta pay it this month. Which brings to mind a philosophical question: Who should own UK infrastructure and industry? A) The UK government B) Multinational capitalist enterprise Thatcher decided (B) and the people never got a referendum on it because Labour decided (B) as well, and it's a two party state really. It's firmly embedded into the politic. When governments of all colors are insisting they need foreign investment from rich capitalists before they can build anything, they are implicitly accepting (B). They don't need money, they can print that. The foreign investment doesn't bring labour, they use local labour. They are just looking for an owner so the government doesn't have to own it. There's hidden options too: C) The workers who work in that enterprise should own it communally and inalienably D) A cooperative of the customers of the enterprise should own it communally and inalienably But we don't even talk about those.

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

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.

"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.

CNBC

Trump objected to Zelenskyy's tone and body language in Oval Office clash, White House says

Zelenskyy challenged the idea that Ukraine can rely on diplomatic guarantees by Russia, whose leader Vladimir Putin launched the war in 2022.

#trump #ukraine #artOfTheDeal

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.

Dalliance Network

Me doing a loop-pedal/synth version of "Come Play with Me" at a friend's birtthday party

Went to a friend

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.

BBC News

Apple pulls data protection tool after UK government security row

Customers' photos and documents stored online will no longer be protected by end-to-end encryption.

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

> 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

The Maga crowd cheering on tariffs and insisting that they make America strong and will force their opponents to capitulate sound exactly like the Brexiters did five years ago. They are certain that their country imposing sanctions upon itself can only hurt the foreign countries and could in no way ever make their own country smaller, poorer, and it's people more impoverished. How could that be? After all punching yourself in the face is a show of strength! We are strong! 👊 They fantasize about Canada capitulating (to do what?) in the same way as the Brexiters fantasized about the German Car Industry forcing the EU to capitulate. These things come in trends, tit for tat, soon all the countries will be punching themselves in the face to show strength. Then they'll start punching each other. Britain once again leading the world! This time at autoimmolation. #tariffs #brexit #uspol #ukpol

Rachel Reeves is delivering her speech from Siemens rather than to the commons, I guess because Business is the most important thing now? She's explaining how she'll make the economy grow. She thinks thriving businesses create jobs for workers, rather than the workers creating wealth for the businesses. So that's a bad start. Apparently as she wonders around the UK she finds our dying high streets optimistic! Because of AI and Deep Mind and Siemens. All those other politicians before her have lacked courage and not prized growth, she thinks. 😕 So she wants: * Stability Which means budget responsibility, fiscal rules, no taxing business, and thus no government spending. There is No Alternative, apparently. Growth though government spending to build state-owned infrastructure is unmentionable! * Reform to attract investment Make is easier for business to borrow and trade and build. But NOT rejoining the common market of course, only a "reset". 😆 It means improving our relationship with Trump instead. He's all about free trade you see. 😖. They'll cut benefits to create jobs somehow?? And reduce immigration, because extra workers are notoriously bad for growth? 😖 Also let companies raid their pension funds more easily. 🤯 They'll change the monopolies and mergers commission so it allows bigger more monopolistic business. Planning reform, to streamline the process and reform environmental legislation to help business ride roughshod over local objections and build data-centers and nuclear power plants and airports and windfarms even if they're environmentally unsound and bad for bats. * Get investment from abroad Because the UK can't print it's own money to invest with I guess. Expand investment schemes to bribe billionaires with lower taxes and more subsidies. National wealth fund to give billions to companies to build private charging network, and a private metal refinery to build solar power panels. Remove marine protections to allow building windfarms even if they kill the fishes. Launch an "industrial strategy" to give money to billionaires so they will build AI data-centers and life-sciences labs and deliver a privately-owned infrastructure like a crossing at Dover owned by a private company. New investment rule to allow counting government owned infrastructure as an asset (oh, a good one! 😃 ) Upgrade some railways especially in the north and so attract private business to build houses at the stations. (eh, okay, maybe some council-owned social housing too would be nice?) Finally, she's going to allow Heathrow to try and build a new runway, which definitely will not be a boondogle project that runs for years and costs billions because we don't have the workers to build it, and ends up cancelled because it's environmentally unconscionable. -- So all in all, they are determined that they will seek private growth and billionaire investment in private enterprise and ignore almost all opportunity to grow government-owned infrastructure or enterprise. Which means they will be nice to Billionaires and crack down on the sick people and the environment and state owned enterprise to achieve it. Which also means they will fail, because in reality billionaires don't cause growth, they are parasitic upon it. Growth comes from the workers, from a rich middle class proving the demand which the billionaires and businesses then exploit. Not to mention that growth at the cost of the environment might end up dooming us all. #ukPol #economics #growth #rachelReeves

Lots of folks spreading warnings: Oh, careful what you type into DeepSeek! It might be spying on you for the communist Chinese government. But really, if someone is gonna be spying on me, would I rather it was: * the Chinese communist party who have essentially no affect or influence over my life at all and are based half a world away or * western capitalist corporations who try to control everything I see and hear and push adverts in my face and bribe my government and affect my life in ways innumerable and uncountable? ⚖️ 🤷 I mean I'd rather none of them were allowed or able to spy on me but if someone has to...

The best economics video of the day though is Gary Stephenson again, on Novara Media's "Downstream" Gary is awesome.

Watched this morning. I like Richard, and agree with him quite often. But he has a very fixed idea of what he calls "money", which is a very new one really that's only existed since the 70s. From his definition of "money" there wasn't any money before that. Which is obviously wrong. He should surely really accept that there are more than one type of money. This narrow thinking about what money is leads him to the mistakes in that video: 1) "Deflation means every pound has to be be worth less". Not sure if he just misspoke there, but deflation means the value of the pound goes up, not down. In a growing economy with a fixed number of pounds each pound has to be worth more to make sure there's enough money to go around. 2) "When we face a deflationary situation people stop spending" - this may be a true fact, but what our environment and economy urgently needs is degrowth. We need people to stop spending, to stop heating up the world. Also: Inflationary money requires this constant growth but this doesn't mean spending is actually better than saving. saving is good too, and in a deflationary economy we get more saving. Is Richard against savings? 3) He seems to think volatility makes a thing useless as a hedge against inflation. My personal accounts would suggest otherwise. It's hedged against inflation just fine for me. The volatility is a result of the rapid monetization of the asset, over-leverage and speculation. But none of those things have prevented bitcoin going up faster on average than the money supply has inflated. 4) "Bitcoin can't be digital gold", he reckons, "because other cryptocurrencies exist". But this would imply Gold can't be Gold because other metals exist. It's just wrong. Those other thing's aren't Bitcoin. They do not have the longest chain with the most proof of work. Only Bitcoin has that. Bitcoin is now more limited in supply than gold. His suggestion that there is no limit to bitcoin issuance because other things can be used instead is wrong. 5) "At least gold has some uses", this is where he's wrong about money again. Having some use other than money is a BAD thing for a money. Gold is being taken off the market because people want it for electronics and for jewellery. That's bad for gold being money, and it's even worse for electronics and jewelry because they pay the monetary premium. A money is a better money if it has no other use than money. This doesn't make it worse, it makes it better. 6) "It is just an entry in a ledger, literally meaningless worthless empty. Bitcoin is a myth, it doesn't exist". And yet that is also all true of the pound. An entry in a bank ledger. Meaningless and empty, doesn't really exist. Only pounds of course are being diluted all the time, expanded by government as the economy grows. And when it doesn't. Growing less valuable every day. No money creates value. It's a measure. A meter ruler doesn't create space, only measures it. All money is a giant ponzi scheme, including pounds and dollars and bitcoin. And dollars/pounds may be worse because Tories can just print up billions of them to give to their mates in corrupt procurement deals.