How You React to @elonmusk's Success Says A Lot About You

“That’s so damning!” @ShelaghFogarty and @NatashaC can’t believe what Peter Mandelson and Pat McFadden texted each other…

Watch the full show here… youtu.be/BisBvkoAEEo?si=sYuW…

All part of the Labour Growth agenda.

🚆Since I was first elected as an MP in 2010, I warned HS2 was a disaster on all fronts, and yet we have blindly ploughed ahead with it. 🤦Too much hubris to admit our mistakes, and too many refusing to end the project. 🙏HS2 is another predictable government project disaster.

Morrisons blames UK government policy for shutting 100 lossmaking stores ft.trib.al/wqVDnSc

Rachel from accounts/customer service needs a better calculator. A family of 4 travelling from Chester to LEGOLAND in August will cost about £600 once you include the train fare, the shuttle bus, and entry tickets. That’s before food or paid attractions in the park. And her big “help for families” is a £5 discount on a LEGOLAND ticket 🤡

If true, the civilizational payoff from this will be stratospheric. Enormous advances coming in all areas of science, biology, chemistry, medicine, materials, energy.

I suspect math will be like Chess and Go due to verifiability. The period of fruitful collaboration between humans and AI will be short (i.e. a few years or less, not a decade). Progress in math will be jagged, with harder to formalize fields coming last, but I suspect this jaggedness will be compressed in time -- I expect superhuman performance at (nearly?) all areas of math within a few years (a few = 2-3?). AIs will also be better at asking pure math questions than humans, and will quickly develop theories beyond human comprehension. Human theorists will have a recreational comparative advantage over other humans in understanding these theories, but AIs will be better at communicating these theories to applied researchers. Pure mathematicians will need to become applied researchers to do productive work, until applied research is also automated. Confidence level for prediction: 50-65% for gist, 40-50% for all above claims being correct.

Question: If you were Chancellor and wanted theme parks to reduce prices by a giving them a temporary tax decrease: Would you (a) Give them 6 months notice, or (b) Do it a few weeks before summer, after all their leaflets, marketing and posters were already printed and distributed?

Should we make the Sunday Sport chancellor?

Earn a 7% return, sell the asset, pay 45% tax on the gain, lose 3.5% to inflation, keep 0.35% of the return. These people are not serious.

Anyone proposing CGT rates the same as income tax needs to accompany that with a list of companies they have personally built and sacrifices they made along the way.

Wes Streeting is reframing “wealth tax” to not be a wealth tax, and is just saying put up CGT (without indexation!), subject to a carve out for “genuine entrepreneurs”, which is undefined. Another tax populist. bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cm2p…

And yet they came into power promising growth, so people would be better off.

The whistleblower does not appear to have access to any more facts than the people commenting in the public domain. Whilst it is curious why a careless penalty was not applied, no-one other than her, her advisors, and HMRC have access to all the facts. The Mail says she “Evaded” a penalty - she didn’t. She was not charged one.

I’m old enough to remember that only a few years ago it was assumed Sunak would beat Liz Truzz.

Darn. We may not get any more 0.6% growth.

The lax treatment of Angela Rayner by HMRC has brought into focus how arbitrary the tax authority can be in its treatment of ordinary citizens. Too often, HMRC has pursued individuals and small businesses for vast sums of money in error. HMRC are masters of using process as punishment, making themselves increasingly difficult to contact while torturing people with demand letters and bankruptcy notices. Victims of these errors are often forced to spend huge amounts of time and money to prove HMRC wrong. This sometimes runs to hundreds of thousands of pounds in legal fees, many times the actual amount in dispute. They also find their names and details published in a list of deliberate tax defaulters, in effect a "name and shame" list. I have to question whether this meets citizens' privacy rights, since these do not appear to be court rulings but HMRC opinions. HMRC's excesses must be brought under control. It is time ministers took a grip of this. telegraph.co.uk/money/tax/ne…

“Let me be clear…I broke numerous promises. I invented a £22 billion black hole to punish pensioners, farmers, the disabled, small businesses and students. I tried to give away Chagos and pay £35 billion to do so. I increased unemployment. I increased the government deficit. I appointed Peter Mandelson despite his friendship with Jeffrey Epstein having already been published in various media outlets. I promised to cut energy bills and council tax, but instead, the opposite happened. I did absolutely nothing to resolve the cost of living crisis and made it worse by increasing the tax burden to record levels. I prioritised hanging out with the Davos / BlackRock clique rather than genuinely ‘fixing the foundations’. I promised a ‘transparency revolution’, but instead, operated under smoke and mirrors and sacked colleagues and threatened suspending Labour MPs who voted against me. I spaffed £30 billion away on carbon capture machines. I failed to sort out the small boats / hotels for illegal immigrants. £3 billion a year to Ukraine and big hugs from Volodymyr. I smeared anyone who dared to criticise me a ‘far-right’. I sanctimoniously lectured everyone like they were naughty children. And I have absolutely no intention of resigning after disastrous local election results because I am right and everyone else is wrong. Me first. Country second.”