DeepValueInvestments

@2147mill 1k, if property is owned, you can move abroad / there isn’t much I want to do…

What number is financial freedom to you? I think for me if I can clear £2k p/m from an investment, that opens up so many options and would likely mean work would become “optional” or at least part time.

@Th_Angelopoulos Intelligent post. Better simplified, if you need to be employed to survive you are working class. Middle class those with some assets who work is more optional for. Upper class those who don’t need to work.

A rant on who the fuck is (or isn't) working class: The way “working class” and “middle class” get flung around in UK politics and media has become completely detached from reality. It’s no longer about material conditions. Ownership, assets, debt, economic power. It’s now pure cultural vibes: what you eat, how you speak, whether you like hummus or watch Love Island. This isn’t analysis. It’s a rhetorical weapon Let’s get back to the structural, materialist root. Class has always been about your relationship to the means of production and the security that gives you. Do you own assets that generate wealth even when you’re not working? Can you weather a recession without losing everything? Do you pass on real capital (a paid-off house, a business, savings) to your kids? That’s class. Not your Spotify playlist or your accent. Sure, cultural capital exists. Tastes, education, social networks, the “right” cultural signals. It’s real and it matters. But on its own it is insufficient to produce meaningful class politics. Your class is not determined by whether you shop in Waitrose or M&S, whether your accent is perceived as middle class, if you have a uni degree, or if you play the harp. Class is first and foremost a relationship of material conditions and proximity to owning wealth, assets, or the means of production. Of course class produces culture, and perceived culture can sometimes prop someone up or hold them back, but vibes do not define your structural position. The vibes don’t pay the mortgage. Even the more “official” metrics we lean on are flawed. Take the old ABC1 / C2DE social grades (still widely used in polling, media, and politics as shorthand for middle vs working class). These were never designed to measure class. They’re a 1950s marketing tool based almost entirely on the occupation of the “chief income earner.” Managerial or professional roles get you ABC1. Skilled manual gets you C2. They ignore wealth, housing equity, business assets, savings, debt, and inheritance. A highly educated renter scraping by gets labelled “middle class.” A debt-free small business owner with a paid-off home gets slotted as “working class.” The metric flattens real material differences. Yet today the labels are applied almost entirely on those aesthetics and these outdated occupational buckets. A mid-30s couple in London, Bristol, Birmingham, Edinburgh or other regional cities, both on 40k, paying a massive mortgage or high rent, no inheritance, eating hummus and shopping at Waitrose on a budget, they get called “middle class” and told they’re privileged. Meanwhile a couple in their 50s running a small plumbing business or a chippy, living in an ex-council house they bought for peanuts decades ago, with zero mortgage and built-up equity, they get called “working class” and held up as the authentic voice of the people. One is one missed promotion or interest-rate hike from disaster. The other has real material security. But the second gets the political halo. This misapplication isn’t harmless pedantry. It’s now the central trick in British political discourse. People whose material conditions are actually precarious, high combined incomes but negative net wealth, renting in expensive cities, no assets to fall back on, routinely get stigmatised as “middle class” or “elite.” The familiar tropes of “champagne socialists” and “luxury beliefs” get thrown at them the moment they raise practical objections about housing costs, tax cuts for the rich, interest rates or policy failures. Even though they rely entirely on their salaries with zero capital buffer, they’re painted as out-of-touch affluent voices. Conversely, those with real material security, paid-off homes, business ownership, savings, managerial control over their own capital, get elevated as the “authentic working class.” This lends them unearned moral and political weight, even when their lived experience is far more stable than the people they’re contrasted against.

@BillAckman @X Disagree, ultimately nephew said what he said. That has a liability, ridiculous but it’s one to live and learn from.

I am reaching out to the @X community for advice with the likely risk of sharing TMI. I have been sufficiently upset about the whole matter that I have lost sleep thinking about it and I am hoping that this post will enable me to get this matter off my chest. By way of background, I started a family office called TABLE about 15 years ago and hired a friend who had previously managed a family office, and years earlier, had been my personal accountant. She is someone that I trusted implicitly and consider to be a good person. The office started small, but over the last decade, the number of personnel and the cost of the office grew massively. The growth was entirely on the operational side as the investment team has remained tiny. While my investment portfolio grew substantially, the investments I had made were almost entirely passive and TABLE simply needed to account for them and meet capital calls as they came in. While TABLE purchased additional software and other systems that were supposed to improve productivity, the team kept increasing in size at a rapid rate, and the expenses continued to grow even faster. While I would periodically question the growing expenses and high staff turnover, I stayed uninvolved with the office other than a once-a-year meeting when I briefly reviewed the operations and the financials and determined bonus compensation for the President and the CFO. I spent no time with any of the other employees or the operations. The whole idea behind TABLE was that it would handle everything other than my day job so that I would have more time for my job and my family. Over the last six years, expenses ballooned even further, employee turnover accelerated, and I became concerned that all was not well at TABLE. It was time for me to take a look at what was going on. Nearly four years ago, I recruited my nephew who had recently graduated from Harvard and put him to work at Bremont, a British watchmaker, one of my only active personal investments to figure out the issues at the company and ultimately assist in executing a turnaround. He did a superb job. When he returned from the UK late last year after a few years at Bremont, I asked him to help me figure out what was going on with TABLE. When I explained to TABLE’s president what he would be doing, she became incredibly defensive, which naturally made me more concerned. My nephew went to work by first meeting with each employee to understand their roles at the company and to learn from them what ideas they had on how things could be improved. He got an earful. Our first step in helping to turn around TABLE was a reduction in force including the president and about a third of the team, retaining excellent talent that had been desperate for new leadership. Now here is where I need your advice. All but one of the employees who were terminated acted professionally and were gracious on the way out (excluding the president who had a notice period in her contract, is currently still being paid, and with whom I have not yet had a discussion). The highest compensated terminated employee other than the president, an in-house lawyer (let’s call her Ronda), told us that three months of severance was not enough and demanded two years’ severance despite having worked at the company for only two and one half years. When I learned of Ronda's request for severance, I offered to speak with her to understand what she was thinking, but she refused to do so. A few days ago, we received a threatening letter from a Silicon Valley law firm. In the letter, Ronda’s counsel suggests that her termination is part of longstanding issues of ‘harassment and gender discrimination’ – an interesting claim in light of the fact that Ronda was in charge of workplace compliance – and that her termination was due to: “unlawful, retaliatory, and harmful conduct directed towards her. Both [Ronda] and I [Ronda’s lawyer] have spoken with you about [Ronda’s] view of what a reasonable resolution would include given the circumstances. Thus far, TABLE has refused to provide any substantive response. This letter provides the last opportunity to reach a satisfactory agreement. If we cannot do so, [Ronda] will seek all appropriate relief in a court of competent jurisdiction.” The letter goes on to explain the basis for the “unsafe work environment” claim at TABLE: “In early 2026, Pershing Square’s founder Bill Ackman installed his nephew in an unidentified role at TABLE, Ackman’s family office. [His nephew]—whose only work experience had been for TABLE where he was seconded abroad for the last four years to a UK watch company held by Ackman—began appearing at TABLE’s offices and conducting interviews of employees without a clear explanation of his role or the purposes of these interviews. During this period, he made a series of inappropriate and genderbased [sic] comments to multiple employees that created an unsafe work environment. Among other things, [his nephew] made remarks about female employees’ ages (“Tell me you are nowhere near 40”), physical appearance (“Your body does not look like you have kids”), as well as intrusive questions about family planning and sexual orientation (“Who carried your son? Who will carry your next child?”). These incidents were reported to senior leadership at TABLE and Pershing Square. Rather than being addressed appropriately, the response from senior management reflected, at best, willful blindness to the inappropriateness of [his nephew]’s remarks and, at worst, tacit endorsement.” The above allegations about my nephew had previously been brought to my attention by TABLE’s president when they occurred. When I learned of them, I told the president that I would speak to him directly and encouraged her to arrange for him to get workplace sensitivity training. The president assured me that she would do so. When I spoke to my nephew, he explained what he actually had said and how his actual remarks had been received, not at all as alleged in the legal letter from Ronda’s counsel. I have also spoken to others at the lunch table who confirmed his description of the facts. In any case, he meant no harm, was simply trying to build rapport with other employees, and no one, as far as I understand, was offended. Ironically, Ronda claims in her legal letter that TABLE didn’t take HR compliance seriously, yet Ronda was in charge of HR compliance at TABLE and the person who gave my nephew his workplace sensitivity training after the alleged incidents. In any case, Ronda, as head of compliance, should have kept a record or raised an alarm if indeed there was pervasive harassment or other such problems at the company, and there is no evidence whatsoever that this is true. So why does Ronda believe she can get me to pay her nearly $2 million, i.e., two years of severance, nearly one year of severance for each of her years at the company? Well, here is where some more background would be helpful. Over the last two months, I have been consumed with a major family medical issue – one of my older daughters had a massive brain hemorrhage on February 5th and has since been making progress on her recovery – and I am in the midst of a major transaction for my company which I am executing from a hospital room office next to her . While the latter business matter is publicly known, the details of my daughter’s situation are only known to Ronda because of her role at our family office. Now, let’s get back to the subject at hand. Unfortunately, while New York and many other states have employment-at-will, there has emerged an industry of lawyers who make a living from bringing fake gender, race, LGBTQ and other discrimination employment claims in order to extract larger severance payments for terminated employees, and it needs to stop. The fake claim system succeeds because it costs little to have a lawyer send a threatening letter and nearly all of the lawyers in this field work on contingency so there is no or minimal cash cost to bring a claim. And inevitably, nearly 100% of these claims are settled because the public relations and legal costs of defending them exceed the dollar cost of the settlement. The claims are nearly always settled with a confidentiality agreement where the employee who asserts the fake claims remains anonymous and as a result, there is no reputational cost to bringing false claims. The consequences of this sleazy system (let’s call it ‘the System’) are the increased costs of doing business which is a tax on the economy and society. There are other more serious problems due to the System. Unfortunately, the existence of an industry of plaintiff firms and terminated employees willing to make these claims makes it riskier for companies to hire employees from a protected class, i.e., LGBTQ, seniors, women, people of color etc. because it is that much more reputationally damaging and expensive to be accused of racism, sexism, and/or intolerance for sexual diversity than for firing a white male as juries generally have less sympathy for white males. The System therefore increases the risk of discrimination rather than reducing it, and the people bringing these fake claims are thereby causing enormous harm to the other members of these protected classes. So what happened here? Ronda was vastly overpaid and overqualified for the job that she did at TABLE. She was paid $1.05 million plus benefits last year for her work which was largely comprised of filling out subscription agreements and overseeing an outside law firm on closing passive investments in funds and in private and venture stage companies, some compliance work, and managing the office move from one office to another. She had a very good gig as she was highly paid, only had to go into the office three days a week, and could work from anywhere during the summer. Once my nephew showed up and started to investigate what was going on, she likely concluded that there was a reasonable possibility she would be terminated, as her job was in the too-easy-and-to-good-to-be-true category. The problem was that she was not in a protected class due to her race, age or sexual identity so she had to construct the basis for a claim. While she is female and could in theory bring a gender-based discrimination claim, she reported to the president who is female and to whom she is very close, which makes it difficult for her to bring a harassment claim against her former boss. When my nephew complimented a TABLE employee at lunch about how young she looked – in response to saying she was going to her 40-year-old sister’s birthday party, he said ‘she must be your older sister’ – Ronda immediately reported it to our external HR lawyer. She thereby began building her case. The other problem for Ronda bringing a claim is that she was terminated alongside 30% of other TABLE employees as part of a restructuring so it is very difficult for her to say that she was targeted in her termination or was retaliated against. TABLE is now hiring an external fractional general counsel as that is all the company needs to process the relatively limited amount of legal work we do internally. In short, Ronda was eminently qualified and capable and did her job. She was just too much horsepower for what is largely an administrative legal role so she had to come up with something else to bring a claim. Now Ronda knew I was a good target and it was a good time to bring a claim against me. She also knew that I was under a lot of pressure because on March 4th when Ronda was terminated, my daughter had not yet emerged from consciousness, she was not yet breathing on her own, and my daughter and we were fighting for her life. I was and remain deeply engaged in her recovery while at the same time I was working on finishing the closing for the private placement round for my upcoming IPO. Ronda also knew that publicity about supposed gender discrimination and a “hostile and unsafe work environment” are not things that a CEO of a company about to go public wants to have released into the media. And she may have thought that the nearly $2 million she was asking for would be considered small in the context of the reputational damage a lawsuit could cause, regardless of the fact that two years of severance was an absurd amount for an employee who had only worked at TABLE for 30 months. She also likely considered that I wouldn’t want to embarrass my nephew by dragging him into the klieg lights when her claims emerged publicly. So, in summary, game theory would say that I would certainly settle this case, for why would I risk negative publicity at a time when I was preparing our company to go public and also risk embarrassing my nephew. Notably, she hired a Silicon Valley law firm, rather than a typical NY employment firm. This struck me as interesting as her husband works for one of the most prominent Silicon Valley venture firms whose CEO, I am sure, has no tolerance for these kinds of fake claims that sadly many venture-backed companies also have to deal with. I mention this as I suspect her husband likely has been working with her on the strategy for squeezing me as, in addition to being a computer scientist, he is a game theorist. My only advice for him is to understand more about your opponent before you launch your first move. All of the above said, gender, race, LGBTQ and other such discrimination is a real thing. Many people have been harmed and deserve compensation for this discrimination, and these companies and individuals should be punished for engaging in such behavior. Which brings me to the advice I am seeking from the X community. I am not planning to follow the typical path and settle this ‘claim.’ Rather, I am going to fight this nonsense to the end of the earth in the hope that it inspires other CEOs to do the same so we shut down this despicable behavior that is a large tax on society, employment, and the economy and contributes to workplace discrimination rather than reducing it. Do you agree or disagree that this is the right approach?

@afneil And what did privatisation do to those industries? They were not successful before nationalisation, during, or after

Well, nationalisation in the past has worked brilliantly for UK railways, steel, shipbuilding, coal, electricity, road haulage, telecoms, airlines etc etc. They were all global leaders at the cutting edge of technology and development. The world beat a path to our door to learn how to do it. 🤣

@KaiserLoengramm @theoldworldshow It was their land massacring invaders is the right thing to do.

@theoldworldshow Yeah it turns out that the Injuns were actually the first ones to break treaties and attempted to genocide the White Man.

In the 1622 massacre of the Virginia settlers, a horrific attack in which the “merciless Indian savages” gained access to English settlements by pretending to be interested in Christianity, then massacred men, women, and children alike The brutal attack wiped out hundreds a settlers, perhaps a quarter or more of the settlers, who had just been managing to move past the Initial rigors of settlement. It also came just at planting time, wreaking agricultural havoc and putting the settlers at risk of starvation The attack was horrific, set the colony back by years, and was savage in the extreme. It also mostly ended Virginian interest in converting the Indians, which up until then had been substantial But fortunately for us the Virginians didn’t give in. Instead they collected themselves behind the walls of Jamestown and then blitzed out and took the fight to the Indians, punishing them in a succession of campaigns and attacks that were so severe the Indian menace was mostly quieted for decades afterwards

@JChimirie66677 @NobbyHall6 How it functions can change - the landed gentry need removing. Yes their unfortunate servants will suffer but the goal is worthwhile.

Exactly right. The target in their minds is the man in the big house. The casualties are the gamekeeper, the beater, the tailor, the hotel porter and the pub landlord. Class war conducted at the expense of the working people it claims to champion. That is not an accidental outcome. It is what happens every time policy is driven by ideology rather than by any serious attempt to understand how a place actually functions.

Labour Loves the Countryside. It Just Hates the People Who Run It. A woman walks into a tailor's shop in Helmsley, North Yorkshire. She loves the heather hills, she says. The wooded dales. The purple moorland stretching to the horizon. What she cannot stand is the shooting that takes place on the Glorious Twelfth. Jeremy Shaw, the tailor, has heard this before. He considers whether to explain that the heather she travelled three hours to admire exists because of the grouse moor she despises. The gamekeepers who manage the land, suppress the bracken, and keep the moorland in the condition that makes it worth visiting. The cake, in other words, was baked by the baker she came to castigate. What is worrying is that the government shares her confusion. On March 18, Labour published its Land Use Framework. Half a million acres earmarked for solar panels. Nine percent of farmland committed to rewilding. And buried on page 45, a proposal to license game bird shooting, potentially restricting pheasant and partridge releases onto estates. The trail hunting ban came first. Licensing comes next. Each measure arrives with its own rationale. Together they form a programme. Licensing does not prohibit. Bureaucracy does not ban. Smaller shoots simply cannot absorb compliance costs, fold quietly, and nobody in Whitehall answers for the consequence. A Natural England case near Helmsley shows the method. A longstanding partridge shoot was barred from releasing birds until after the season had already started. Shoot days cancelled. Revenue gone. Natural England's hands formally clean. Helmsley bucks every trend in British retail. Four pubs in the town square. A Michelin-starred inn nearby. A tailor forty years in business in what a mentor once called a dying trade. Seventy-five percent of Shaw's revenue is shooting-related. The Pheasant hotel runs at sixty percent shooting occupancy through winter. The deli sells local cheese to Norwegian and German sportsmen. Shooting contributes £3.3 billion annually to the UK economy and supports nearly 147,000 jobs. Pull the shooting thread and the weave comes apart. One Helmsley pub changed hands a few years ago. The new owners decided they wanted nothing to do with shoot trade. They lost heavily, then went back to the estates cap in hand. The market delivered the verdict that policy is not yet ready to impose openly. Licensing achieves the same result without anyone having to take responsibility. The conservation argument collapses under scrutiny. Grouse moor owners have restored 217,000 acres of upland heath in the past 25 years. The almost-extinct curlew is four times more likely to fledge on a managed grouse moor than on unmanaged moorland. The landscape that Whitehall has identified as the problem is the reason the landscape exists in the form they claim to value. When asked what economic trade-offs it had actually modelled, the government was vague. Officials said they recognised shooting's cultural importance and would work with industry toward a sustainable relationship. Starmer has been invited to visit Helmsley and see how the economy functions. He has not replied. He should go. He should meet the gamekeeper loading double guns through winter to keep the household solvent. The beaters earning seventy pounds a day. The tailor measuring 24 keepers for tweed suits stitched with Essex lining and Yorkshire zips. What rural Britain is being offered instead is a licensing regime that will first eliminate smaller shoots, then larger ones, then the hotels and tailors and pubs, until the moorland reverts to bracken and the towns that shooting sustained join the dying high streets that apparently only the countryside had managed to avoid. The heather on the North York Moors, Jeremy Shaw at Carters Country Wear, and the market town of Helmsley. All three exist because of shooting. Labour's Land Use Framework puts all three at risk.

@Therichardralph @buildscapital Yes but if it goes wrong after 2 years out are you employable?

@buildscapital I've got quite a sizable investment portfolio. So could easily go 2 years without worrying about money

I am seriously contemplating walking away from my £80K a year job. Not because I am financially secure, but because I want more and I'm too comfortable. Does this relate with anyone?

@vrexec @Ixenal Computer jobs can be easy and many people just cruise rather than climb.

@Ixenal It’s a good philosophical question. I can promise you’d though that I would not be working a computer job.

I ask this question from time to time and it’s not one of those judgmental “why are you not having kids” posts. I could not care less if someone decides to have kids or not, or their reasons. What I genuinely don’t understand is… if you’ve decided not to have children… why are you working a traditional career? Why are you interacting with a computer all day? Why do you care at all about how much money you make? It literally makes no sense. There are only a few tiny exceptions… like you’re a caregiver for a family member or you have significant health issues. Go join the Peace Corps or the military. Go volunteer somewhere in the world. Become an EMT or a paramedic or a firefighter or a police officer. Go find a shack in the woods somewhere and write fiction for five straight years and don’t talk to anyone. Literally walk across the country. Bike around the world. Move to Greece and work on a boat ferrying tourists around the islands. Go to Switzerland and become a mountain guide. Dedicate yourself to fitness and adventure. Literally anything. You have this incredible gift of a life with no dependents. Why are you still career coded and money coded? One of the great mysteries of our time.

@Cefte @theveindoc Yes but most of the rest of the country doesn't make what it did in 2008 why should doctors be an exception?

@theveindoc The real-terms value of the average FY1 salary in 2008 is £55,418 in today's sterling - and every more senior doctor has a wider gap, even when working 48 hour weeks. Unlike you, today's FY1s have five to six figure student debt and no final salary pension.

Let that sink in. £52000 straight out of university. Rejected by BMA

@rhomboid1MF No but you wouldn’t price oil lower because of it gas maybe as transport cost so high…

is it free to transport O&G to the U.K.?

@RupertLowe10 If that's true surely 0 % inheritance tax won't help the position of those who will inherit very little...

I am with the young British men and women who feel crushed under inflated house prices, stagnating wages, record tax burden and just generally a really piss-poor standard of living that is falling embarrassingly far behind countries we once competed with. My question to them is this... Is the status quo what you want? Because if it is, there are a variety of parties to vote for. If you want something radically different, and I mean radically, then Restore Britain is giving you that option. Ask yourself - does the current model work for you? Commuting two plus hours a day from some pokey flat in a part of London that increasingly resembles the third world? All to get taxed out of your arse for a job you hate, with no prospect of starting your own business or owning your own home because the rotten state takes so much of your cash? It is an awful deal. Earn a bit more money? Bang. Gone. Student loan. Paying hundreds each month just to keep on top of the interest. Initial loan never getting paid off, it just creeps up and up. Gather enough capital to start a small business? That’s a different world of pain. Regulations, taxes, an environment designed to bury any enthusiasm to build something better. It is just not worth the risk. HMRC takes such pleasure in making it as difficult as possible. Honestly, I hate those people so much. Young tradesmen and women all over Britain waking up at 5am, working 12 hours plus every day. Why? For what? For who? Losing almost half your earnings to fund some indolent slob who refuses to work? It’s not exactly the American dream, is it? Want children? One? Two? More? Childcare costs thousands and thousands a year. It’s unaffordable. It’s impossible. So, depressingly, many don’t even bother. What about a home? Ludicrous leasehold rules mean you’re just paying rent up front for decades. Getting screwed on the service changes that soar with no consultation. House prices booming whilst wages fall behind. The mountain to climb gets bigger and bigger. It is endless. Yet you’re told by people who bought their house for 40k and got university education for free that cutting down on the cappuccinos will solve all of your financial problems. Politicians like Farage tell you working from home is the problem, and that seeking a ‘work-life balance’ is somehow selfish. It is bullshit, to be honest. And I am fed up of it. It stinks. There’s this prevailing attitude with many people of my age that young men and women are lazy and refuse to put the hours in. That’s just not true. The system is crushing you. It kills ambition and suffocates aspiration. It all needs to change. All of it. Restore Britain doesn't want to reform the establishment, we want to smash it up. And yes, that will include a meaningful debate about a triple lock which creates division between the young and the old - because it simply isn’t financially sustainable in its current form. Restore Britain will have the courage to do what needs to be done, I promise you that. If you want more of the same - vote for it. Tories, Reform, Labour, Lib Dem. Go for it. Your choice. Same faces, same model, same decay. The Greens want to accelerate our transformation into a third world dump. If that’s what you want for Britain, Polanski is your man. Certainly don’t vote for Restore Britain. Because we are offering something entirely new. You now have a political party that is willing to take the difficult decisions to give you the opportunities that my generation had to achieve that same financial freedom so many of my age enjoy. Restore Britain is that party. We want a fundamentally different economic model. One that gives young British men and women the freedom to pursue their own goals - whether that’s building their family, business or own financial freedom. That’s what we’re about. We are going to be honest, and we are going to take the difficult decisions required to benefit us all, that very much includes the young Brits who for their entire lives have been ripped off by a decadent political establishment that cares about votes, and only votes. Restore Britain will treat you all with the respect and honesty you deserve. There is a political party that is finally your side. Restore Britain is on your side.

@RollingHedge It's not all on govt. Employers terrible, don't reward those who do more, so people don't...

The other trap, outside the valley of death for HENRYs earning between £100k-£125k, is the low income trap - the bottom half of the income distribution - where the juice to earn more just isn’t, structurally, worth the squeeze. Dreadful. So absolutely stupid and regressive. No wonder productivity is in the toilet. Won’t someone who understands incentives come and fix this shithole of an economy?

@stalinruu @sopjap It could, they just spent far too much on weapons against an attack that wasn’t ever coming.

@sopjap Come on , DDR was a stasi state with a constant crisis of consumer products. Yes, it ideologically helped anti colonial activities but overall it couldn't solve the contradictions within their own society

Just like most things, valuing what you have is a social phenomenon. Your mindset about the worth of your living standards is shaped by interacting outside factors. Capitalist propaganda attempted to convince people in socialist societies that what they had was valueless—nothing—and that they were lacking compared to capitalism. So they devalued the gains of socialism, which primed the population to give up those gains, having been made to feel it was all worthless. Of course, many people didn't feel that way, but they were sidelined. Ultimately, the "influencers" who saw their world through Western propaganda won out. All those who rejected this false and facile narrative—that socialism was a failure and they had nothing—were sidelined and disenfranchised. Only through thoughtfully observing museum displays like this, or talking to someone who actually lived under communism, can everyday people find the cracks in the dominant anti-communist ideology.

@KayleighBritta6 @Saskiaaa_____ Why do it?

@Saskiaaa_____ I'm a chef, wages for chefs have gone down with the rise of minimum wage and often we are paid the same as the people carrying plates to tables. I carry far more risk and responsibility than a waitress yet because the hospitality has been fucked for so long I get the same money.

£26436.80 is the new min wage annual salary (40 hrs p/wk). And as the min wage rises, regular salaries don't. So many people will begin to ask themselves 'why am I working this highly stressful job that needed qualifications and a tonne of bullshit paperwork and police checks just to earn 5k more a year than I would stacking shelves at Lidl?'

@rhomboid1MF You know Polannski is Jewish?

educators needs to be somewhat more critical imho ..they’re in danger of looking like a band wagon of antisemitic pro IRGC economically illiterate vandals Obviously happy if others disagree as freedom of thought is important

@rhomboid1MF @MrShitbagger Israel too?

@MrShitbagger personally I’d suggest proscribing any regime that commits mass murder ..but I’m old fashioned

It is astonishing to me how many people have poor judgment about what causes they support….the IRGC is the ultimate exemplar of that unpleasant fact

@banks_chef @alfamito155 @richo160875778 48 hours a week is No-ones dream!

@alfamito155 @richo160875778 This is a great idea however I couldn't let our teams down like that. One team one dream

With the new national minimum wage kicking in our entry point staff such as commis chef, Kitchen Porter, FOH helper will now be paid £31,724 for full time. £4009 on top to hire this person in NI contributions. Plus £1,274 pension. Total is £37,007.

@banks_chef @OnJambos41038 They won't wages determined by supply / demand for labour cut your costs doesn't affect this.

@OnJambos41038 This is where your mindset is confused. Reduce the tax burden on small businesses and people will be paid more. Things will cost less. More for your bucks..

@wallstcass How do you determine stop levels?

@rhomboid1MF Sorry to hear this, maybe time to rethink the concentration level?

It’s Saturday…I’ve had a steak supper..and my thoughts turn to volatility..mainly because my paper net worth ~ halved this week & it feels appropriate to dwell on that. I run an insanely concentrated portfolio…basically 80%* #GDWN on Monday this RNS landed investegate.co.uk/announcement/r… Confirming they’d doubled profits YoY …but with a smorgasbord of additional negatives that implied bad stuff potentially occurring I believe that was intended as a nudge that perhaps the valuation was a touch giddy…& I always appreciate a mgt team that wants to soft pedal stuff ..the market reacted inappropriately imho I remain embarrassingly over weight in what I believe to be one of the best growth stories listed on the LSE *prevously 90% PPS I’m back at September 2025 Portfolio Value