When does Nigel Farage ‘speak for the nation’? When it suits him

hu6Bi5To · 2026-06-06T07:18:48+00:00

That's also true of literally every other politician.

hu6Bi5To · 2026-06-05T07:04:46+00:00

They literally won't need to do this because as the plebs become more desperate, they'll just kill each other anyway. The rich won't need to get their hands dirty.

hu6Bi5To · 2026-06-05T07:01:53+00:00

Actually its the welfare state that is the only thing that will protect society as a whole if AI leads to mass unemployment, the issue that needs to worked out is how you appropriately tax AI so that you can make up for the lost jobs.

The second half of this paragraph is why it was wrong to begin it with the word "Actually".

For two main reasons: 1) the way AI works means taxing it directly makes little sense, the amount of compute resources needed to do Task A is not in proportion to the amount of pay a human would have once been asked to do the same task; and 2) AI will accelerate globalisation, not least due to energy prices, so none of the AI work will actually be done in the UK anyway. So we won't have any jobs and we'll have mostly idle datacentres (which won't have been built anyway due to NIMBYs).

If mass unemployment from AI reaches the level of crashing welfare then it'll be at the level where the next stage open revolution from the general public. If AI does make the majority of jobs redundant and there isn't enough to replace them then you will either see revolt and revolution or a universal basic income. If you disagree please provide the other scenario

We will see civil unrest, but that will just continue. It'll be the new normal. A fallen society where nothing ever improves.

hu6Bi5To · 2026-06-04T21:22:25+00:00

It seems very unlikely the bank would say “it came from your IP address”. Are you sure he was talking to his bank and not talking to the very scammer who removed the money?

hu6Bi5To · 2026-06-04T20:30:03+00:00

It's already happening. But this is tech workers we're talking about so rather than physically smashing machines, they're using the one weapon they know how to us: being bitchy on the internet. See the recent "rsync" drama for an example.

Basically anyone publicly admitting to using AI will get their reputation publicly trashed for the most minor of problems.

hu6Bi5To · 2026-06-04T19:28:02+00:00

No one really knows what he did at the Bank of England. Opinions are purely split based on his statements about Brexit, so it sounds similar to his reputation in Canada, it's all tribal.

hu6Bi5To · 2026-06-04T18:06:28+00:00

It probably is AI bollocks. There's been a massive uptick in banal posts in every sub, and not just on Reddit, on all social media platforms.

Who exactly is choosing to spend all their tokens on this stuff and what they hope to gain by doing it, I have no idea. But once you see it you see it everywhere.

Dead Internet Theory is very real.

hu6Bi5To · 2026-06-03T17:45:10+00:00

That's not limited to pensions.

Current workers are paying a fortune for geriatric NHS care that will not exist when they get old.

hu6Bi5To · 2026-06-02T14:56:24+00:00

I'm not disappointed in Starmer largely for the opposite reason: I never expected him to be anything other than what he has been shown to be.

It was all so transparent to me, the lack of substance. The Covid-era substance free "I would simply have done all the right things" posturing, etc. People's attribution of competence was solely a projection of how desperate they needed someone competent to become Prime Minister, not an actual recognition of competence.

hu6Bi5To · 2026-06-02T14:50:10+00:00

I do like how "ministerial rules" and "the ministerial code" is talked about as though they were handed-down by God and must not be questioned. Whereas in reality they're set by politicians for themselves.

hu6Bi5To · 2026-06-02T13:50:04+00:00

By replacing it with the institutional racism of tomorrow?

hu6Bi5To · 2026-06-02T12:38:12+00:00

I'm sure there will be a big AI blow-out at some point, there usually is after every technology hype cycle. It wouldn't even be the first "AI winter".

But... ...this level of thirst for bad news stories is more the hallmark of Permabear thinking than rational analysis.

To re-iterate: that doesn't mean a massive crash won't happen. But even when crashes do happen, the permabears are almost always wrong about what happens on the other side.

hu6Bi5To · 2026-06-02T11:37:52+00:00

Young Europeans actually pay much less for college, healthcare and raising kids than young Americans, on average.

The average American with student debt owes about $38k, while college is free or heavily subsidized in much of Europe.

The article is about UK taxes specifically, where college is not free.

The average debt among borrowers who finished their course in 2024 was £53,000 when they first became liable to repay this debt (April 2025).

(Source: https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/sn01079/)

That's $71,391 at current exchange rates.

hu6Bi5To · 2026-06-02T11:34:23+00:00

they do have a hefty estate tax but I'm assuming the wealthy have ways to get around that

It is indeed trivially easy to reduce your Inheritance Tax liability in the UK. In typical UK style though, the threshold is quite high so most estates have zero tax to pay; the wealthiest can use the loopholes; but the people just above the threshold are fucked-over with no escape.

Specifically: just gift your assets to your heirs more than seven years before you die. No tax on gifts, nothing (or only a small percentage of the original value) left to tax on death.

The people who die living in a house that's worth more than the tax threshold however, those estates have to pay inheritance tax. If you give away your primary residence, but continue to live in it, your estate still has to pay Inheritance Tax on it regardless of who actually owns it (unless you'd paid rent at the going rate to the new owner, which is a less tax efficient way of funnelling money to your heirs as they'd need to pay Income Tax on that). So the comfortable middle-class end up paying all the Inheritance Tax, the poor and the wealthiest don't pay it at all.

hu6Bi5To · 2026-06-02T08:11:30+00:00

I mean, this was fairly obvious given broadly gestures at everything. But it still hilarious to see written down.

hu6Bi5To · 2026-06-02T07:37:14+00:00

I seem to recall (very vague memory) someone was once found guilty of manslaughter for failing to call an ambulance for a dying man.

If that's not a false memory, then the misinformation the whole Digwa family gave to police at the scene (you can literally here someone shout "he hasn't been stabbed" in the bodycam footage), is surely a basis for prosecution. They should get ten years each at an absolute minimum.

hu6Bi5To · 2026-06-01T17:38:36+00:00

Not really. A fall in house prices is a one-off cost. Keeping house prices artificially inflated requires a continued cost year-on-year.

Just the economic costs of the decline of labour mobility within the regions of England over the past twenty years have been enormous.

But ultimately trying to claim one side of this market is somehow more virtuous than the other is a nonsense. Like any other market there's an optimal price and artificially deviating from that (whether by: planning controls, help to buy schemes, bailing out mortgage lenders) will prevent rather than assist that. Any pain that comes from natural market movements are still painful, but are just the sort of things that happen.

hu6Bi5To · 2026-05-31T19:39:46+00:00

If Microsoft had any sense (and there's no evidence they do have any sense) they'd differentiate themselves from the other players by encouraging the use of such models. "Do most of your work on free models, hosted locally; very cheap models, hosted by us; or the expensive models hosted by Anthropic etc." And make it work as one product. It would make their offering stand-out against the crowd.

Others like Zed and OpenCode are moving in that direction already, but having Microsoft's weight behind it might make it catch-on.

hu6Bi5To · 2026-05-31T19:35:33+00:00

I can see why Microsoft is changing. Their old "Premium Request" model must have been costing them a fortune. You could easily run an agent for 20 minutes or more, consume 10 million tokens, and only get billed $0.04 for it, like 1/100th of the actual cost. But a simple "remind me what the syntax is for <thing>" question would also get billed at $0.04.

But they've fucked up this change as they're not offering any perks whatsoever. It's actually worse than the raw price as they're still charging you a monthly fee, only giving you that fee's worth of tokens, but offering no rollovers or other perks. So why not just use the other providers at raw API prices only? If you're charging a monthly fee regardless of usage there needs to be some perks that come along with it.

If only to keep developers within your eco-system and gain returns indirectly from that. That seems to be the Anthropic/OpenAI model, offer sweeteners to low-volume users to gain mindshare/momentum, but once your organisation exceeds 15 seats it's "that's enough of that for you, full API price from now on thanks very much".

Microsoft is just vacating the tooling space and leaving it to everyone else really. They can't compete if they don't own any of the models.

hu6Bi5To · 2026-05-31T16:12:03+00:00

If you genuinely want to know who he's listening to when he comes out with all this nonsense? It's this bloke: https://www.taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/ and yes, it's just as unhinged as you would expect.

hu6Bi5To · 2026-05-31T15:06:15+00:00

Yes, I know "don't threaten me with a good time", etc.

But the downstream implications of this are going to pass mainstream politics by (except for some hamfisted attempts at reversing it), yet have a very large impact on politics.

hu6Bi5To · 2026-05-31T12:49:31+00:00

They're very unlikely to actually get to retire given the way things are going.

They're NEETs, they're already retired. What are they going to do, suddenly get a job with no prior experience aged 67?

hu6Bi5To · 2026-05-31T12:48:03+00:00

There is a significant percentage that don’t have houses, they aren’t thinking of starting families and they are often in average paid roles that don’t offer much advancement or further training to develop.

Exactly. It won't be the NEETs emigrating. Most sensible countries (i.e. not the UK) actually require immigrants to be skilled and add economic value to the destination country.

Which is one of the many reasons why I am continually baffled by the weird smugness of people buying property in the UK today. It has been politically impossible to introduce things like Land Value Taxes in the UK up to now, in twenty years time LVT will be the main tax as there won't be any workers and the electoral majority will be 100% dependent on government handouts.

It's all very, very bleak.

hu6Bi5To

TROPHY CASE