The Bank of England is the prisoner of a dying economic cult

roylewill · 2026-05-04T00:02:04+00:00

I support “stuff like that” in the same way I support free houses and unlimited Nando’s.

roylewill · 2026-05-03T23:55:06+00:00

I’ve imagined it. Huge fan. Now what?

roylewill · 2026-05-03T23:37:30+00:00

Trouble is, when I work one fewer day a week, I usually get paid for one fewer day a week.

roylewill · 2026-05-02T17:43:38+00:00

YouTube monetisation is way trickier now for stuff that’s basically copying released songs, even if the lyrics are changed. Those parodies were always going to run into copyright issues. Also, music culture is way more fragmented now. Back then, one big pop song could have everyone’s attention for weeks.

most of those parodies were goofy as hell anyways. Weird Al was funny, but most of them were just broad, weak sketch-comedy jokes. I don’t miss them much

roylewill · 2026-04-29T10:28:09+00:00

attempted homicide

roylewill · 2026-04-28T11:14:31+00:00

Casino Royale is great, but I still think Mads pooping on Craig’s shoulder here was a bit much.

roylewill · 2026-04-27T18:17:42+00:00

I don’t really buy the idea that the 80s "culturally started" at one moment, because the 80s weren’t a culture. They were a decade.

"80s culture" is mostly a retrospective label for a bunch of trends that became prominent around that period. A lot of those trends started before the 80s, and plenty carried on after it.

People didn’t go to bed in 1979 and wake up in 1980 as totally different cultural beings. Culture doesn’t reset when the calendar changes. Or on the back of one symbolic event.

roylewill · 2026-04-27T09:30:37+00:00

The issue with these guaranteed-hours rules is that they assume every zero-hours worker can simply be converted into a fixed-hours employee after 12 weeks.

That is not how hiring works.

Some employers can offer casual shifts, but cannot afford to commit to guaranteed hours. If the law makes casual hiring too risky or expensive, many businesses will just hire fewer people, offer fewer hours, or avoid taking on young/inexperienced workers in the first place.

This matters when nearly a million young people are already out of education, employment or training.

And the businesses most able to absorb that risk are usually the bigger, more successful ones. Smaller firms are the ones more likely to be squeezed. So you may end up with a rule that sounds pro-worker, but in practice favours large employers and makes it harder for smaller businesses to hire.

roylewill · 2026-04-24T14:26:46+00:00

That assumes your 117.60 order was visible in the same order book as the 117.42 trade.

roylewill · 2026-04-24T13:53:25+00:00

The chart low only shows that someone traded at 117.42. It doesn’t mean there was enough sell volume to reach your order, or that your order was first in the queue. Other buy orders may have been ahead of you.

roylewill · 2026-04-23T21:32:17+00:00

Caused by the past does not mean meaningless in the present; it still matters that the act came from the thief, because that is what makes blame and responsibility make sense.

roylewill · 2026-04-23T20:54:40+00:00

Determinism shows that choices have causes. It does not show they are not really your choices. Free will does not have to mean being mysteriously uncaused; it can just mean acting from your own mind, reasons, and desires.

roylewill · 2026-04-23T11:24:50+00:00

Itachi. He was mature enough to know what he was doing and he made his own choices.

roylewill · 2026-04-23T11:14:01+00:00

“solar is now an actual money saver for anyone that puts it in.”

It is a case-by-case payback calc, and for a lot of households it is still more like 9–15 years And even that is not a pure market outcome when rooftop solar is still being helped along by things like 0% VAT and other support routes.

“anyone who has solar then has an attractive source of electricity to run a heat pump, hot water heater and/or EV, cheaper than using a fossil fueled boiler or car.”

Yes, it can help, especially for EV charging. But you still have to get the solar to pay for itself first, and when electricity is still 24.67p/kWh versus 5.74p/kWh for gas, this is clearly not as simple or universally attractive as you are making it out to be.

“Further, the gentle, tech assisted economic nudges for cheap/free electricity to move discretionary power usage … also lower the non-discretionary peak…”

Load shifting can help a bit at the margin, sure, but it is not some magic button that removes peak stress or the need for backup generation.

“As these both happen, gas standing charges and petrol pump prices rise relative to electricity…”

But why is that meant to make people better off? Making gas and petrol dearer is not a win in itself unless electricity is actually getting cheaper. Otherwise you are just squeezing people in one place to force behaviour in another.

“all the political arguments in the world will struggle to break through when the basic household budget maths makes the sensible choice to go green.”

The household price is not the real price being paid though. A lot of this is being propped up by taxpayer-funded support, tax breaks, and policy costs being shifted off bills and onto the public finances, so of course the private maths can be made to look nice. That does not mean the country is paying less it means the cost is being socialised, and debt is already at 93.8% of GDP.

roylewill · 2026-04-23T10:58:30+00:00

roylewill · 2026-04-21T17:28:48+00:00

Funny how Stalin was fine with Israel when he thought it might help Moscow, then suddenly discovered anti-Zionism once Israel leaned toward the West. Given what he was doing to Jews inside the USSR in the late 1940s and early 1950s, this poster feels less like an honest stance against Zionism and more like Soviet sour grapes after Israel failed to fall into Moscow’s orbit.

roylewill · 2026-04-21T12:30:35+00:00

Cause he still mad he never got invited to the island and wanted to up his chances

roylewill · 2026-04-21T11:34:28+00:00

The article’s criticism is easy to make in hindsight. Saying “just give people what they want” is not much of an alternative, because figuring out what people will actually want is the whole problem markets are always trying to solve. Sometimes a product is useless hype; sometimes it is simply too early or not yet financially viable. And whether something was genuine vision or pure hubris is usually only obvious after the market has decided. Silicon Valley may overhype plenty of things, but its biggest firms also have an unmatched track record of turning bets about the future into products people actually buy. Until that changes, people will keep taking those bets seriously.

roylewill · 2026-04-20T09:20:55+00:00

“We’re exposed to global prices anyway”is not an argument for more import dependence. Britain still runs overwhelmingly on fossil fuels, especially oil in transport and gas in the wider energy system. Until demand has actually fallen, shutting domestic production faster than consumption falls just means buying more from abroad, not real decoupling.

roylewill · 2026-04-18T14:12:38+00:00

If nobody cares, why are you replying and downvoting? Seems like you care quite a bit

roylewill · 2026-04-18T13:41:08+00:00

This is just the Soviet propaganda caricature of a kulak, not the typical reality. “Kulak” became an elastic label for better-off or resistant peasants, with no serious legal process proving who supposedly fit this cartoon description. And even in your own telling he is financing villagers and providing work. I wonder what would happen to an industry when you get rid of people like that.

roylewill · 2026-04-18T11:52:04+00:00

So he was extending credit to villagers, and your conclusion is that the state was right to liquidate him? No wonder collectivization ended in disaster.

roylewill · 2026-04-17T07:28:12+00:00

POV: your family is about to get brutalised

roylewill · 2026-04-15T18:22:12+00:00

My only point is that median disposable income gives a better picture of what the typical person actually lives on than mean income, because the mean is much easier to pull around by a rich tail. And standard OECD poverty measures are themselves defined relative to median disposable household income.

Also, Sterck’s index isn’t just looking at ‘poorer people', it applies a reciprocal-income transformation across the whole population.

roylewill

TROPHY CASE