fletchbog

@BellaBaddie__ Tenet is the worst film for this

Does anyone else spend the entire modern movie turning the volume up and down because there is zero sound consistency in movies anymore?

A firefighter was asked why he couldn’t stop laughing while rescuing an elderly woman. He replied: “She told me I reminded her of her wedding night.”

Meanwhile, in a country where energy policy is not made by halfwits...

Tax for growth, drink for sobriety, eat cake for weight loss etc.

It is understood Starmer has countered by offering £2bn.

I know it's easy to discard gaming from the 80s, 90s, and even the early 2000s as nothing more than nostalgia viewed through rose-tinted glasses. One aspect that often gets overlooked in that debate is actually based on facts, not just overly sentimental nostalgia. Having a computer and wanting to get the most out of it - and sometimes even just to get it working at all - required you to be far more invested, curious, and hands-on, so maybe that's why anyone who experienced that era feels a stronger connection to it. You had to read up on things, learn, and tinker with both software and hardware. If you had a PC in the 80s or 90s, it wasn't a "one and done" purchase. There was constant upgrading: swapping out a crappy sound card for a better one, replacing a small/slow hard drive, installing a CD-ROM drive, doubling your RAM from 1 MB to 2 MB… the list went on and on. It meant installing and updating drivers so everything actually worked. It meant understanding compatibility issues - all without the internet in the early days - so you relied on magazines, manuals, and friends who had "been there, done that." And that was just the hardware side. Then came the software: getting drivers, configs, and setups tuned perfectly so you could squeeze every last bit of performance out of the machine. Some games simply wouldn't run unless you freed up those final kilobytes of conventional memory. There was even a whole industry built around "managing your PC" with tools like Norton Commander and countless others. These days, there is... No more fiddling with AUTOEXEC.BAT or CONFIG.SYS files. No fine-tuning HIMEM.SYS. No IRQ conflicts with your sound card. No more boot disks. Juggling hard drive space? Forget it - drives now come in terabytes, not megabytes. Dealing with a 5.25" floppy, a 3.5" floppy, and a CD-ROM drive all crammed into one case? What a drag. Saving up for that shiny new VGA card to replace your old EGA? Not a thing anymore. And yet, if you ask older gamers who lived through the 80s and 90s, most of us actually enjoyed customizing and troubleshooting our machines. It was part of the experience - part of the joy and excitement. Sure, it involved plenty of trial and error and frustrating "OMFG, why isn't this working?!" moments… but when it finally worked, the reward was so much sweeter. Finally freeing up those last couple of kilobytes of your 640K base memory? Glorious. Replacing that pathetic PC speaker with a real sound card? Pure ecstasy. To all you old-school gamers out there, I hope you experienced it the same way. I always felt that the need to tinker endlessly made the whole experience more rewarding. You were more connected to your machine and understood it on a deeper level. These days, you just click a button and the game downloads and installs itself. I have a modern PC, of course. It's been over 20 years since I last had to do any real tinkering. That's convenient, sure… but the magic and curiosity is gone.

Slow clap 👏

You think the bloke who worked hard and built a business is the problem. He is not. You think the boomer who paid off his mortgage in 1998 is the problem. He is not. Nobody holding a pound is your enemy. Whether you have a tenner in your pocket or a million in your account, you hold the same broken currency. The pound has lost 69% of its purchasing power since 2000. That tenner buys less. That million buys less. The man next door did not print £895 billion during covid. The man next door did not freeze your tax thresholds. The man next door did not sell your gilts for a 76% loss and tax you more to cover it. The men who did are on television telling you to have broader shoulders and extracting your wealth to plug the gaps they created. We are being divided so we do not unite against the people who actually robbed us.

Only £15 an hour, why not £45 per hour or do you not think workers of all ages are worth that?

A minimum wage of £15 would end my coffee shop, it would have to close, as would many other businesses. I’ll explain for the economically illiterate. Staff costs are currently half our costs, a £15 minimum wage is actually more than £15 an hour for the company, because you have to add: - 12.07% holiday - Sick pay - Maternity pay if and when required - National insurance - Pension contributions These costs would mean the shop loses money because remember, energy costs are up, rates are up, regulations are up. Now you can pass these costs onto the consumer - that would mean charging a lot more for coffee, people won’t pay it. The likes of Starbucks and Costa can, because they have economies of scale. The independent doesn’t. Now the little socialist will say well this is your fault, if you can’t run a business that can afford to pay its staff properly, but the little socialist has never run a business and does not understand the dynamics. Now I could pay some staff off and fill those hours myself or reduce us to one staff member during certain periods - but this proves the point that a minimum wage costs jobs. There was a time when these jobs were done by kids, perhaps on the weekend, paid a lower wage, no holiday and no silly employment rights. Perhaps they were even paid cash. The dynamic worked and small businesses like this could operate. It was also a great first job. Sadly now it isn’t worth employing entitlement youngsters at this level of pay. So alas, I don’t need the stress, the business would close, a number of jobs would be lost. Economics is about understanding these dynamics, no vibes. The cost of living is not solved through passing on inflation to the business, it is solved by ending high inflation and creating prosperity. This is what socialists don’t understand, they can’t create prosperity, they can only destroy it.

No one should be surprised but what he left out is that this turbine costs an estimated $50-80 million to build and install. It only produces power 35-45% of the time because wind is intermittent. Its output degrades 12-16% over its 20-25 year lifespan. It requires hundreds of tons of steel, concrete, fiberglass, and rare earth minerals mined largely in China (his favorite country). The other 55-65% of the time you need backup power, which comes from natural gas. And it exists only because of massive government subsidies. A natural gas plant of the same 26MW capacity costs $26-39 million, produces more than double the effective output, runs on demand 24 hours a day regardless of weather, and lasts 30-40 years. Half the price. Double the output. No weather dependency. No subsidies required. But this was never about the environment. If it were, you would care that rare earth mining for wind turbines devastates landscapes across China and Africa, that thousands of birds and bats are killed annually by turbine blades, that the blades themselves are non-recyclable fiberglass rotting in landfills, and that natural gas produces half the emissions of coal with none of these problems. You ignore all of this because environmentalism was never your goal. It is your vehicle. The destination is what it has always been: government control of energy production, which means government control of the economy, which is socialism. Rand identified this decades ago. The green movement is not a scientific movement. It is a political one, and its target is not pollution. It is capitalism.

gpt-image-2 is actually good at memes

The absurdity of central banking never ends. The Bank of England is thinking about raising interest rates because of an energy shock caused by the Strait of Hormuz disruption. This is the wrong tool for the wrong problem. Raising rates is a demand side solution. It works by making borrowing more expensive and cooling an overheated economy. That is not what is happening here. This is supply side inflation. Energy prices are rising because a critical global chokepoint is closed and because the UK has spent a decade destroying domestic energy production in pursuit of net zero vanity projects. By the way, this is the same institution that recently sold government bonds at a massive loss to the taxpayer. These are the people controlling your currency. It is time to return to sound money.

The pound is losing its value faster than your ability to keep up. Every time money is printed out of thin air your purchasing power decreases. It happens silently, relentlessly and most importantly without your consent. You will continue to get poorer year on year and most people will never understand why. They will blame their employer, the cost of living, the government of the day. They will never trace it back to the root cause. The money is broken. It has been broken for a long time. This is the single most important issue of our time and it touches everything... housing, wages, inequality, savings, retirement. There is no economic problem in Britain today that does not have debased currency somewhere in its root cause. Until people understand this, nothing will fundamentally change. Politicians will keep offering sticking plasters and the system will keep extracting wealth from those who can least afford to lose it. Fix the money. Fix everything else.

Just when you thought things couldn’t get any more retarded, the government is telling you what tumble dryers you can and can’t use

New highs for government borrowing rates. 5.7% for 30 year money and over 5% for 10 year money,well above the brief Truss peak that the Chancellor always criticises. This is the extra cost imposed by their lack of control over spending. It will bring higher taxes.

I’m sure we have all now seen the footage of Metropolitan rozzers kicking a suspected terrorist in the head, repeatedly, when he was down. We can all play a part in putting an end to this sort of police brutality. Mainly by not going around stabbing people.

Interesting that @Ed_Miliband deleted his tweet about it being immoral for oil companies to "profit from the crisis" Like the rest of this @UKLabour government, he wants the private sector to put capital at risk, for it to swallow any losses that arise, but to tax into oblivion any profits they make This asymmetry is a major factor in the reluctance of firms to invest in the UK, with some now claiming parts of Africa have a more stable fiscal and regulatory regime than we do Meanwhile Labour wonders why the economy is failing to grow agcc.co.uk/news-article/a…

FYI, Ed Miliband has decreed that the last data point in this chart represents "excess profits" for BP, because reasons... 🤷‍♂️

We might expect this from a student union activist but from the Secretary of State for Energy it’s profoundly disturbing. And where is the Business Secretary’s voice slapping him down? Miliband in any case misunderstands trading profits which are global and are separate from BP’s UK highly taxed UK exploration and extraction business. In fact, we are lucky to have not one but two FTSE100 energy producers whose global profits are ‘booked’ and taxed here benefitting the UK Exchequer. Commodities often have volatile prices. They go up and they go down. How often do you hear arguments for the state to ‘chip in’ to share unexpected losses? It comes the same day as the government allowed the idea of nationwide rent controls to be briefed out and that it forced through the power to direct where your pension funds are invested. Possibly not unrelated is the fact that the UK’s ten year government borrowing cost (gilt yield) closed above 5.0% - its highest since 2008. Truly scary times.