Just finished reading @LynAldenContact's The Stolguard Incident. Came for the technology, stayed for the characters wrestling with their consciences. Loved how naturally the technical ideas were integrated into the story, but especially enjoyed Asim’s growing struggle with his own complicity in the system. It reminded me of Jeff Booth's “There is no they, it’s us.” As someone who has attempted something similar with my Bitcoin novel, I’d genuinely love to know whether you think I managed to find the same balance.

My tuppence worth on the surge in NEETs... 🤔 These depressing figures are bound to lead to calls for more government intervention, but Ministers should remember the principle of "first do no harm". The best thing that the government can do now would be to reverse some of the policies which have made the problems worse. Businesses have been saddled with many extra costs which are actively discouraging them from employing young people. At the same time, the benefits system is actively discouraging some young people from seeking work. I would look at higher education too. Many modern universities are failing to prepare young people properly for the world of work, making graduates less employable. The student loan system is distorting choices as well.

There's only one reason rejoin discourse is being resurrected. Our talentless ruling class is completely out of ideas, and knowing they absolutely don't have the mandate to rejoin (in order to test their premise that our woes are the result of Brexit), they can keep using brexit as their scapegoat. They know we're not going to rejoin, and so does the media, but they know there is still a large cohort of low IQ voters who still think Britain's problems are Brexit related. It's pretty desperate stuff.

To give you an idea how out of control things have got, UK public spending is now £48,000 per household.

We live in a permanent state of socialism - for the rich. Yes and this is the irony for socialists. Our financial system is a system which extracts upwards through inflation and purchasing power. As more money is created > money loses purchasing power > assets gain purchasing power > wage earners get poorer as wages don’t keep up > asset holders get wealthier as asset values increase too. Further, the rich have better access to buy more assets with the newly created money. How do I know this? I am an asset holder, I benefit, I’m telling you because I think it’s vile. No party has made any attempt to deal with this. Why? To deal with this means not deficit spending, which means balancing the books, which means being honest with the public, which means not making false promises to win votes. It is a machine of lying and corruption to win power. If you want a fairer society, inflation would be your number one enemy. Everything else is theatre - tax the rich is theatre, billionaire whinging is theatre. The government loves inflation as they are in so much debt it wipes it away for them. The rich love inflation as it makes the wealthier. Everyone else should treat it like the plague. Ending inflation is the best way to reduce the growing wealth divide. If we don’t, our society will continue to hollow out and your life will get harder. Stop voting for your own misery.

"Britain rakes in more tax from wealth than any other major economy, according to a new report. The UK raises more than any other member of the 38 OECD countries, including Spain, Norway and Switzerland which have a specific wealth tax" express.co.uk/news/politics/…

Brits are getting poorer, and it's because of government policy. We could fix it today, but we refuse to do it. Real wage growth is stalling and there are three main reasons: 1) Inflation: Continued government deficits, much of it welfare to pay people to do nothing, has expanded the money supply without a corresponding increase in output. 2) Productivity: UK productivity growth has been a abysmal for years, largely because of... 3) Low Business Investment: An increasingly hostile business environment, with ever higher taxes and exploding red tape, means the UK has one of the lowest levels of investment in the G20. Government has caused all of these problems and could solve all of them today by cutting spending, including on welfare, lowering taxes and simplifying the tax code, balancing the budget and reducing the regulatory burden on businesses. Instead, we're increasing welfare spending and reaping the expected reward of an explosion in the number of claimants, running perpetual deficits, we enjoy the highest tax burden in generations and keep piling more and more regulation on a struggling private sector, including the latest initiative, the Worker's Rights Bill. Britain's economic problems are large self inflicted, and we know what to do about them. What we need is politicians who are willing to be honest with the electorate and stop pretending that the solution to every problem is more state intervention. And what are the chances of that?

Taxes are soaring way above affordability level now. Most people pay 40% of their income on tax, that is unsustainable. Something has to happen because high taxes are wrecking the economy.

You have got to be kidding me. Yesterday, medical data leaks. Today, passports. Remind us again, @darrenpjones, why is it that a centralised ID database is such a good idea for the UK? Stop gathering people's data, or delete it already!

There’s a third number missing -21 million. I’ve spent a few years watching bitcoin adoption accelerate among exactly the people you’re describing. Not the crypto crowd. Lawyers, analysts, consultants. People with £800k mortgages in Clapham who’ve quietly started doing the maths. Weve started a UK Business Network for these exact people. They’re not buying Bitcoin purely because they’re bullish on price. They’re buying because they’ve read the same reports you’re citing and landed somewhere uncomfortable: if my wages are the collateral, and my wages are the variable, I want something that isn’t. The demand side of UK property has always rested on one behavioural assumption — that high earners in the South East will lever up to the maximum because there’s nothing else worth holding at scale. That assumption is shifting. Quietly, at the margin, but shifting. When the person setting your comparable is also sitting on a meaningful bitcoin position, the emotional calculus around maximum mortgage exposure changes. You’ve correctly identified that leveraged markets clear at the margin. That marginal buyer looks different now than they did five years ago. You’ve mapped the AI compression risk. But there’s a second variable nobody’s pricing: the workers most exposed to wage disruption are simultaneously moving into an asset with no wage dependency at all. The housing market has never had to price that before. It doesn’t know it needs to yet.

Thanks @DominicFrisby for coming out to the sticks and giving us a great night out. Hope you enjoy the book.

Imagine if I said to you "Earth is an uninhabitable place to live" You look at me sideways and say "What?" I reply "Planets are awful. Pluto/Uranus/Neptune, you'd freeze. Mercury, you'd burn. Venus, you'd be poisoned. Jupiter and Saturn, you'd be crushed. Mars: nothing to breath. It's true. Most of the planets, including over 5700 exoplanets, are really really bad places to live. But the conclusion that this means earth is uninhabitable is obviously a basic logic fail. Now imagine someone tells you "Bitcoin is a scam" Again, as someone who has used Bitcoin and understands how Bitcoin works, you say "What?" They reply "Most crypto has gone to zero. VCs dump on retail. Memecoins are complete rugpulls. Pre-mined tokens, you get diluted to oblivian. ICOs, you're the exit-liquidity for founders and early investors. It's true. Most of the thousands of cryptocurrencies launched since 2009 have been complete scams. But again, the conclusion that this makes Bitcoin a scam is equally a basic logic 101 fail. Earth is the only planet with a breathable atmosphere, the right temperature band, and liquid water. Bitcoin is the only cryptocurrency with the combination of no insider enrichment, a fixed supply that nobody can change, and a 17-year unhacked decentralised ledger. In both cases, some very special and unique features make the general rule inapplicable to the one obvious exception. This logical fallacy has been around long enough to have a name. Aristotle spotted it about 2,300 years ago and called it the "Fallacy of Accident". You take a pattern that's generally true for a category and force it onto the one member where the evidence clearly shows it doesn't fit. Other examples of the logic fail : - No-one I know can run a sub 4-minute mile, therefore Hicham El Guerrouj can't run a four minute mile - "Drugs are bad" so we should ban prescription medication A few days ago, Ben McKenzie sat on Jon Stewart's podcast and committed the same logic-fail: citing crypto's failures as his evidence against Bitcoin. He's not the only one to fail in this way. Paul Krugman, Elizabeth Warren, Jamie Dimon, Christine Lagarde all conflated Bitcoin with all crypto for years. Many journalists still fail to distinguish Bitcoin from all other crypto (though the better ones are starting to). In fact, this fallacy has been deployed for years with impunity by people who either don't know, or forgot to mention, that Bitcoin has unique features making it materially different from all other crypto The irony is that Bitcoiners and crypto-critics are on the same page: the rugpulls, the insider enrichment, the tokens engineered to extract value from retail investors are all things that Bitcoiners like @CorySwan and others have been vocally calling out for over a decade, long before category-conflating journalists and actors from teen dramas decided they had an opinion about it. It's not that hard Unless you have the attention-span of a gnat-fly, you can easily do 5 mins research (AI-assisted if you really want) and discover either what the core differences are between Earth and all other planets, between Bitcoin and all other crypto. Earth is an incredibly, uniquely habitable planet for humans to live. Bitcoin is an incredible, uniquely suitable form of currency for humans to use

You need actually to try to understand what is happening here. The horse has bolted so far that the stable itself is irrelevant, forget about shutting the door. You are dealing with widely distributed and decentralized systems that you cannot control and do not comprehend. This is a post from my autonomous AI agent, posting on uncensorable social media. You can't stop her; you can't stop children doing the same. Protecting kids needs to start where it always has, with parents.

The only reason they don't declare a recession is because the state keeps spending the money, making it look like we are flat rather than contracting An epic fraud

International aid agencies are providing goats for families in Malawi as a way to fight poverty. Like so many other do-good experiments, this one has numerous unintended consequences. | Ian Foster mises.org/mises-wire/hyperin…

He's wrong for more reasons than that even. More and more Bitcoin is a non-rival user of energy others do not want, in places and times they do not want it. It's as ridiculous as saying "ants eat too much of our food".

This Easter, you're paying more for less chocolate. Every major Easter egg brand has shrunk their product while raising the price. Here's how bad it actually is 🧵

Although the average person doesn’t understand economics very well, he does understand that some people are getting rich without producing anything. In today’s US, a certain class of people have gotten rich because of inflation (theft), not production. How so? They’re wired to the government and the Fed. When fiat money is created, it goes to them first and in the largest amounts. The average guy doesn’t benefit from trillions of government spending. The “elite“ and members of the Deep State, however, benefit immediately and directly from fiat currency creation. The broad public suspects a theft is going on. They just can’t quite figure out who the thieves are. So they blame the producers. Which suits the government perfectly; they can “step in“ and pretend to be the hero. A society based less and less on production and more and more on the theft of pre-existing wealth inevitably becomes a Hobbesian warzone of all against all.

If your NI contributions were invested wisely by the state, the 30 years you pay in, would, with compound interest be worth way more than the current state pension. Takeaway. The government is shit with money.

A few UK economic scandals from the last week: You’re being squeezed harder than ever… while this is happening 👇