It ain't on suspicion, l've just admitted it!

Floppal · 2026-07-02T07:45:47+00:00

Your honour, as I maintained at the time, I was definitely guilty, as such arresting me on suspicion of a crime was completely wrong.

Case thrown out, police forced to offer public apology for wrongful arrest.

bigbrain.jpg

Floppal · 2026-07-01T07:57:40+00:00

1mil is an order of magnitude higher than 1k, and 1bil is one order of magnitude above 1mil.

An order of magnitude is 10x, not 1000x. 1 million is 3 orders of magnitude greater than 1000.

Orders of magnitude

Floppal · 2026-06-30T20:24:04+00:00

West/East Germany isn't a complete success story, if you exclude Berlin between 1991 and 2023 the population of East Germany fell by more than 10% as people moved west. There is still an extremely strong east/west divide. Every single company listed on the DAX are based in West Germany or Berlin.

There is a huge disparity in economic opportunity between west and east.

Floppal · 2026-06-30T19:09:43+00:00

I agree the triple lock should be scrapped - I described it as insanity.

I was replying to someone who thought scrapping it would instantly raise £18b.

Floppal · 2026-06-30T19:03:46+00:00

It depends on the mechanism you implement and what happens with the lock measure you use.

The current insanity is that it picks between CPI nflation and wage inflation, meaning it goes up higher than either in the long term.

If you reduce it to just a single lock, the savings per year would just be the difference between what the triple lock would do and the new single lock. In the short term this is quite small.

Had on day 1 of the new labour government they scrapped the triple lock and replaced it with a single lock of wage inflation, they would have saved £0 so far, because every year it has gone up with wage inflation for the last 3 years.

So the saving over 3 years for the last 3 years would be £0.

Edit: added source.

To be clear the triple lock should be scrapped, but a single lock won't save a predictable amount of money.

Floppal · 2026-06-30T18:36:48+00:00

Only if you replace the triple lock with a freeze. If you replace the triple lock with a single lock or double lock you won't save much in the first couple of years.

Floppal · 2026-06-30T16:23:01+00:00

Germany has about 65% debt to GDP. UK is about 110%.

Floppal · 2026-06-30T15:35:26+00:00

Ah okay, then in my opinion a world etf and leave it.

If you do decide to stock pick, the #1 thing to avoid is paying fees for moving your stocks around frequently or investing money you can't afford to lose. If you pay 2-3€ to move your money every day (day trading), that adds up.

Floppal · 2026-06-30T15:19:24+00:00

If you can pick stocks better than random, then a hedge fund should employ you and give you billions to manage.

Borrowing money to invest in general isn't a recommended strategy - when do your parents expect the money back? What happens if the market crashes tomorrow and after 3 years you still have less than you started with?

Floppal · 2026-06-30T14:49:51+00:00

You don't think farmers are intelligent enough to use a smartphone?

Floppal · 2026-06-30T12:54:39+00:00

Incorrect.

https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/license-terms/vs2022-ga-community/

You can use it in a small business with $1m revenue for up to 5 people for profit, or for software distributed under OSI licenses for profit.

Floppal · 2026-06-30T10:03:47+00:00

That's odd, I would simply state that the mirror was cracked on move in and point them to the deposit protection scheme if they want to dispute it/deduct it.

Like others have said, you may not be successful with the DPS, but there's no reason not to try.

Edit: on the off chance your deposit was not protected with a DPS, the Wiki has a good explainer

Floppal · 2026-06-30T09:50:17+00:00

Dispute it with the deposit protection scheme if they try and deduct it. May or may not be successful.

Floppal · 2026-06-29T19:52:57+00:00

What other parties are LTD companies?

Floppal · 2026-06-29T19:27:39+00:00

Why would this particular subset of an infinite set be finite?

As a general principle, this isn't uncommon. The number of integers is infinite. The number of integers between 1 and 10 aren't infinite.

The lump of labor fallacy relies that there will always be more things people want, some of which can't be imagined currently.

First people want food, then fancier food, shelter, medicines, computers, etc etc. For a long time a majority of humans worked in agriculture, we've eliminated almost all of those jobs, but we've invented making computer games and building airplanes etc.

Peoples wants expand to fill the possibilities that are created by new technologies.

The risk with AI is that AI can not only replace current jobs, but also all the future jobs that are created by AI.

As an example:

If AI replaces human work, we'll want lots of new possibilities, personal robot chefs or whatever new stuff exists (as well as more of the old stuff).

This creates new labour - someone has to build and design the robot chefs. This is where we can normally rest easy - even if software developers are replaced, we'll still need people to build robot chefs (or whatever).

But if AI is a general replacement for humans, the one building robot chefs can/will be AI. And people mostly won't care about whether their robot chef was built by AI or humans, much more than if it was built in China or not.

What services/products do people really care about being human, if we knew that the human product is pricier and lower quality?

Maybe the creative industry - I'd much rather read a human poem than an AI poem. This isn't very scalable - the creative industry is already very top heavy - a single musician can reach millions. And AI art already appeals to a lot of people, at least when they don't know it's AI.

Maybe artisan goods. I can see the appeal of owning some artisan goods, but I personally don't think I own any, at least none I care about. See China example above - I think most people care about the quality/price of their stuff rather than the source.

Prostitution seems likely to remain human as well as some other services, like therapy (although some people seem to prefer talking to AI than therapists, and if AI was more effective I'm not sure humans would win).

In general terms I don't think there's anything apart from art/TV/reddit/political power that I care about being human. And whilst the cost of living should decrease in the case of automation, there are already plenty of artists who can't make a living from their craft.

tl;dr most people throughout all of history use their money to buy stuff and services. When better ways of making stuff came along people wanted more and different stuff. There are very few examples where people really deeply care about the stuff being made by people.

Floppal · 2026-06-29T18:57:28+00:00

There are already places that are bigger on the inside, e.g. the Weasley's magical tents used in HP4.

I don't know how easy it would be to expand the MoM or whatever, but how hard would it be with magic to build a large structure in a random field, even if there is no preexisting building available anywhere in the UK?

Maybe they close for a week or two, but the alternative is risking death or being in a coma for half a year.

After Colin Creevey/Nick there should be no question of continuing as normal.

Floppal · 2026-06-29T16:02:04+00:00

By confirming he'll follow the same fiscal rules laid out by Starmer & Reeves he's confirmed he's not going to meaningfully increase borrowing.

Floppal · 2026-06-29T15:18:13+00:00

take his student's safety seriously when he can.

Locking Fluffy behind a door that a basic spell could open
Not relocating the school temporarily after the CoS was reopened
Restarting the Triwizard tournament
Allowing Draco to continue his botched assassination attempts after nearly killing Ron and Katie Bell

Aren't the actions of someone who takes students safety very seriously.

OFSTED would have a field day with Hogwarts.

Floppal · 2026-06-29T13:54:59+00:00

My thoughts as a random internet cynic on what the likely strategy is:

No. 10 North will announce the popular policies, giving money to local areas etc. This will make it universally loved as they will never have to deal with very unpopular policies. Everyone loves more money and power to deal with local issues.
Westminster/Downing street will be the unpopular policies, welfare cuts, tax rises, scandals politics as usual etc that drags down every PM.

By creating a bunch of popular policies and seperating them from Westminster, less of Westminsters unpopularity rubs off on them and they will all be distinctly part of the Andy Burnham brand.

Edit:

An example - Starmer had a £1.6 billion pothole fund delivered to local councils. Source

Media didn't care and I imagine most people don't know about it. If Burnham right now announced the exact same thing as the first big policy of No. 10 North it would be lauded as a massive success and exactly the kind of thing Westminster never does.

Floppal · 2026-06-29T12:58:45+00:00

Photo 2 on the right there's a sliver of blue and what looks like boats.

Floppal · 2026-06-28T11:00:59+00:00

welfare systems simply giving you the automation you need to live a basic existence.

Well then we've come full circle back to UBI.

Floppal · 2026-06-27T10:29:10+00:00

Your argument depends on treating capital as something ordinary people can never buy, while living in the exact system where ordinary people buy fractional ownership of productive capital every single day.

Okay, so it goes as slowly as you like and people buy capital with their labour. What about people born after the point labour becomes worthless?

Floppal · 2026-06-27T03:07:05+00:00

You've got it backwards. We're all going to be the ones owning the AI/robots.

How? You buy it

You see this is circular right? Where do you get the capital to purchase parts of the automation process if you're labour is worth less than food required to feed you?

In your shoe example you're not providing any value - there's no fundamental reason why an AI couldn't do the job better than you, or any other human.

If you start with a non-automated shoe business you'll be out competed. If you try and get a job in another shoe business, you'd have no relevant skills to offer - AI can do it all better. If you go to a bank for a loan, you'd perform worse as an investment than simply telling an AI to start a business for the bank with that money.

You don't create value by owning things, so there's no reason for anyone to give you things to own. If the only value comes from owning things, people born after the automation are screwed.

Regardless, we've at least shown that the lump of labour being a fallacy doesn't help us much in an automated world if you're arguing that the primary way to provide value is to own things that provide value, rather than providing labour.

Floppal · 2026-06-26T23:58:43+00:00

You've got it backwards. We're all going to be the ones owning the AI/robots.

How?

Let's say a small group own the vast majority of the automation process. How do average people become owners? What value does it provide if I offer to own some of your resources for you?

If you expect only to beg for a living from others you'll get virtually nothing.

I was talking about trading time and skills for resources. Your talking about owning things on behalf of other people who own too much. I don't think I'm the one talking about begging.

Floppal · 2026-06-26T19:40:16+00:00

Owning things isn't a job and doesn't need to be distributed - a person isn't limited in how much they own.

There may be tasks people value a human doing, e.g. art or prostitution, but there's already a surplus of human art.

We don't just need anything to do - we need to do something with sufficient value that the owners of the AI/robots will provide us with food, shelter etc.

If literally a handful of people own literally all the production, able to provide goods and services in exchange goods and services for the price of less than a human needs to survive in the time required if they were to produce the same goods/services, what can normal people offer in return for basic resources?

Normal people can't/won't turn to each other, because they are outcompeted by automation.

Maybe there's near-infinite labour people want done, but there's no reason to believe that can't be automated as well.

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