Ian Osburn

This image alone is incredibly powerful.

@Not_the_Bee The level of detail rendered is proportionate to the precision of the observation. Anything more than that is wasted compute.

Isn’t that an expected outcome if the predominant messages are: 1) society is doomed (climate change - the messaging for which has become more alarmist and shrill in the face of a population unwilling to choose discomfort) 2) neither you or your great-great grandchildren are getting out of this debt burden 3) you are not special and your society is of so little value it should be given away (uncontrolled immigration. Note uncontrolled is the important part here) 4) unless you are of immigrant heritage, you have the original sin of empire, judged by modern standards 5) if you can claim a difficultly you can check out as a contributor and society must take care of you ad infinitum 6) all the above subtly exacerbated by geopolitical adversaries and competitors

Unemployment is rising. Employers can't find staff. Both are true. And nearly everyone writing about the UK labour market is missing why. What I've found isn't a dozen separate crises. It's one event, seen through different windows. The productivity people write about productivity. The welfare people write about welfare. The left writes about bosses, the right writes about benefits. Everyone is right about their room, but nobody mentions the building. So I pulled up four chairs. The jobseeker. Charlotte Briggs sent 500 applications in two months. The average employer now receives 140 applications per graduate vacancy, the most since records began in 1991. An algorithm grades you like cattle and sorts you onto one of three lists… shortlist, maybes, rejection. The employee. 964,000 people made ill by work itself, a record. The average office day now costs £47 to attend, up from £21 two years ago. Employers flagged 315,605 jobs for redundancy last year, and February's redundancy notices matched February 2009. The eve of the crash. The employer. A £25bn tax rise on the act of employing someone. Industrial electricity among the most expensive in the developed world. New employment rights arriving in instalments to 2027. The next hire stopped paying for itself, so the next hire isn't happening. The assessed. Sick pay among the least generous in the developed world, yet 2.8 million signed off long-term sick. Because attempting work risks the award you live on. There is no reliable right to try. The proof: the government has proposed creating one. Here's what should unsettle you. Everyone in those chairs is telling the truth. And every one of them is behaving rationally. The root cause isn't benefits, bosses, AI or Gen Z. Those are symptoms. Britain's social contract had one clause... work hard, play by the rules, and the country works for you. That clause is dead. It died somewhere between the financial crisis and the pandemic. Nobody issued a certificate. And people know. They ran the numbers on their own lives. What followed wasn't a strike. It was quieter. Millions of private decisions to stop honouring a deal that had already stopped honouring them. This is Opt-Out Britain. The micro is rational. The macro is ruinous. This is how decline arrives… not as collapse, as optimisation. The full autopsy covers the symptoms, the causes without a villain, and a 10-point menu for making effort pay again. It's long. It's meant to be. Nobody is behaving irrationally. That is the problem. Link below.

@TlatoaniAzteca Si es española, no quiere perdón; quiere darle un porrazo al hombre con las flores

Cuando dejas de migajear se les acaba el show. ¡Bien hecho soldado! 🫡

Torpenhow Hill, England When the Saxons arrived and asked the locals what that hill was called, the Welsh replied, “Pen,” which simply means hill in Welsh. The Saxons, apparently not spotting they’d already been given the full answer, added their own word for hill: tor. So it became Torpen - literally Hill Hill. A few centuries later, the Norse turned up and repeated the exercise, adding haugr, their word for hill. Now it was effectively Torpenhaugr - Hill Hill Hill. Then the English arrived, looked at the whole thing, shrugged, and added “Hill” on the end for good measure. Thus we ended up with Torpenhow Hill: Hill Hill Hill Hill. It’s comforting to know that for over a thousand years, successive generations have been independently deciding that the previous lot hadn’t made it quite clear enough that it was, in fact, a hill. Language is magnificent. Humans… less so.🤷🏻‍♂️🤣

“Until August 1914 a sensible, law-abiding Englishman could pass through life and hardly notice the existence of the state, beyond the post office and the policeman. He could live where he liked and as he liked. He had no official number or identity card. He could travel abroad or leave his country for ever without a passport or any sort of official permission. He could exchange his money for any other currency without restriction or limit. He could buy goods from any country in the world on the same terms as he bought goods at home. For that matter, a foreigner could spend his life in this country without permit and without informing the police. Unlike the countries of the European continent, the state did not require its citizens to perform military service. An Englishman could enlist, if he chose, in the regular army, the navy, or the territorials. He could also ignore, if he chose, the demands of national defence. Substantial householders were occasionally called on for jury service. Otherwise, only those helped the state, who wished to do so. The Englishman paid taxes on a modest scale: nearly £200 million in 1913-14, or rather less than 8 per cent of the national income. The state intervened to prevent the citizen from eating adulterated food or contracting certain infectious diseases. It imposed safety rules in factories, and prevented women, and adult males in some industries, from working excessive hours. The state saw to it that children received education up to the age of 13. Since 1 January 1909, it provided a meagre pension for the needy over the age of 70. Since 1911, it helped to insure certain classes of workers against sickness and unemployment. This tendency towards more state action was increasing. Expenditure on the social services had roughly doubled since the Liberals took office in 1905. Still, broadly speaking, the state acted only to help those who could not help themselves. It left the adult citizen alone.” A. J. P. Taylor’s English History, 1914-1945. With thanks to the @iealondon newsletter for highlighting this in yesterday's email.

A previous comment on here stated that the founding father of modern Singapore, a defence barrister, ended jury trials in that country because he had seen (and taken advantage of) juries willing to let off suspects on ethnic in-group grounds, in multi ethnic Singapore. If that is a strong trait that we haven’t worked to mitigate (I am generally very pro education on these matters, not, for example, abolishing jury trials which the executive would love to do), we may see a surprising result from the jury compared to that suggested by this footage

@HJB_News__ Any jury will see: 1. Instead of arresting the attackers she aims for the victim; 2. She blindsided the victim, violently pushed him against the shutters and, in the dark, he reacted by defending himself against this new attacker. When he realised, he didn’t continue. Bad police

Cody Harper the 20 years old who was attacked by 3 men and arrested is now due in court. He was taken to Perry Barr police station and left in the cells until the following day. While in there he asked for water and some food which he didn't receive until towards the end of his stay. The police told him he wouldn't be charged for the fight (the one where he was attacked) but he will be charged with assaulting an emergency worker. He will be at Birmingham magistrates court on the 23rd July.

The big fallacy here (and believed by many Europeans) is implying we need degrowth to fix climate change But degrowth is likely just masked foreign sabotage of our societies to make us poor and dumb You can install AC + fix climate change + avoid tens of thousands of Europeans every year dying from heat in other ways like: - changing to clean energy sources: solar, wind, batteries and nuclear (yes nuclear!), so the AC you use comes from clean energy - carbon sequestration or similar tech to remove the emissions already out there - improved production technologies so you emit less or no emissions None of that means you do not need AC, and none of that means you need less GDP growth, that's a psyop!

Reddit is the most left wing social media platform, bar none. Twitter is among the most balanced. Guess which one the next Prime Minister is picking and choosing questions from, and which one government ministers are abandoning?

The most stunningly successful thing about the American experiment is that in the late 1700s, the thirteen colonies were hardly valuable at all. They had no known great natural resources, they were far from a jewel in the crown of the British Empire. The British were far more desperate to keep the profitable sugar islands than the thirteen colonies. That’s why upon the entry of the French to the war, peace was sought soon - and the priority was to keep the profitable Caribbean and control of the seas. In seeking peace, Britain was thinking with its treasury not its heart. War is expensive. And while losing the thirteen colonies was embarrassing, it was not the kind of hit to the British economy that losing other colonies would have represented. In stark contrast to the relatively barren North America, the Spanish Empire in South America had vast obvious natural resources. Spain extracted gold. But it never built anything to last. The United States of America proved what far too many countries are yet to understand today. The wealth of a nation is not in its natural resources. It is not fixed. The world is not zero sum. America became the wealthiest country on the face of the planet, not thanks to its soil - but thanks to the men who stood on it. The institutions they built - the English liberties they codified - created the basis for a stable, prosperous, market economy. Freedom under law. It’s thanks to the systems of government the founders built that the United States became what it is today. Were any other group of people - with any other ideas about how a society should be structured - to settle that land, America would be like any other country today. But it isn’t. And that’s thanks to the enlightened ideas of its founding. Happy Treason Day, cousins. 🇬🇧🇺🇸

@ce_pickles I was previously unaware of your work. Now having been made aware of it, hats off to this great fundamental effort to, and I choose my words carefully, save Britain. It brings hope for the future in a country currently bereft of it

There'll be a lot of civil servants champing at the bit to see a radically reformed system The new Cab Sec is right to grasp this moment Though she shouldn't wait to conclude the Review to get cracking... & we have plenty of ideas to get her started x.com/jo3hill/status…

Yesterday the PM laid a written ministerial statement which *could* have huge implications for the functioning of the British State. It's largely gone under the radar, but I think it's pretty exciting... 🧵

@RollingHedge But this is assuming all goes through as income tax. As I understand it, one of the main arguments for entrepreneurs relief to be first reduced then abolished and IHT introduced on farmland is both were 2 are abused by high earners, usually in The City, to avoid tax

🤣 no. What nonsense. Ok quick myth bust: the very idea that a cleaner pays a higher rate of tax than a City broker is utter drivel and collapses the second you look at wages, ready? Here we go: Cleaner: £26,637: 14.8%, call it 15p Junior broker: £75,000: 27.9%, 28p Senior broker / VP: £150,000: 39.1%, 39p Director/SVP: £300,000: 43.1%, 43p Managing director £500,000: 44.6%, 45p Partner: £1,000,000: 45.8%, 46p The more you earn, the bigger the slice off the top. That is the system working exactly as designed. And no, before you ask - sadly/painfully enough, bonuses do not magically skip this. A bonus or a commission is taxed exactly like your salary. £60k base plus £90k bonus lands in the same place as a flat £150k a year base. There is no magic loophole on the trading floor. Where people tie themselves in knots is around CGT. Sell an asset at a profit and the rate is lower, around 22p, with no NI on top. Looks like a stitch up on first glance. You only pay it when you actually sell. It is money you put at risk with no promise you get it back, plus it often accounts for years of patient growth getting nailed in the same tax year. Even carry (carried interest), the private equity perk everyone loves to hate, used to be the actual gap. Not any more me ol’ china… From April it got hauled up to about 34p, income tax rates with a small discount for the years the money is locked up. That is more than the trader on £75k and not far off the VP on £150k. The famous loophole lefties always want on about has basically been shut but it’s inconvenient for them to admit it. If you’re a Trade Unionist, then it is your dogmatic MO to shit on the guy on the trading or broking desk (hi), but my misinformed friend @nowak_paul here should know the reality (and I’m shocked none of the so called “Think Tanks” around him have armed him with the facts - I’m doing my “shocked” face right now): that city professional (hi again) is already one of the most heavily taxed people in the country. You and your members are so welcome, Paul. This lesson was free. But. If you keep needing to be educated, then I might have to start charging you -only - the state keeps taxing me more every year and the cost of living is only going one way. Ouch.

“You can’t have security and roads because we’ve got to protect welfare” The irony is being in work is associated with improving self-esteem, reduced anxiety and reduced depression. It is an answer to mental health issues rather than paying those affected to stay at home and suffer

Bloody hell.

As a teenager reading about the decline of the Ottoman and Habsburg empires, I couldn't understand why they mostly just let it happen. Why not reform urgently, slash the bureaucracy, race to adopt the new technologies? Much less confused these days.

Bobo pero mi gusta

Of all the dumb shit this country has going on this is one of the dumbest. Yeah, male bin men get paid more than female teaching assistants. The women could have applied to collect bins but didn't want to be up at 5am to lug a thousand smelly bins. Absolutely barmy.

Travel back with me 120 years to the Edwardian summer of 1906. I have cleaned-up this remarkable time capsule of British holidaymakers on Brighton beach in August 1906. The photo is an incredibly rare example of genuine colour Edwardian photos in England. It pre-dates the commercial release of Autochromes and was taken using a 3-filter glass-plate process invented by the Swiss photographer Otto Pfenninger, who had settled to live in the Sussex seaside town. His invention was a tri-colour, single exposure camera, and this remarkable image from 1906 is not colourised.

Oh for fuck’s sake give it a rest… Brexit was FACTUALLY a de minimis footnote (I voted remain in 2016 so don’t even start…) when compared with a raft of the worst policy decisions imaginable since the end of WW2 across virtually all policy areas, by fuckwit politicians… To name some of the biggest offenders: - Most expensive energy in the developed world fuelling inflation across every good and service going - and net zero cultish insanity crippling our economy; we now make virgin steel only via emergency nationalisation in all but name - mainly because windmills and solar don’t produce the joules to produce concrete or steel, to build stuff - Shuttering North Sea oil whilst buying the same stuff from the Norwegians who banked the oil: two trillion in the tank, three hundred grand a head, a quarter of the budget paid forever - PFI. Blair and Brown fancied hospitals that didn’t trouble the books, so they put them on tick with loan sharks. £60b of buildings, £300b out the door, NHS still paying through the nose for a car park and a leaky roof. - Tories borrowed the best part of £400bn at 0%, the cheapest money in three hundred years, and what have we got for it? Furlough, a fortune in PPE that didn’t work, and ~£20b handed to chancers with fake ltd co’s. Nothing built. Nothing that pays you back. The lot, gone. And here’s the one nobody says out loud… Money was free. Risk free. Rates at zero for the best part of a fucking decade. If a govt or their perm secs had any sense that was the moment to issue a 30y infra bond and build the grid, the reactors, the track, the housing, lock the cost in at basically nothing and let it pay for itself for two generations. Norway would’ve had it done by lunch. We didn’t issue a penny of it. Now the long end’s at 5.5 and the door’s now bolted shut. We had the cheapest money in history and spaffed it all. - Capital markets that don’t work since Blair and Brown’s various legislative and regulatory changes, making pension fund allocations lower going into British companies, and making it harder and more costly to raise capital to grow and keep businesses here paying taxes and employing people - the collective cost of this to British households is conservatively estimated to be around £20trillion (per @andyroocraig’s figures) and countries that were literally communist within living memory are on track to overtake us this decade, on the IMF’s own numbers. Oh, and Mississippi HAS already overtaken us on GDP per capita basis (they are the butt of all poverty jokes in the US) - Brown flogged 395 tonnes of gold, over half the national reserve, in 17 auctions between 1999 and 2002, at about $275 an ounce, near a twenty-year structural low. They call it “Brown’s Bottom” for a reason. Pocketed $3.5b but I t’d be worth around $52b today. So that socialist genius cleared the lot at the bottom of the market and torched the thick end of £40b in one decision (because he like many politicians since the 90s is a retard with no real world understanding) - P90/P10 wage compression under social democracy is demonstrably worse than even the Soviets managed under Gosplan ffs - Selling off and sweating various other national assets to fund our absurd debt borrowing pile that has mostly been spaffed up the wall on zero return or loss making initiatives / welfare socialism etc - Series of the worst trade deals imaginable (pre and post Brexit) - Too much of people’s money tied up in the resi property Ponzi scheme doing nothing (other than now: losing value in realtime) - Planning laws that stop anyone building infrastructure on housing I could go on… Plus we have rising long yields now, which are (TL;DR) the price of having destroyed your own structural buyer base and then issuing into the gap while the central bank sells on top. Brexit doesn’t appear anywhere in that mechanism either. So, this creepy obsession you have with Brexit is weird, lame and entirely worn out. Bin. 🚮

I wonder which one was the hairdryer for?

From a very credible Labour source: - Wes Streeting promised the Chancellorship for not running. - Capital gains raised to match income tax. Possible exit tax. - Economic focus: devolution, plus state ownership of cost-of-living essentials (energy, water, transport). - Nothing on AI or tech, bar higher capital gains and an EIS/SEIS-style relief for backing British businesses. (Spoiler: startups now incorporate in Delaware and raise on SAFEs. I’ve done 60+ angel investments; only two were eligible.) Andy and Wes don’t seem to grasp that tech has been the core engine of growth for 20 years, and AI will only accelerate that. So why would any founder build here? How does the UK compete with the US and China on AI? Where does growth actually come from? The world economy is changing fast, and we need to be ready to thrive in it, not just survive. I really hope this admin appoints some figures who actually get what’s happening. Losing business support early, from a disastrous first budget, was the beginning of the end for Starmer.