An Tuiseal Uafásach

@Chieftain_armor Tá siad lán de cac a chara, humourless pudendas.

This. I mean, I can understand "Don't chill the whiskey" or "A little water does help the taste". I was expecting some good natured ribbing on stereotypes. But some folks seem to be letting their lack of perspective kill a moment of humor caused by a novelty gift.

@fulovitboss NAB have offshored most of their cyber security, including critical parts of their detect and response function. The SOCI act implications are self evident.If it kicked off in the South China Sea, Oz would have little or no international data connectivity left within 7-10 days.

The big push for work from home is yielding not very surprising results. Many more job losses to come.

@AlanKohler @abcnews The whole point of so called 'independent bodies' is to remove accountability from the political class, claiming 'Not our fault' when it fails... The 'independent body' will always succumb to Pournelles Iron Law, outcomes turning into an unaccountable Kentucky Fried Shitshow.

This week's column for @abcnews in which I explain why Angus Taylor's immigration/housing policy would not result in a cut to immigration and suggest that migration should be run by an independent body like the Reserve Bank. abc.net.au/news/2026-05-2…

@whitesundesert Don't forget the class signaling attached to that snark... How dare the plebs have ideas above their station.

My gut feeling is the assumption on which this snark is based is at least 20 years out of date.

@JetSetGomez @MtarfaL All of this could have been avoided by purchasing the M346 in the first place...

@MtarfaL Hawk T2 reliability issues are well known. The M-346 has proven itself with NATO partners. The AJT decision needs urgency before training gaps widen further.

The RAF’s Training Crisis: Hawk Failures, Red Arrows Struggles, and the AJT Decision Views my own, comments and corrections welcome. Thread drafted at Tampa Airport - en route back from SOF Week 1/25 The Royal Air Force (RAF) has built its reputation on excellence in the air. Yet today it faces deep, systemic challenges in military flying training. This thread attempts to examine the ongoing Hawk T2 reliability problems, the recent Red Arrows announcement, broader defence issues, the race to replace the Hawk, and what comes next. A sober (realistic) look at capability, strategy, and accountability just in time for the mythical DIP.

@LordWalney Taps the sign... x.com/millennialwoes…

Not the side I usually fall on, but am really troubled by implications of this for many trans people who will be at greater risk if they simply switch public bathrooms as currently constituted. I hope there is a way that women’s right to single-sex spaces can be delivered without putting others at greater risk

@whitesundesert @echetus Helen Joyce has posted on this at length. Society at large is being held hostage by these people.

@echetus My unsubstantiated guess is Jolyon has transed his kid and cannot change course.

It’s interesting that the biggest partisans of transgenders in the UK are neurotic women in their early twenties and Manopausal minor celebrities on BSky (see also Jolyon)

@whitesundesert Yup, I learned not to do that again… the squeeze was not worth the juice…

I found out working for large companies that nothing invokes the fury of a bureaucracy more than some individual going off script and just doing the task the bureaucracy cannot or will not do.

@lukas_ohl "She is currently running two funded projects, REDCAJU (Rethinking Developmentalism for Climate and Social Justice) with Ndongo Samba Sylla, IDEAS Network Africa, and REDEF (Redesigning Finance for Climate Justice – a Big Green State approach)." Close it all down...

This article is deeply flawed. The old Defined Benefit pensions bought gilts because regulators demanded that they match their liabilities & reduce volatility. This boosted govt finances through cheaper borrowing. Now that DB schemes are closed, the party is over.

I lived in one of those Berkeley flats in London dock. It was too small and had no storage space, but it wasn’t inhumane. Stop treating places like Peckham as if they’re Bruges.

@lukas_ohl Making HR, P&C et al employment costs non deductible for the purposes of corporation tax would go a long way towards 'solving' this manifestation of Pournelle's Iron Law

The problem with HR, like any cost centre, is that it will keep trying to grow. Whether it’s HR or IT or FM, they’ll tell you that you need to buy X, hire more Ys, and spend more time on Z. The boss has no idea whether it’s true.

@whitesundesert @lukas_ohl I lived that at dream during the early 90s recession, no pay rises, people getting let go. HR tripled in size over the space of 2 years or so. Which was nice..

@lukas_ohl I’ve worked in companies where the number of engineers and operations people were a handful but HR and Finance always have at least 4-5 people each.

@sullrich Still running the old non subscription version on Windows.

Any nostalgia for Directory Opus on Amiga? Mac users would you use a utility like this?

@cjoye The purpose of a system is what it does.

The start-up and tech focus is BS - the budget hammers every single business and its employee owners. The incentive to work hard is being destroyed at all businesses in the name of Labor expanding the public service by 25% and paying for a government sector that is the largest share of the overall economy since WWII. It is highly regressive, stealth socialism. It is making once extraordinary Aussies very, very ordinary by global standards. We are rapidly going from world-class to cattle-class. From the Wonder Down Under to Asia’s Ibiza

@RollingHedge @MargsAnne I like the design code aspect, cookie cut that shit, instant planning approval. 100 % freedom of information is also required, serial objectors named, shamed and forced to post bonds which are not refunded if their objections are overruled.

The system is unfair.

Britain is stuck in a long bad patch and it is worse than the political class admits. The country is genuinely more stressed than it has been in living memory. The data shows it: fewer babies, fewer marriages, more people on disability, nearly a million young people not working or studying, mental health collapsing. This is a physical response to impossible conditions, not a mood. The state cannot fix it because the money has run out. Tax is at a record high, debt is huge, and the bond market has lost patience. Households are quietly drowning, hidden by mortgage forbearance, with debt charity demand at a 15-year high. AI is now eating entry-level professional jobs in real time. The Big Four and law firms have cut graduate intake by a third. Those young people end up on benefits, paid for with borrowed money. Two specific danger points sit in the next year: the Autumn Statement and the spring 2027 tax receipts, when the migration maths will print badly. Either could break the government and force a gilt crisis. The old American backstop is gone. The relationship has soured structurally and will not snap back. Five things would fix it: build nuclear, unwind the housing bubble, redirect British savings into Britain, retrain workers for the AI shift, and break the cartels capturing the gains. None are happening fast enough. If nothing changes, the slump lasts to roughly 2050. Today’s 25-year-old will be 55 before the recovery arrives. The 60-year-old will be dead. Part Three was released earlier today and covers what to actually do about it: @anglofuturismcapitallp/note/p-198803709?r=1uhim&utm_medium=ios&utm_source=notes-share-action" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">substack.com/@anglofuturism… (I can share a similar précis of this if you like?)

@RollingHedge @MargsAnne The first point above might be missing one element, cap loans at 3.5 times a *single* income per household. It's structurally unfair otherwise.

Excellent question. The real answer is long enough to require a part 4 tbh. It’s painful however you do it but one uncontrolled and messy the latter uncontrolled and cleaner. Neither simple. Britain’s housing market is not expensive because the country ran out of land. It is expensive because three policy choices compounded over fifteen years and a fourth welded the result in place. QE inflated the money supply ninefold and the new liquidity flowed into long-duration assets, predominantly property. House prices compounded at 5 to 6 percent against wages at 2 to 3, and the gap is the dead capital wedge. ZIRP then collapsed the yield required to make property work as an asset class, repricing every long-duration asset upward, with property the biggest beneficiary because the leverage was subsidised through Help to Buy and looser LTVs. Foreign capital, Russian then Chinese then Hong Kong, was small in aggregate but decisive at the margin in prime postcodes, and the price signal cascaded down the ladder through the substitution chain until it reached the first-time buyer market. Planning then ensured none of this could vent through supply. Britain’s supply elasticity is 0.4 against a developed-economy median of 1.2, so two-thirds of any demand shock arrives as price rather than quantity. The tax code welded the structure shut by rewarding holding and punishing selling, producing the low-transaction high-price configuration the market has been stuck in since 2015. Why unwind. The 9.18 trillion of housing wealth produces no productive cashflow. Houses are a store of value, not a producer of value, and the scale of the store is what makes Britain structurally low-investment relative to its peer group. If that savings pool were redeployed into substrate, Britain would fund its own AI and energy buildout out of domestic capital rather than importing it and exporting the rent stream. The dead capital is also active drag, because the household spending 40 percent of post-tax income on housing services cannot spend it on consumption, pension contribution, education, or business formation, and the sum of those suppressed allocations is the productivity gap against the peer group. Built by monetary policy, amplified by planning policy, locked by tax policy, all serving the homeowner-pensioner coalition that has been electorally decisive since the early 1990s. Unwind requires reversing all three. Until it happens, Britain pays the rent rather than collects it. Now to answer you… deep breath… • Cap loans at 3.5x income. • Drain buy-to-let through tax. • Build more, behind a design code so no NIMBY veto. • Keep primary residence CGT in the cupboard for later. • Real rates positive. • Hold nominal prices flat ten years, let wages catch up. • Price-to-income drifts from 8x back to 4x. No collateral explosion, no gilt event through the back door. • Reveals the housing piece as a fifteen year project inside a series calibrated to thirty-six months. • The gilt window is acute. • The housing unwind is structural. • Same programme, different clocks. 1/2

@LeeRespecter A textbook ancien regime aristocrat. Learned nothing, forgot nothing

A problem the Teals have is that they’ve built little cults of personality around themselves. They run “community surveys” of self-selecting participants from an already self-selected group, their mailing lists. Then they gas themselves up, convincing themselves their wealthy electorates are desperate to pay more taxes so the money can be squandered by a government their local member is not part of and has no real say in.

@RaltsAuthor The universe liked that...

Proof of Life in case I don't past anything else today.

@smart_intellecc @mr_james_c The NZ system works in that regard, there is no tax free allowance. Everyone pays income tax . Roll employer NI and pension contributions into employee remuneration, abolish the TFA and rip the band aid off. Take home pay stays the same. ird.govt.nz/income-tax/inc…

@mr_james_c All voters must be exposed to tax policy. All voters must be exposed to inflation.

Skin in the game matters, especially when it comes to taxes. In recent years I've become a flat tax fundamentalist because: a) it's the only system that is fair to the individual rather than the state (which has a monopoly on the use of force) b) it gives all taxpayers skin in the game to ensure efficient govt spending c) it encourages aspiration - there's no penalty to earning more.

@RaltsAuthor Phorque no! You're not alone mate. Coinnigh do mhisneach a chara.

What they don't tell you about the chronic pain when you are terminal is it makes you feel alone and isolated and abandoned even when someone's there and helping you. You feel like the pain is just going to go on and on with no relief. There's a hopeless part of it that you have to fight every day.