Orthophenia

@Shrlck_Ddls @peterboghossian Normally yes, but unrealistic minimum wage laws force employers to compress the wage gap to the next rung of the ladder. Fewer people bother for an extra few pennies.

@peterboghossian My gut says that the pool of people working becomes smaller and smaller. If people can choose they ‘climb the ladder’.

In Europe: Shocked by how many low-skill service jobs have been automated away. Clearly not because of a dearth of low-skill (migrant) labor. My gut says this is due to worker protection laws. The more expensive it is to employ someone, the more you can spend to automate away their job.

@peterboghossian Combinations of worker protections, unrealistic minimum wage & employer-side taxes - in markets where revenue is falling due to 'cost of living' - makes automation attractive for lower cost & risk. A state-managed doom cycle which Amazon will survive, but the local pub won't.

@rorysutherland It's almost entirely a cost benefit thing. Blackspots correlate strongly with areas where provision (construction and maintenance of masts) is most costly. With the rise of city centre free WiFi, the problem costs orders of magnitude more to solve than it does in lost revenue.

One thing that confuses me here. Mobile phone networks presumably have tons of data on the precise locations where motorists and train passengers lose signal and are cut-off. Yet nothing ever improves.

@BladeoftheS Nonsense claim. All of these business pay corporate tax somewhere (most often in the US), and all of them pay other taxes in the UK when they employ, sell, distribute, operate data centres etc. In 2025 Amazon paid about £1.3b and its sales generated a further £5b in VAT.

Lets cut Welfare to fund Defence. Here's the top claimants we need to deal with. Amazon, Google, Starbucks, Meta, Apple, Shell, BP, Vodafone... All these companies pay ZERO tax in most if not all year's. They should be paying tens of billions. End this unaffordable Welfare.

@BladeoftheS Nonsense claim. All of these business pay corporate tax somewhere (most often in the US), and all of them pay other taxes in the UK when they employ, sell, distribute, operate data centres etc. In 2025 Amazon paid about £1.3b and its sales generated a further £5b in VAT.

It's amazing probably everyone who reads this post uses at least one of these companies. Yet despite EVERYONE using them, they don't have to pay any tax. Tax isn't optional for you, why should it be for them?

What on earth happened to the Green Party? It used to be a virtuous mission warning of the damage we are doing to the planet, how we are absusing nature and the environment, and of the need to act on animal compassion. It was the party of Creation. But this is something else.

@NotFarLeftAtAll On the contrary. There is no chance labour will allow a general election before 2029 after fourteen years in opposition. Let the right fragment now, to coalesce around the preferred party when it actually matters. Choices are good.

Just over a year ago the right was virtually united and poised to vote for Reform, effectively ousting Labour and the Tories from power for good. However, it appears we are now deeply divided and the Greens have a very good chance in winning the next general election because the left will vote tactically.. for some reason we won’t do the same It’s a very sad situation

@xwanyex The problem is that we gave the job of imagining things to systems, then let the systems propagate themselves at the expense of the imagination.

I imagined adults would be smart and knowledgeable, but it turns out that most of them don’t know how anything works. So I guess we both have our crosses to bear.

@mr_james_c Where do you even start to refute this drivel? The credulous claim that poverty is flat, painting service cuts as the 'easy option', economically illiterate wealth tax values, the entitlement, the wish fulfillment, the total absence of chin? It's just so infantile.

Want to know why public services are at a breaking point? Because they're run by public servants.

Je vais partir du principe que tu es de bonne foi, parce que ton raisonnement est intuitif et que 90% des gens le partagent. Mais il repose sur trois erreurs factuelles, et ça vaut le coup de les regarder calmement. Erreur 1 : la fortune d'Elon n'est pas un tas d'argent. C'est de la propriété d'usines, de fusées et de satellites. "Prendre la moitié de sa tune", concrètement, ça veut dire forcer la vente de la moitié de SpaceX et Tesla. L'argent ne sort pas d'un coffre, il sort des entreprises elles-mêmes, qui passent sous contrôle de fonds étrangers ou d'États. Tu ne redistribues pas du cash, tu démantèles un outil de production. C'est la différence entre récolter des pommes et découper le pommier. Erreur 2 : "ça résout énormément de problèmes dans le monde". Cette expérience a déjà été tentée, en vrai. En 2021, le directeur du Programme Alimentaire Mondial de l'ONU a affirmé que 6 milliards de Musk pouvaient "résoudre la faim dans le monde". Réponse d'Elon : décrivez-moi exactement comment, comptabilité publique à l'appui, et je vends mes actions Tesla immédiatement. Le PAM a publié son plan. Verdict : ce n'était pas "résoudre la faim", c'était nourrir 42 millions de personnes pendant un an. Un an. Puis il faut re-payer, pour toujours. Le PAM avait d'ailleurs levé 8,4 milliards l'année précédente, et la faim était toujours là. Les ONG traitent les symptômes en boucle, jamais les causes, parce que leur financement dépend de l'existence du problème. Erreur 3, la plus importante : tu cherches ce qui sort vraiment les gens de la pauvreté. Bonne nouvelle, on a la réponse, et elle est massive. En 1990, 36% de l'humanité vivait dans l'extrême pauvreté. Aujourd'hui, moins de 9%. Plus d'un milliard de personnes sorties de la misère en 30 ans. Par quoi ? Pas par la charité ni par l'aide internationale (plus de 1 000 milliards versés à l'Afrique en 60 ans pour un résultat à peu près nul). Par l'ouverture des marchés, l'industrialisation, le commerce. La Chine seule a sorti 800 millions de personnes de la pauvreté en abandonnant le collectivisme, pas en taxant ses entrepreneurs. Donc fais le calcul complet. Option A : tu confisques 500 milliards, tu finances quelques années de programmes, l'argent est consommé, et tu as détruit la machine qui produisait les fusées, les voitures électriques et l'internet des zones rurales. Option B : tu laisses le meilleur allocateur de capital de sa génération réinvestir 100% de sa fortune dans des industries qui baissent les coûts pour tout le monde et emploient des centaines de milliers de personnes. L'option A soulage ta morale pendant 18 mois. L'option B sort des populations entières de la pauvreté pour toujours. La pauvreté ne se redistribue pas. Elle se résout par la création. C'est contre-intuitif, c'est frustrant, mais c'est ce que disent 200 ans de données.

@_simonchandler_ @PeterMcCormack I accept the fundamental point, but the wealthy don't redistribute, they transact. Transactions require at least one & normally very many, other parties. In other words, a market. If they fail to offer attractive terms, there's no 'buyer', no transaction & the wealth's devalued.

@Orthophenia @PeterMcCormack Yes, but when they dispose of or redistribute their wealth they generally act independently of the market. They might try to anticipate what the market wants, but their actions are not equivalent to an aggregated market acting with 'collective intelligence.'

Here’s to the trillionaire class. Let’s make more of them.

@Heccles94 Explain the practical mechanism by which a trillion dollars of assets could be used to solve even one of these problems. Then show the framework in which these outweigh the problems said assets already solve. Only then you might be able to make a moral case for why they should.

Things the world needs: Global vaccination programme Access to clean water Global education Disaster relief funds Epidemic preparation Protection from climate change Things the world doesn’t need: A trillionaire

@Ye_Olde_Holborn @afneil @HalfDHacker Characterising subsidies provided to one company (among many) by government policy (presumably in return for a national benefit) as 'handed over' to it's largest shareholder is a motivated oversimplification. You're condemning state intervention, not a successful businessman.

@afneil @HalfDHacker The millions in UK government EV subsidies handed over Musk affects me

He’s floated Space X. How many consumers are being price gouged buying rockets? I ask again — give me an example of how Musk becoming a trillionaire (only on paper — he doesn’t have a trillion dollars under the bed) affects you.

@_simonchandler_ @PeterMcCormack A billionaire is not a single actor. They are the titular owner of assets made up in no small part of other actors, assets which are valued at that amount. If the billionaire lacked the capability, this value would not emerge, since capital is only attracted to returns.

@PeterMcCormack There's an argument in Hayek's 'The Road to Serfdom', which basically opposes central planning on account of a single actor lacking the knowledge to efficiently distribute resources. A similar argument could be made against billionaires and trillionaires.

@GavinBoby @elonmusk @AuronMacintyre That's a too generous to the intelligence of the powerful. The purpose of the system is what it does, the system doesn't need to know *why* it does that. The root imperative is "protect boomers' wealth". All of these effects are emergent, unforeseen higher-order consequences.

The reason has always been about increasing their power over us. The method is to make us weaker and easier to rule: 1. Take away our identity 2. Impoverish us 3. Divide us 4. Reduce trust 5. Increase fear 6. Subject us to crime 7. Make us more dependent 8. Sow feelings of guilt and self loathing 9. Reduce our freedom to speak out 10. Humiliate us. Power is an addiction to them, and there's nothing they won't do to keep a grip on it. Multiculturalism increases that power by using third parties to grind us down, while telling us it's for our own good.

@KonstantinKisin Everyone who wants to comment on Henry Nowak's death and the ensuing discourse should be made to do so as a voiceover to the bodycam footage.

If you listened to the British media today, you'd think Henry Nowak was killed by Nigel Farage's comments.

Britain had a moment of silence for George Floyd. Our politicians kneeled en masse to show their outrage at his killing. "I can't breathe" became a slogan. George Floyd died on the other side of the world. He wasn't British. Henry Nowak *was* British and his treatment by the police was shocking and negligent in the extreme. Yet there is no minute of silence. There is no coordinated public campaign. There is no kneeling at sporting events. And we all know why. During the summer of BLM, some people said "All Lives Matter". This was treated as the highest form of racism and anyone who said this was immediately cancelled. Why? Because the people in charge don't actually think all lives matter in the same way. They have created a racial hierarchy of victimhood where a career criminal who died through mistreatment by police in a foreign country with 0 evidence of racism like George Floyd is automatically sanctified because of the colour of his skin. And Henry Nowak, a British man, one of ours, is automatically dismissed and ignored because of the colour of his. This is the ugly fruit of so-called "anti-racism", an obsession with race that has created a two-tier society which treats people differently because of the colour of their skin. This needs to stop.

@Heccles94 Because you keep redefining poverty & import millions of people who will, at 'poverty' level in the UK, have greater wealth than they could have ever achieved in their 3rd world home. You either know this, in which case you're dishonest, or you don't, in which case you're naive.

Why are the rich getting richer, while we are getting poorer? 👇👇

@Zombielooville @BladeoftheS No absolutely, I shouldn't have to give a big business my burner email to get my cheap Pimm's. What's this country coming to?

Lol. I don't think they are joking... Club cards used to offer or represent approximately 1% off the total basket value. Often delayed and issued as coupons. With additional deals of upto 10% bolted onto your letter. With additional modest savings. Which slow crept up via multiples in terms of exchanging your points for vouchers at participating attractions, like cinema tickets or theme parks, even insurance. However things really started escalating around COVID where it went from 'nice to have' BONUS to a 'must have' ESSENTIAL and is now effectively a form of 'profit gauging' of non-members. Which I have long argued should be illegal (due to scope and scale). Especially on things like food, that is not a discretionary spending. Data breachs, needing to hand over personal data to get 'fair' or 'reasonable' value at basically every establishment you go to is becoming a total nightmare. So unfortunately due to this free market failure, I'd put a simple cap on the total level of discount offered unless there is a specific legal justification to offer more. For example there is NO spending or visit requirements for a Tesco club card, so it doesn't even reward regular shoppers. Which is not the same as being rewarded for doing effectively all your weekly shops with them over the course of a year. In which case that legal limit could be set higher. Potentially decided on by an independent consumer group plus industry representatives and legal professionals as a panel. Or something like that. Just thinking out loud here tbh.

Tesco shouldn't be allowed to rip people off like that, these criminal clubcards should be banned. 1 price in the supermarket only.