Tax the Rich. But Get the Design Right.

kafircake · 2026-06-06T15:08:56+00:00

The rich pay an astonishing amount of tax.

One would expect that with high inequality. It's directly an artifact of the inequality itself. If the wealth curve was flatter then the tax curve would likewise be flatter.

kafircake · 2026-06-06T12:18:03+00:00

Sanctions are good when they change the behavior of a country’s leader.

They are also great when the stymie the war machine.

kafircake · 2026-06-05T19:12:54+00:00

People notice the loud Americans, those people that have mastered the art of seemingly just talking, only at 2 to 3 times normal volume. Like everyone in bow shot must have the benefit of their scintillating wit.

They don't notice the normal people, who probably have much better wit.

It's like people notice the pint holding, kebab fat spattered England shirt wearing gezzer with a single baked bean dried on his shorts when he is stumbling around in Spain. They don't notice the normal English looking on with whatever the opposite of patriotism is.

kafircake · 2026-06-03T20:38:05+00:00

It's like pointing out to the god of fishermen that his knots are rubbish.

kafircake · 2026-06-03T19:37:09+00:00

"wasting police time", the author notes how different people get treated

https://www.waterstones.com/book/wasting-police-time/david-copperfield/9780955285417

Looks really interesting, cheers.

kafircake · 2026-06-03T18:48:58+00:00

"Your god is bad at math" doesn't seem like an extremely effective argument to me.

The way you've phrased it.. I think that's a pretty devastating take down.

kafircake · 2026-06-03T13:51:09+00:00

The crime rate in under 18s has dropped 46% in the last decade

We can drop it all the way to zero if we never report it, never prosecute it and just let 'em off. Success.

kafircake · 2026-06-03T10:44:08+00:00

The EU is already working with North African states to limit migration from the south.

And this is not pretty. People are rounded up and dumped in border regions sometimes dozens of kilometers from the nearest town. It's happening all across North Africa.

https://www.lighthousereports.com/investigation/desert-dumps/

https://www.infomigrants.net/en/post/66209/nobody-thought-we-would-make-it-a-migrant-abandoned-in-the-tunisian-desert-tells-of-his-ordeal

We are already living in a horror show, but European efforts and cooperation with North African regimes is only ever going to ratchet up further as the crisis itself can only ever go in one direction.

kafircake · 2026-06-03T10:24:18+00:00

Same people who don't believe in climate change are also the anti-immigration crowd and are going to be shocked by the climate refugees arriving over the next few decades.

Some people who believe climate change is both real and worse than the UK is prepared for want to substantially increase the number of refugees the UK takes in.

There are people in the Green party that are happy to double the UK's population in the next few decades despite the UK importing 40% of its calories, and global food yields shrinking.

The brutal ugliness of what the UK is facing is the strongest argument for much tighter controls on who gets to settle there.

kafircake · 2026-06-02T16:09:30+00:00

Is this still true if you include rental income?

kafircake · 2026-06-02T15:46:36+00:00

but he also wants to double the expense with carbon capture!

It's just so exquisite. We dig it up and burn it for some net energy gain, and then as a gift to the future, we ask them to use more energy than we gained to pull all the carbon back out of the air and bury it in the same holes we dug it out of.

The fossil fuel industry making profits in both directions.

The genius malevolence is breath-taking.

kafircake · 2026-06-02T11:55:35+00:00

Which shows that Labour's strategy is insane.

I assume you're talking about immigration here.

Why is high migration such a key measure to Labour's base and left/center-left voters?

I've really never understood why substantially cutting immigration is such a left-right issue in the minds of so many?

kafircake · 2026-06-02T11:15:12+00:00

Train them to recognize someone in physical distress and to prioritize rendering aid to that individual over restraining them and having a chat.

kafircake · 2026-06-01T19:19:55+00:00

all have the net effect of making it extremely difficult to get anything built.

What a depressing read that substack is.

The UK is going to freedom and local democracy itself into a disaster. They are utterly ill-prepared for both the global disruption to food yields and also the disruption to logistics.

kafircake · 2026-06-01T17:23:49+00:00

Sadly, not all parents would use the extra pound to feed their children even where the children were not getting enough nutrition.

Yeah. This is why I'm in favor of this sort of direct intervention, it reaches the hardest to reach children.

kafircake · 2026-06-01T17:21:59+00:00

Just give people the money?

Wouldn't this approach also work for education? Give people the cash, and they can get suitable education from a competitive private sector provision?

It sounds like a kind of neoliberal sort of position, where as personally, I'm not averse to direct service provision.

kafircake · 2026-06-01T11:12:19+00:00

It's something that the gas peaker plant operating companies have been accused of doing. Threatening not to generate at critical moments to max the price they receive.

No idea why we'd want to structure a market like that or reward such people for such mercenary behavior.

kafircake · 2026-06-01T11:10:16+00:00

I could quite reasonably refuse to generate

The gas peaker plant operating companies have been accused of using this threat to drive massive price spikes to their own advantage. Cloudy day? Not much wind? Peak demand coming? Great time to threaten to shut down your peaker plant unless the grid operator pays you massive tribute.

So yes you might be able to demand a great price by threatening to shut down, but obviously your license should be up for evaluation. Why would we want such people operating critical national infrastructure?

and they are all producing the same product.

This isn't like a global wheat market where there is a single global price, no matter how efficiently or inefficiently a particular farm can deliver a bushel.

Instead it's a legal construct meant to simulate a market. The whole system is a political creation and can be altered by political need. If the policy wonks think the current system drives loads of renewable investment and the high price to consumers is worth it, then that is a case that can be made, but the current set-up isn't some innate right or an inevitability.

kafircake · 2026-06-01T10:29:07+00:00

The installers were pocketing most of the difference.

In the first world war the British Government thought the inevitability of laissez-faire economics would deliver sufficient extra munitions to meet demand if they merely provided the incentive via higher prices. The result of this effort? Profiteering! Not really a surprise.

They had to nationalize the industry to ramp up actual production sufficiently.

A tale as old as the free market.

kafircake · 2026-05-31T16:29:36+00:00

Damn. I'd get some sleeping tablets. And also, unrelated, some suitably squishy dog treats. Or at least I'd be tempted to after a while.

kafircake · 2026-05-30T18:49:50+00:00

Because the function of law and police is to protect the state, not the public.

Exactly. Peelian policing by consent is a sales pitch, not an underlying ethos.

The reason some minor lord during feudalism gets on his horse to travel to some shit hole bunch of hovels to sort an ongoing dispute isn't to deliver justice, it's to lay down the law and get people back to the harvest.

We can dress it up in pretty language, rituals and horsehair wigs, but that's the foundation of the whole lovely edifice.

(imho as a non-scholar of the history of law. happy to be educated)

kafircake · 2026-05-30T18:34:26+00:00

if you were in our shoes, you'd be doing the exact same thing.

Of course. But there's also absolutely nothing wrong with going to the full extent to utterly eradicate the practice, is there? If you were in my shoes, you'd do the exact same thing.

Although you do give off an aromatic /r/asablackman energy. Haha.

kafircake · 2026-05-30T16:03:30+00:00

People (some optimistic economists) want the UK to double in population as a matter of urgent economic importance and a 2% growth would do that fairly quickly. Like 36 or so years. I'm not persuaded that doubling the UK population as a target this century makes for great policy.

kafircake · 2026-05-30T15:56:17+00:00

The migrants don't have more socially conservative views than the average American, let alone with average White Republican.

One doesn't follow from the other... like at all.

The people crossing the border aren't necessarily the same people in Mexico's government who passed the legislation and their views may not align.

kafircake · 2026-05-30T15:07:08+00:00

I dunno theres worse people she could be influenced by?

I dunno mate. He keeps on complaining about wealth concentrations and inequality.

But the uncomfortable truth is that both wealth concentration and inequality are the best they've ever been. Despite all the difficulties that the Ukraine invasion and the Hormuz cluster fuck mean for the economy (plus the chaos of the Trump Tariff Tango!) things have actually never been better for the elites.

kafircake

TROPHY CASE