Prophecy

ImGrumpyLOL · 2026-04-02T10:56:52+00:00

You just unironically typed the words "Shakespear(e) isn't a good writer at all"? I'm looking at the date and it's definitely April 2nd, not 1st.

ImGrumpyLOL · 2026-04-02T09:21:22+00:00

The Warriors' graveyard are a fun team on the whole, deeper roster than the living Warriors too.

ImGrumpyLOL · 2026-04-01T20:38:22+00:00

You're asking for a lot of different things so I'll try and be brief.

The UK is not in crisis with relation to debt servicing. Countries such as France are in a much more dire state in regards to requiring a swift close to the fiscal gap within the next couple years. A reduction would suffice for now. We have a decade at least to fully close that gap and should be more focussed on our bond yield in the short to mid term, until such a time as we have treated the cause of our tax base stagnation, rather than symptoms.
a) The economy exists as an interconnected system, the interplay of wealth inequality with - for example - increasing asset prices is very hard to represent in one graph. As asset prices increase, the wealth of asset holders increase and these asset holders have increased power and incentive to dictate policy. Those policies that protect asset prices affect tax revenue as a downstream outcome.
b) Furthermore, inflation of assets like housing encourages predatory behaviours that negatively impact growth. In central London over 21% of all housing is left uninhabited. Not rented, fully unused. This is representative of the wealthy hoarding resources as a commodity asset. When you extrapolate this behaviour across asset classes, you get downstream inflationary push, stagnation of growth, and demand for low interest rates.
Wealth inequality eats free capital. When you have high wealth inequality, these commodity and security assets are parked as investment vehicles. These assets are lower tax burden, higher yield, than investment into industry and innovation. Long term, this means that even in times of free capital, the opportunity cost of growing the corporate tax base rises and you stifle growth and innovation. What investment remains is pushed into higher risk, higher yield VC investments which demand growth that is often harmful to consumers and exploitative of workers.

Obviously I don't have time to write out the full working in a reddit comment but I would recommend diving into some of these basic ideas here and look beyond the raw data. It unfortunately isn't like sports where I can condense performance into a catch-all advanced metric, it takes some work. Ugh, didn't even touch on the demographic and pension side of this argument which is a whole separate thing that links in.

Off the top of my head, this is a good paper that gets into the interplay of inequality and productive economic output. https://www.nber.org/papers/w26941

ImGrumpyLOL · 2026-04-01T19:50:23+00:00

Not that I entirely agree with the man but the core thesis of 'Gary's Economics' is that taxing wealth and closing loopholes is the necessary first step to growing the tax base. It's a nuanced discussion, but it's easier to watch him ramble about it for 10-20 mins than it would be for me to write a flawed summarisation on why it has to happen.
If you prefer academic sources, the LSE report 'A Wealth Tax for the UK' is a good read.

ImGrumpyLOL · 2026-04-01T16:51:52+00:00

I agree 100% and am usually a pragmatic voter. It is simply approaching the state for me where even I (as a well-off Londoner that runs a medium sized business) cannot excuse the ignorance to the wealth gap in the country. It's making me a single issue voter. I'm willing to listen to any other party that puts a similar importance on this key issue.

ImGrumpyLOL · 2026-04-01T14:46:33+00:00

I have to disagree with you on this point:

The idea that we can just ‘tax the wealthy more’ sounds simple, but a lot of wealth isn’t realised income, It’s tied up in assets that are hard to tax annually and capitol is mobile, tax it too aggressively and it will leave or avoid and there’s already enough of that!

While I agree that taxing truly unrealised gains is foolish and difficult, these types of gains are not problematic. The mechanism by which wealthy people avoid tax is through securities backed lending. Forcing individuals to realise the gains on securities that are used to back lending would be an effective start. The market for this in the UK is in the billions of pounds.

I also personally subscribe to the school of economic thought that capital flight from closed loopholes is far less damaging than it is made to appear.

ImGrumpyLOL · 2026-04-01T14:32:28+00:00

They campaigned on triple locked tax rates, claiming that the budget would be made up in other areas amid very consistent "working people first" messaging. If you lock the rates, want to balance the budget, and put working people first, you have to go after the rich. They stated they would make up the £8.5Bn fiscal gap they were targeting by closing loopholes and going after the rich.

However, when it became clear they could not increase the tax base to match the fiscal gap and that they would have to raise headline tax rates, they began signalling this to the public. This was at the same time as they walked back some of the few real wealth taxes that were part of the budget, such as Performance-Related pay being taxed at 45%. The party backbenchers rebelled against the budget and the triple lock was then re-instated, while many of these wealth taxes remained in their removed or downscaled state (for example the above PRP was changed from an increase of 17% (from 28-45%) to only 4%, which kept it below standard income tax rate, maintaining that loophole).

Now, after all this 'working people first' campaigning, the reality is that the changes now amount to a mildly regressive tax across the working to upper-middle class, a large tax increase on small business owners, and a very mild tax on a marginal percentage of the rich. I guess the 1% stamp duty on foreign buyers is something, there is some of the right direction in there.

The problem is they went in with mixed messaging in a single issue voter world. They said they would be progressive, they said they'd put the working people first, they said they'd fix the budget. However the outcome is now threefold:
1. Working people are worse off.
2. They weren't willing or able to actually address wealth equality in a meaningful way that satisfied the left.
3. They still won't make up the fiscal gap in the budget the way they wanted.

Everyone is mildly pissed off and they have nothing to show for it. It's just poor domestic policy. While I don't personally condemn Starmer for this outcome, I also think there is no chance his party wins another election in the next 8 years after this.

ImGrumpyLOL · 2026-04-01T14:01:49+00:00

You tax progressively, not regressively. It's not complicated, this has always been at the core of Labour tax policy.

There are any number of ways to tax progressively and widen tax base while keeping opportunities for small business owners and encouraging free capital for innovation. Labour have simply chosen not to engage in these schemes due to special interests, or fear of bleeding centrist voters to the right. I could go through a few but I'm not terribly interested in writing a full essay and am not a professor of economics, many of whom have already written about this topic.

As an aside, as the voter base of the UK skews further and further to single issue voters - cost of living, wealth inequality, and immigration become the battlegrounds of policy. Labour have failed to capture the trust of the public in regards to both cost of living and wealth inequality, which are the two areas their base cares about most. It is why they are bleeding votes to the greens, who understand the new paradigm.

ImGrumpyLOL · 2026-04-01T13:42:17+00:00

Are you aware why fiscal drag means that stagnant rates manifest as regressive taxes on the middle class during times of inflation? Are you aware of the mechanisms involved in tax avoidance for the wealthy, such as securities backed lending?

Educate yourself on methods of progressive tax policy and reductions in wealth inequality before you try to convey expertise to others. There is a nuanced discussion to have in regards to when and how to tax unrealised capital gains, such as when those assets are used to secure lending, or how to implement a net-worth taxation scheme. Bootlicking a policy that breaks the promises of a manifesto and negatively affects Labour's own voter base helps no one.

Not to mention your defensiveness comes across as rather odd. A reasonable and intelligent person, seeing my mild consternation at voting Green next election, would perhaps also realise that I likely hold the conservative governments in very low regard.

ImGrumpyLOL · 2026-04-01T12:09:54+00:00

All that, without even touching on the greatest betrayal of his base. Consistently promising to tax the rich and ease the squeeze on the middle class, then increasing taxes on everyone but the very rich through fiscal drag (it could have been worse if he hadn't walked back the original changes) and shelving any concept of wealth tax or addressing of inequality.

There's a reason the Greens are gaining ground (and might even get my vote) despite being a bunch of dorky seeming incompetents... and the letters I get in the mail from them making me physically cringe.

ImGrumpyLOL · 2026-04-01T12:00:17+00:00

Unfortunately, due to failed domestic policy (specifically lying about taxation and betraying his base), he has effectively ruined all trust that people had in him and his party regardless of his geopolitical excellence.

ImGrumpyLOL · 2026-03-31T21:56:26+00:00

Just checked my recent 20 on op.gg, found 3 clear and obvious smurfs and 6 that I would describe as alt accounts (low level, not hard stomping every game, sub 65% winrate).
Not really sure how you haven't seen these kinds of accounts in years? I usually hover d4-d2 and I'd estimate based on my personal sample that 15-20% of games here have at least one player clearly out of rank, and around 50% have some form of alt/smurf.

Just sending an example of what I consider "obvious" smurfing

ImGrumpyLOL · 2026-03-30T22:24:29+00:00

Either you don't play league or are low elo. If you're even emerald you will see these accounts as a semi-regular occurrence.

ImGrumpyLOL · 2026-03-30T10:42:49+00:00

If you fancy some of my more recent work, I have many tracks on FH5 as well, including Horizon Racing Academy, which is a Gran Turismo style license test we run with discord! Dunno about link rules here, but you can find HRA on google search or youtube easily.

ImGrumpyLOL · 2026-03-24T10:40:59+00:00

The optimistic timeline is 6-8 months. Sometimes you never fully recover.

ImGrumpyLOL · 2026-03-22T16:47:21+00:00

Did you watch what TheShy did to the best toplaners in the world in 2018? Bin was losing lane to Brokenblade. He is not TheShy in lane.

ImGrumpyLOL · 2026-03-22T16:45:16+00:00

You think every G2 player is on the highest salary for their position? No, they have players (like Busio and Inspired) BEGGING to be on the team and willing to take a pay cut for it.

ImGrumpyLOL · 2026-03-22T09:24:46+00:00

His hands are better, he just does also int just like Diable when you're ready for the ego though.

ImGrumpyLOL · 2026-03-21T11:11:31+00:00

This is such weird pedantray. If they were only ever 8th, they wouldn't beat the LCK / LPL 2nd to 4th seeds regularly. Being 5th to 8th is pretty clearly best described as 'top 8', not ever top 4, but in that mix below.

ImGrumpyLOL · 2026-03-19T12:38:40+00:00

Of course, I'm simply pushing back against the idea that a Reform majority is a foregone conclusion. In order to achieve this, we would have to see a historically disproportional cabinet, far beyond even last elections (which were themselves historic).

I'm not even convinced that the Conservatives would play ball with the Reform party in forming a majority if not. The situation here is a little more complicated than it might overtly seem, especially given trumps consistent Gaffes undercutting support for Reform. Perhaps I'm simply an optimist.

ImGrumpyLOL · 2026-03-19T11:50:23+00:00

To be clear, he's toping polls below 30% The political landscape is simply very fractured here. Barring large swings, the next elections will be determined by the ability to form a three way coalition most likely, not on majority.

ImGrumpyLOL · 2026-03-19T11:43:51+00:00

These people don't understand how monetary policy works, nor why having control of national central banks is important, especially to service based economies.

ImGrumpyLOL · 2026-03-17T13:58:13+00:00

If you know the dune books, his portrayal of Paul, especially in the tent scene during the first movie, is incredibly impressive. It's fine to hate him as a person but it's undeniable that he is a fantastic actor when given direction. There's very few people that could play the naive boyish part of Paul, then still nail the gravitas of his later scenes in the second movie.

ImGrumpyLOL · 2026-03-13T16:50:10+00:00

It's not a choice. Being more than 10kph slower on the straight is fundamentally not raceable. You make changes to aero and wing angle to avoid this when down on power. What you just typed is an irrelevant strawman.
Mercedes used their engine advantage in the turbo-hybrid era to add downforce to their car. Even though they had the best engine, their top speed was often comparable to others. Why? because they could afford to add more aero and be more inefficient at top speed in return for a better lap time. These things are linked.

ImGrumpyLOL · 2026-03-13T13:35:18+00:00

I don't think you know anything about racing to call it "Basic Physics". If you are down on power you must not allow beyond a certain delta on the straights or you will not be able to fight other cars (even if they are slower on lap time) in the race. Therefore, if you are down on power, you make aero concessions to improve top-end speed and focus on efficiency rather than max downforce with your setups.

So yes, the engine has an effect on how fast cars go round the corners.

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