grumpyman

@cmclymer Is that the clutching at straws maneuver?

"How do you explain the lack of women among top chess players? Men just have natural ability in this area. That's not sexist to point out." No. That's not the case at all. And you're not gonna like the actual reason for the lack of women among top chess players. Every professional chess player has spent years constantly studying, playing, and traveling. By the time a player reaches the top tier of the chess world, it's pretty much what they've been doing most of their waking hours for many years. There's not a lot of time for much else. And who does the bulk of all caregiving in society? Women. Mothers. Sisters. Daughters. Being a professional chess player isn't incompatible with caregiving, per se, but it's definitely not easy finding a balance that works. Most men don't worry about this. Most women absolutely worry about this. There are male pro chess players who are adept caregivers and find a balance that works, but it's just not a problem men in chess have to deal with on the sheer scale of how women must negotiate that challenge. Women are few among top chess players because they don't benefit from social structures that allow the time and commitment over a long period to reach that level. It really is that simple. It's not about intelligence or aptitude. It's about gender norms in family and society not fitting well with the astonishing commitment required for top level competitive chess. Now you know.

@_GiveUsAQuid Not with the traffic in London!

@2147mill 5% is on the high side. Mine is much lower. It has been more like 3%. Cost to rent my house is more like £1500 per month.

The average UK mortgage is £200,000 at 5% over 25 years. Total repayment? £350,000. You borrow £200K and pay back £350K. £150,000 straight to the bank. For nothing. Then you pay to fix up the house. Stuff breaks. You pay insurance monthly. Fees when/if you sell the property. And we act like renting is throwing money away. There is a strong argument for renting.

@KeruboSk Oh brother...

My cousin’s wife got pregnant while he was working abroad. The math wasn’t mathing, but he forced himself to trust her. When the baby was born, it looked exactly like him. Same face. Same everything. Everyone told him to let it go. But he couldn’t sleep. So he did a DNA test in secret. 0%. Now he stares at that baby every day, wondering how someone who isn’t his… looks more like him than he does.

@Mark70638784651 @d1lak @DaleVince @grok The treasury is actually "us" , the people of the UK. It's in theory our oil and so the oil drillers are paying us for it. Oil companies do well out of the deal.

@d1lak @DaleVince @grok So they invest, at no Cost to the taxpayer and do all the work? Meanwhile the Treasury takes the vast majority of the revenue for doing next to nothing? Sounds like a Win for UK plc…

Ratcliffe is incoherent - all of the oil and gas we produce here in Britain is sold at the global market price. No amount of oil produced here can in that case save us a single penny. Importing fossil fuels does not mean we pay more. Drilling in the north sea will take years to deliver globally priced fossil fuels and Rosebank will cost nearly £3 Bn in tax payer subsidies to it’s Norwegian owners - and….none of the oil will land here in Britain. So what sense is Ratcliffe making here, other than to shareholders in Rosebank and other oil companies. This is another fossil fuel crisis and we can’t solve it or help ourselves at all - by pouring more oil onto it. telegraph.co.uk/business/2026/…

@KathrynPorter26 @iammockatory @jonburkeUK Can't you just GPS lock it?

@iammockatory @jonburkeUK They don't form the grid. They can support it but you need synchronous generators to set up the waveform in the first place

U.K electricity is pegged to the wholesale price of gas. You’d think the Shadow Energy Secretary would know this? If you cared, you’d break the link between gas prices and renewables and campaign to prevent 40% private profits on generation across the board. But you won’t.

@Houseofyogi 201 billion in share buy backs. Share holders wanted money now and we're not prepared to support investment for the long term. Didn't want to take a risk. They just play it safe.

Don't be IBM and fumble an 18yr head start on AI IBM was the most valuable company on Earth. Invented the hard drive. The PC. The floppy disk. The ATM. DRAM. SQL. The barcode. Most US patents 29 years straight. 405,000 employees. 70% mainframe market share. Today: $231 billion. 67th in the world. Anthropic. Founded 2021. Four years old. $380 billion. Every piece of the bag was fumbled... Invented the PC. Sold to Lenovo: $1.75 billion. Invented the hard drive. Sold to Hitachi: $2 billion. Server business. Sold to Lenovo. Basically nothing. Now the chips. This is pure comedy. IBM was the largest semiconductor manufacturer on Earth. Fabs in New York. Fabs in Vermont. 16,000 patents. They PAID GlobalFoundries $1.5 billion cash to take it. Gave away the factories. Gave away the patents. $4.7 billion write-down. IBM had American fabs. They paid to close them. And the same Democrats who scream about chips going overseas are the ones whose policies made it too expensive to build here. We wouldn't have TSMC/Taiwan issues today. Decisions have consequences. TSMC: $700 billion. Nvidia: $5 trillion. IBM paid to exit chips right before chips became the most valuable industry on Earth. Incredible timing. Deep Blue beats Kasparov. Live television. First machine to outthink a human world champion. IBM owned AI. Not as a buzzword. As a fact. On camera. In front of the whole planet. OpenAI did not exist for another 18 years. Anthropic for another 24. Nvidia was making cards so teenagers could play Halo. Google was two grad students sharing a dorm room. IBM had an 18-year head start on the entire AI industry. What did they do with it. They dismantled Deep Blue. Put it in a museum. Same mentality as every socialist (cough dems) who wants to regulate AI before it ships. Celebrate the breakthrough. Kill the follow-through. Watson wins Jeopardy. Destroys the two greatest players alive on national TV. Most famous AI brand on the planet. IBM spends billions on Watson Health. AI that cures cancer. Their engineers flagged it unsafe. Instead of fixing it they sold it for scraps. Then killed the brand entirely. Loser mentality. IBM Research. Decades of NLP work. The compute. The talent. The CEO looks at LLMs and says "no thanks." Two years later ChatGPT launches. 100 million users in two months. The entire economy reorganizes around the exact technology IBM looked at and said nah. That is like having Google's algorithm in 1997 and deciding to build a phonebook. The suits and the consultants took over. Same thing that kills every city, every agency, every institution that picks socialism over competition. $201 billion in buybacks over 25 years. More on buybacks than CAPEX. They could have funded every AI lab on Earth with that money. Instead they bought their own stock while the stock went down. Revenue down 22 straight quarters. Nobody fired. Name another job where you lose $95 billion in market cap and get a raise. Actually don't. That job only exists at IBM and in Congress. Buffett bought $12 billion in IBM. The greatest investor alive. Held six years. Dumped it on CNBC. "I was wrong." Put the money in Apple. Best investment in Berkshire history. They had the patents. The labs. The engineers. The brand. An 18-year head start on AI. Replaced the builders with bureaucrats. Chose buybacks over R&D. Chose administration over competition. Lost everything. Now look at who wants to run the same playbook on the AI economy. Bernie wants data center moratoriums. Tax the builders before they finish building. Ro Khanna represents $18 trillion in Silicon Valley market cap. Apple. Nvidia. Google. His district built AI. He just held a Stanford town hall with Bernie called "Who Controls AI: The Oligarchs or The People." Wants to tax unrealized gains. Pause data centers. Put unions on AI boards. Redistribute wealth that hasn't been created yet. His own district is trying to primary him. Not because he's too progressive. Because he's trying to kneecap the industry that made his district the most valuable zip code on Earth. That is IBM energy. Tax the engineers. Slow the builders. Add a committee. Wonder why nothing works. Gavin ran California from a $97 billion surplus into a $68 billion deficit. Lost 789 companies. Tesla. SpaceX. Oracle. Chevron. 200,000 people leaving per year. And he thinks he should have a say in how AI gets built nationally. The guy who can't keep In-N-Out Burger in California wants to regulate the most important technology since electricity. These aren't hypotheticals. This is the IBM playbook in real time. Replace engineers with regulators. Replace competition with committees. Replace building with administrating. And act shocked when the talent leaves and the lead disappears. IBM went from first to 67th. 1.43% a year for 28 years. A savings account beat that. Don't let them do it to America. Name a bigger fumble. I'll wait.

@AlanFoum @dontdelay Yes. No one knows how long they will live. They keep a big stash until they die.

@dontdelay Why should the flow of money from grandparents stop if IHT is abolished? The intergenerational aid is surely not all due to IHT avoidance? Would Seniors just hoard the money like Smaug the dragon rather than help their grandkids pay for university?

I understand the desire to abolish inheritance tax And as someone who manages a lot of investments for a lot pensioners if they’re no longer worried about inheritance tax, we’re likely to manage more money for more time But be careful what you wish for If the flow of money from parents and grandparents to their children and grandchildren stops, a lot of property purchases wouldn’t go ahead. A lot of spending would no longer happen.

@LeeHurstComic @Nathan8hpp No. Weathly people save or invest. They spend more to get nice things but don't need to spend all their income to get these things.

@Nathan8hpp No doubt, but they’ll spend it and drive the economy which creates jobs.

IDEA How about we set a legal, simplified tax rate. 15% for everyone on all their income. No personal allowance. Just a flat rate of 15%. Then… The government can only spend that much. No more. It has to live within its means. How about that? Maybe we can the. pay off the debt and then cut the 15% rate further. Sounds like a plan to ne.

@BladeoftheS They should be called the fantasy party really.

The Green Party have proposed a policy where the highest paid person in a company could only earn 10x as much as the lowest, currently the ratio is over 1000x in some companies. Do you agree?

@lugaricano @mattyglesias If you believe that you need to give up your post. There are many more stupid economic policies. Look to current government for examples.

The UK triple lock is the singlest stupidest policy in the entire Western world, and the most damaging to the future of a country. Of course, it is also untouchable and almost undiscussed in the UK press. @mattyglesias does a big favour to the UK public here.

@RyanMullarkey1 @thatginamiller @Telegraph Made up statistic.

@thatginamiller @Telegraph 80% of current degrees are misold because they are pointless

Women will spend 35 years repaying #studentloans. Men? 28. We encourage more women into university, sold them the same loan product, knowing they don’t have the same ability to repay. In any other consumer environment, this would be mis-selling. I said it to the @Telegraph Money today. I’m say it here too. 📰 Telegraph article: telegraph.co.uk/money/consumer… Full analysis 👇 moneyshe.com/wp-content/upl… @MoneyShe_

@PJamieson92506 @anon_opin If UBI was higher than the current government pension it would be like an early retirement fund. Once you have paid off your mortgage the incentive to work decreases. I would take the UBI 60 please.

@anon_opin Anyone who argues against UBI doesn’t understand Maslows hierarchy of needs. Most people won’t just sit idle on the free money, it will actually allow more people freedom to innovate.

As yet another UBI trial rolls past showing that it works really well, it's hard not to conclude that the main reason nobody adopts it is because bad employers don't want to give up their leverage over the desperate and poor to work in shit conditions for pittance.

@anon_opin It might work ok when you run a trial with unemployed people but if it were to make it universal to all then there would be a massive number of people suddenly ditching boring, low paid jobs. It would collapse the economy.

@hbinfopeter @paullewismoney Not true. Most university courses are actually useful to industry. Universities work hard to make sure their courses are relevant. It's a major selling point. Sure students could do apprenticeship degree type learning but not many companies are actually prepared to support this.

@paullewismoney Does University matter? yes for a few vital courses but most of them are pointless...apart from the social side and getting freedom from home. Our oldest is a hard worker and got a good degree and then moved back in. Her huge student debt has destroyed her ambition.

It’s psychologically horrible to have such a debt. But it doesn’t matter. She’ll never pay off her loan. She’ll pay extra 9% income tax above Plan 2 threshold, £29,385 from April, which will mean less disposable income, but after 30 years, however massive, debt will disappear.

@Chris_Gilmour @paullewismoney Students were sold a lie. It will be fine they were told. There was no other option they were told. When you are young and nieve you get conned easily.

@paullewismoney Why take on a debt like this from a degree that will never pay for itself? If she can't pay off the cost of the degree within a decade then it's a waste of everyone's time & money.

@paullewismoney People saying don't worry the debt is written off after 30 years forget that over 30 years an average university graduate could end up paying over a £100k back before the loan is written off.

@Feargal_Sharkey We need to stop fining these companies £ as this is just paid for by the customers. We need to start fining a % of their total shares. If they continue they lose control of the companies.

@scottsantens Wow. One person got a job. If you gave me £1290 for free, I might work a few days but not in the summer when I can play golf. 😁

Love this experience by one of the basic income pilot participants in Wales. They got £1,290 a month after tax for two years (about $1,862/mo), and at first they planned to not get a job, but then after getting into the pilot, they changed their mind, because why not do more to get more money?

@RoyalLondonHelp Is your website broken ? Why is there no way to check ? I phone you and have to listen to so many options, none of which lead to someone who can answer a simple question like this !!! then I just got cut off !! why can you provide a simple email service!!