It's Saint George's day! Not a holiday in England, dunno about all the other countries that share a patron saint with England. The prime minister says it's a constant battle to try and reclaim the flag of the crusades, that England shares with the country Georgia, to make it a flag which doesn't sow division.

I keep hearing Americans saying that China has been manipulating the Yuan for a long time, as though America never adjusts their interest rates or does quantitative easing. Strange to say that China is doing currency manipulation in such an accusatory tone when literally every currency other than Bitcoin is manipulated by changing the supply or interest rates on a monthly basis.

"Insider trading" is what they call it when someone has advanced knowledge of economic numbers or a policy change and trades on that knowledge. So what do you call it when a president posts a note to all his followers saying "Now is a good time to buy" and then two hours later announces an economic policy change that pumps stocks to their highest single-day rise of the decade? 🤔 Wonder if he'll ever tell his followers it's a good day to sell? Seems like 10% tariffs on everything and a trade war with China is still pretty bad economic news to me, even if it's a bit better than full on global trade war.

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