Say AGI isn’t hype to dazzle customers and bamboozle regulators, but something the AI bros believe in and are working towards. They are spending hundreds of billions of dollars to create the enslaved digital entities they plan rent out to do the world’s bullshit jobs. They could invest the money in real jobs to tackle the climate crisis. The problem here is that real workers expect to get paid.

Interesting Owen Jones piece in the Guardian today. Worth a look.

The line-up of British politics right now is right-nationalist/cod-right-nationalist/right-libertarian (Reform/Conservative Party), and conservative/centre-right (Labour).

The Tories’ chance of winning is infinitesimally small. What matters now is whether anyone who wants to redistribute wealth and power is denied a voice in Starmer’s administration […] When inevitable disillusionment with a government rooted in deceit and lacking any solutions to Britain’s woes seeps in, it will be the radical right that stands to benefit.

Heterodox macroeconomist and campaigner Richard Murphy has produced a Taxing Wealth 2024 report to show how wealth can be taxed fairly in comparison to wages. His worked example restating Rishi Sunak’s tax bill is bang on.

Rishi Sunak’s tax for 2022/23: a Taxing Wealth Report 2024 case study:

The additional tax owing would be £761,378. This is a tax rate of 57% […] The resulting tax liability is fair. What Rishi Sunak paid in 2022/23 was not and was instead an insult to all people who worked for a living and paid much higher rates of tax than the prime minister.

UK prime minister Rishi Sunak paid around 23% tax on £2.2M income because most of his income is capital gains and dividends. Investment income enjoys a huge tax subsidy. Had Sunak “earned” a £2.2M wage, he’d have paid roughly 56% tax1 including student loan repayment.

  1. back of the envelope. ↩︎

So far this year - as of 4 February 2024 - on my daily walks, and every single day since 1 January, at least one car has run red lights on a pedestrian crossing.

Wryly amused at our blundering elite who spent the last 45 years doing more damage to our productive industrial infrastructure than Hitler lecture us that we are moving from a post-war to a pre-war status.

The UK political class has used WhatsApp to avoid democratic scrutiny. They weren’t bamboozled by the tech or confounded by advice from their private office. They knew what they were doing. They knew it was wrong. They did it anyway.