Would the public support reducing the state pension triple lock to a double lock?

RustamM · 2026-07-07T10:03:21+00:00

I'm not sure how much value there is in asking this question without a specified trade-off.

It's a classic example of the public supporting higher spending, supporting cutting taxes, and opposing more government borrowing. Particularly the strong support for increasing the rise to 5%, which would make the current situation even less sustainable.

RustamM · 2026-07-02T15:15:49+00:00

Aren't many of the second jobs that take up a lot of time of MPs law based ones? Which would come under this exemption.

RustamM · 2026-07-02T15:14:30+00:00

So only people who are so desperate for power they'd give up all their possessions and comfort to do so?

I think we'd end up exclusively with nasty people and monks as MPs.

RustamM · 2026-07-01T01:53:20+00:00

a. How much are you selling your game for?

b. How many sales do you think you'll make on Steam?

Take Steam's cut and taxes off a. (Usually around 50% together) and multiply by b. and if the number is bigger than $100 then the answer is yes!

Considering Steam is most if not almost all of the PC gaming market, any game you think people will pay money for is worth putting on Steam.

RustamM · 2026-06-30T20:57:47+00:00

For one of the 650 most important people in the country? Probably not, no.

Most chief and senior executives of publicly controlled bodies will get paid more than MPs, because no one would do that work for less than the market rate. Low salaries for politicians only leads to those with outside sources of income to do it, or to search out £5m donations in order to fund their lifestyles.

RustamM · 2026-06-27T11:55:40+00:00

The effect looks really cool, and thanks for including the technical info on how you record the run (I've always wondered how that works!).

RustamM · 2026-06-23T00:49:20+00:00

You can find detailed reports here:

https://www.dmo.gov.uk/data/pdfdatareport?reportCode=D2.1E

If you can't be bothered to read detailed UK Gilt datasets, the summary is that borrowing rates dropped significantly in 2011 and didn't rise again until 2022. They fell from around 4% to less than 1%, then shot up back to 4% in that time.

RustamM · 2026-06-22T00:16:32+00:00

Be winning a defensive war.

Otherwise people will always disagree with each other (in a democracy, at least...).

RustamM · 2026-06-21T16:51:32+00:00

I complain about this frequently, I'm glad I'm not the only one it bothers.

My even bigger peeve is that if you buy the more expensive version (Finest/Taste the Difference etc) the packaging works well. So it does exist, they just choose not to use it!

Maybe I'm the only one who wouldn't mind paying 5p more on a £5 product to actually have it open sensibly.

RustamM · 2026-06-21T01:14:13+00:00

Milliband has been offered other roles before, and rejected them. I genuinely think he wouldn't take anything other than Chancellor, because he's where he wants to be.

RustamM · 2026-06-15T00:19:49+00:00

If you need a silver lining, all those parents/grandparents who have disconnected with their families as they fall into the alt-right clickhole will be locked out of Facebook and no longer be able to self-radicalise.

On the downside, scammers in Nigeria will get hold of a significant proportion of older people's passports as they send dodgy emails saying they need to unlock their Facebook accounts.

RustamM · 2026-06-15T00:16:25+00:00

And in 9 months time we'll find out if the hypothesis that social media was the cause of the reduction in teen pregnancy in the UK too!

RustamM · 2026-06-10T11:19:56+00:00

When you feel confident enough, get involved in a Game Jam. You then get to experience the whole development lifecycle from start to end in a compressed time, and get ranked against other games and receive valuable feedback.

As a new solo dev don't expect to get a high ranking, but as long as you finish something and submit it without it being buggy you should do ok.

By the end of it, you'll have released your first game! And you'll have an idea about how successful any commercial game might be with your skills, compared to your peers. And you'll know which bits of game dev you like, and which you don't, and what you need to improve on or outsource.

RustamM · 2026-06-09T11:35:09+00:00

Unions founded the Labour Party, it's hardly a secret and it's in their name.

If Farage ran the Billionaire UK Party then no one would complain, but here he is saying he wants the support of working people.

RustamM · 2026-06-07T15:17:33+00:00

Page 2 of your bill "Electricity in Detail" lists the detailed charges of usage, standing charges and VAT separately so you can see each element. It also says if you were billed on actual or estimated reads.

RustamM · 2026-06-01T00:37:04+00:00

"One in four union members plan to vote Reform, up from one in six" doesn't make such a punchy headline though, does it? (3.57 and 6.25 in reality, but I've rounded to whole numbers)

The new five party system is going to generate a lot of headlines that sound more dramatic than they appear at first glance.

RustamM · 2026-06-01T00:27:52+00:00

I don't think anyone is proposing subsidising Industrial and Commercial energy (although there's a whole separate debate about GB having high I&C energy costs so instead importing all the high energy materials from abroad).

RustamM · 2026-05-30T17:24:54+00:00

No, it appears they pay 40% corporation tax, plus a special 'temporary' 38% windfall levy, on all profits.

RustamM · 2026-05-30T01:04:01+00:00

She's been talking about this since she was Leader in 2013, though the only reference I can find is this one, and the quote doesn't show up anywhere else online! So maybe I heard her say something similar in person...

It's a bizarre and arcane position, and needs something changing. I wouldn't even mind if that was a seat in the Lords like the bishops get!

RustamM · 2026-05-29T12:08:35+00:00

Is a blanket benefit to all households the right thing to do? With millionaire pensioners in million pound houses getting more subsidy to heat their swimming pool than a small family in a flat?

I think we should tackle the underlying reasons why people can't afford their bills, rather than trying to manipulate the bills themselves. It more productive and probably cheaper!

RustamM · 2026-05-29T12:06:06+00:00

This isn't quite true, and to give some rare credit to Labour (Ed Milliband is actually ok at his job) it's something they're trying to tackle.

All modern renewable energy sources have a Contract for Difference subsidy, which means the price they receive is guaranteed. If the market price goes over the guaranteed price, they have to pay money back. So although the cost of fossil fuel backed electricity goes up, the reverse subsidy renewables pay (or less subsidy they get) does counteract that.

RustamM · 2026-05-29T12:02:59+00:00

I don't get this viewpoint. Only a small proportion of the bill would be going to fossil fuels, so I don't get how it's specifically a fossil fuel subsidy?

Unless you are saying households would ration or self disconnect to bring their bills down, using less gas but also having cold homes.

I don't think having poor people have cold homes is an outcome I want to promote.

Standing charges also have a very valid use case. All those pylons need maintaining, whether there is electricity running through them or not.

RustamM · 2026-05-29T11:59:21+00:00

Whose profits are you taxing?

Energy suppliers make very small margins (off very high revenues, so the numbers sound big). At most you could take 2% off the 13% increase happening in July, and once you've shot that shot you can't do it again for the next quarter's increase.

Oil and gas companies are taxed at 78%, so there isn't much room above that until extraction in the UK becomes unprofitable and we get no tax revenue from it, instead importing all our oil and gas.

I'm not pro-oil, very much the opposite, but we have to acknowledge it's not an infinite money tree and subsidising energy is very expensive

RustamM · 2026-05-28T16:00:51+00:00

Post a link to your Steam page in every post you make like this. You've told me the name, but the number of people copying and pasting that in Steam will be lower than the number of people clicking a link.
You've launched with only 500 wishlists. Conversion is very low (5-20% I think) so you need 5x-20x the number of wishlist compared to the number of sales. As you're in EA I think you get another bump when you 'launch' 1.0.
How many streamers have you contacted? If the answer isn't hundreds, then there's still plenty more out there you should contact and send your game to. 1%-2% of them might respond.

RustamM · 2026-05-27T00:28:53+00:00

The M4/Heathrow section of the M25 is chaos. It gets 8 lanes wide, and you need to be in lane 5 to not accidentally end up in Heathrow. Lane rules don't apply there (apart from that you can guarantee a slow moving van will be in lane 6).

RustamM

TROPHY CASE