F*Ck yA !Dio wrote:What did the FCA say?
/me takes coat ...
Politics Thread!
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gilesgoat
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Re: Politics Thread!
/me takes coat ...
Giles the billy goat
"Baa"
"Baa"
Re: Politics Thread!
The Duran argue it's part of the general purge including Jeremy Corbyn, Truss, Johnson, etc.merman wrote:If everything Farage has done was above board, there would be no need to restrict his bank account.
Therefore, there must be reasonable doubt.
Re: Politics Thread!
Look, I know its Snaff, but I have to point out that the all-powerful "Purge" clearly aren't powerful enough to stop all of those individuals acheiving their main goal (Farage), become leader of their Party (Corbyn) or Prime Minister (Truss, Johnson). They're clearly as effective at stopping any of those things happening as they are at getting, for example, Flat Earth believers to shut up...
"Stars don't twinkle in space." - Char Aznable.
Re: Politics Thread!
Duran Duran have a politics conspiracy theory podcast on YouTube?
"Words ought to be a little wild - for they are assaults of thought on the unthinking."
- John Maynard Keynes
- John Maynard Keynes
Re: Politics Thread!
erm the perusuomalaiset having to publicly disassociate from mass hysteria like the mass replacement theory
Holier than thou
Re: Politics Thread!
State of this bank thing and it being spun into a culture war piece again (it's absolutely not). It's being pitched as Farage being "banned" from banks because of his political views and politicians are stepping out to defend him, suggesting that if they ban Farage they can ban anyone.
Only that's not what happened. He's on a list that's been in use for (at least) 15 years and that's compulsory for financial organisations to check against before they decide to do business. It's part of the Anti Money-Laundering push that kicked off after the last financial crash. Finance orgs have to check that the person they're about to deal with isn't on any known lists of Specially Designated Nationals or Politically Exposed Persons. Farage, through his actions over the last 20 years, has found himself on the latter.
And now the likes of Tugenhat are out there today berating the banks for sticking to AML regulations by suggesting they're blocking people "they don't agree with". It's an absolute shambles.
Only that's not what happened. He's on a list that's been in use for (at least) 15 years and that's compulsory for financial organisations to check against before they decide to do business. It's part of the Anti Money-Laundering push that kicked off after the last financial crash. Finance orgs have to check that the person they're about to deal with isn't on any known lists of Specially Designated Nationals or Politically Exposed Persons. Farage, through his actions over the last 20 years, has found himself on the latter.
And now the likes of Tugenhat are out there today berating the banks for sticking to AML regulations by suggesting they're blocking people "they don't agree with". It's an absolute shambles.
Re: Politics Thread!
And now they've confirmed the real reason he got ousted - he doesn't have enough cash to qualify for an account. Fucking stunning stuffRhythm wrote:State of this bank thing and it being spun into a culture war piece again (it's absolutely not). It's being pitched as Farage being "banned" from banks because of his political views and politicians are stepping out to defend him, suggesting that if they ban Farage they can ban anyone.
Only that's not what happened. He's on a list that's been in use for (at least) 15 years and that's compulsory for financial organisations to check against before they decide to do business. It's part of the Anti Money-Laundering push that kicked off after the last financial crash. Finance orgs have to check that the person they're about to deal with isn't on any known lists of Specially Designated Nationals or Politically Exposed Persons. Farage, through his actions over the last 20 years, has found himself on the latter.
And now the likes of Tugenhat are out there today berating the banks for sticking to AML regulations by suggesting they're blocking people "they don't agree with". It's an absolute shambles.
Re: Politics Thread!
Oh, so there is more to this story than Farage is claiming. Shocked, I am.
SHOCKED.
SHOCKED.
"Stars don't twinkle in space." - Char Aznable.
Re: Politics Thread!
I wish the Streisand effect was still a negative thing. As it stands, regardless of the real reason behind it all, he's now drummed up extra support from an outraged public and even from Tory MPsF-ZeroOne wrote:Oh, so there is more to this story than Farage is claiming. Shocked, I am.
SHOCKED.
For all the pissing and moaning that MPs and press are doing right now ("how dare they exclude people just because of their political views?") there'd be a far bigger outcry if they realised banks weren't stopping Al Qaeda members from having accounts at Natwest.
Short-sighted snowflake cunts, the lot of them
Re: Politics Thread!
https://www.project-syndicate.org/comme ... in-2023-02
The German people have been kept happy since WW2. Now they're starting to ask questions and AfD is surging.
Germany made the wrong choice in supporting the US proxy war with Russia. Without Russian energy their manufacturing has collapsed. The strength of their high tech manufacturing combined with Russian natural resources was a threat to the US and they've been thrown under the bus. Now they are in recession with only structural decline ahead.Germany’s economic model, which relied on cheap Russian gas imports and high-quality industrial exports, has collapsed in the wake of the war in Ukraine and the rise of China.
The German people have been kept happy since WW2. Now they're starting to ask questions and AfD is surging.
Re: Politics Thread!
Everyone's economic model is wrong, betting all of modern civilisation on the continued supply of natural resources - fossil fuels - that are non-renewably burnt and dwindling fast.
One can pick on Germany for over-exposing itself to the "tyrant toujour" of Putin.
But it's not like anyone's doing much better, bargaining with a rogue's gallery that includes Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran, Venezuela, etc., are they?
It's a strategy doomed for failure. A foregone conclusion. An inevitability.
There's only so much fossil fuel on planet Earth, it takes hundreds of millions of years to replenish, we've pissed through most of it in a century and some change, and thanks to Thermodynamics then you can't feasibly make "artificial fuels".
I mean, you can literally do so, in the sense that it is possible to make a petrol-substitute from coal - the Nazis were forced to do so, during the war - and you can create artificial fuels from raw materials but the problem is those First and Second laws. You can't get out more than you put in (First law), and you can't even really manage that as you'll always have losses to entropy (Second law). So it'll always take more energy to make an artificial fuel than you can get back out of it.
Which makes no sense for a fuel, in the overall, as the balance sheet will always end up negative. If you're making, say, hydrogen powered by renewable energy sources, then you'll always end up with less energy than you already had from those renewable energy sources. Because Thermodynamics won't let you ever reach 100% and, in practice, due to inefficiencies in the conversion process, you'll only net about a third, at its most optimally efficient, to a fifth, at actual real world efficiencies we actually achieve, of the energy that you had from the renewables in the first place. So it always makes more sense to just use those renewables directly.
And this is a "laws of physics" and "chemical efficiency" thing, that'll always be true, no matter how good our tech gets. At its most optimally efficient, the hydrogen round-trip gets a third. To run the planet on "green hydrogen" would require at least three to five times more wind turbines and solar panels, than even folks like me have been advocating for. We don't have enough renewables already - like, I reckon every home should have solar panels on its roof, absolutely all of them - that we're never practically going to ever have five times more than even that.
"Green hydrogen" is a storage medium, not a fuel. That is, it could be useful for something like aeroplanes, which have to carry their own fuel with them (as you can't exactly plug a plane into a wall socket mid-flight) and you accept the losses - the substantial losses - for the practicality of having a fuel that you can take with you. But for any ordinary land-based thing, it also makes more sense to plug into the wall.
The science and logic here is clear. It makes no economic sense whatsoever to depend on such fuels. It honestly never has done, but if you only concentrate on short-term gains, at the expense of long-term sustainability, then it can temporarily feel like it makes sense for a fleeting moment. Like trying to pay off your debts with a credit card. Sure, that might delay the bailiffs coming round to take all your property, but you can't borrow your way out of debt.
The only way fossil fuels make any sense at all is because we didn't put the energy into them. The Sun and gravity did that over hundreds of millions of years for us. We're just digging it up and drilling for it, then releasing that ancient stored energy by burning it.
But there's only so much of it on planet Earth, it replenishes at such a glacially slow rate that, actually, even glaciers are super-fast in comparison and I need a better word than "glacial" to capture just how slow we're talking. We only have a handful of decades to get ourselves off this shit onto something with long-term prospects, like renewables, before we're forced to do so anyway, as there are no more fossil fuels left.
And as these fuels run out, it's going to get exponentially more expensive, as the supply decreases - and gets harder to obtain - while the demand increases. Start at the end, then work backwards: How much would the last barrel of oil on planet Earth cost to buy? Literally the very last barrel, so that burning it will make oil extinct. It's priceless. It belongs in a museum. If priced accordingly, then no-one can afford to buy it and you absolutely wouldn't, at that price, ever contemplate actually using it.
It's not just that this stuff runs out. It's that, as it runs out, it's going to get scarcer and scarcer, and more and more expensive.
It's only an illusion of choice. Whatever your feelings on the matter, you will eventually get priced out of being able to afford it - and, you know, that'll hit the poorest first, then progress up to the very richest - until, one day, there isn't any left, so it doesn't matter. The only remaining options are renewable.
Like it or not, this is the future. The only possible future.
Accept that now, and get ahead in the new economy to come. Or cling on to the old ways, and face a catastrophic car crash that bankrupts planet Earth ten times over.
Everyone's had it wrong for a very long time now.
Putin's war has just unintentionally given us a "sneak preview". An example of how horridly wrong we've all got this, to depend a world economy - the continuation of our species - on the back of such a lame and dying horse.
Germany might be feeling it for being particularly over-exposed on dependency with Putin. But everyone's got that over-exposure. To Saudi, to Venezuela, to Iraq, to Iran. None of these players are remotely great options, are they? Everyone's in hock to some Medieval tyrant or socialist revolutionary or another. This is a terrible state of affairs for the whole planet.
Germany, ironically, might be the lucky one. It's suffering this now, so it realises the imperative to change things up and dig itself out of this hole. To go full blast and whole hog to replacing as much as possible with renewable sources, to get rid of that over-exposure as far as possible. And to do it right now.
Everyone's been getting it wrong for a few centuries now. Living on borrowed time, and just not thinking of how massive this debt is going to be, when it's finally cashed in.
And you'll notice, not a single word about carbon emissions and climate change. To be clear, all of that is also absolutely real and true, as far as I'm concerned. But I don't need to mention it, as the entire case can be made economically without touching any "save the planet" stuff. Though, you know, it will also incidentally help save the planet at the same time.
I prefer this "enlightened self-interest" case over the "touchy feely" environmental stuff, simply because the latter depends on the person you're talking to actually giving a shit for the planet and future generations and shit. Which, clearly, there are plenty of people for whom this matters not a single jot nor iota, as we've all heard those arguments and they've not done a single fucking thing about it. But "enlightened self-interest" doesn't depend on emotional reaction - even a sociopath can get it. This is economically bad for everyone, YOU included.
Be selfish, look out for number one, worry about your economic situation. It's actually the same conclusion, in the end.
One can pick on Germany for over-exposing itself to the "tyrant toujour" of Putin.
But it's not like anyone's doing much better, bargaining with a rogue's gallery that includes Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran, Venezuela, etc., are they?
It's a strategy doomed for failure. A foregone conclusion. An inevitability.
There's only so much fossil fuel on planet Earth, it takes hundreds of millions of years to replenish, we've pissed through most of it in a century and some change, and thanks to Thermodynamics then you can't feasibly make "artificial fuels".
I mean, you can literally do so, in the sense that it is possible to make a petrol-substitute from coal - the Nazis were forced to do so, during the war - and you can create artificial fuels from raw materials but the problem is those First and Second laws. You can't get out more than you put in (First law), and you can't even really manage that as you'll always have losses to entropy (Second law). So it'll always take more energy to make an artificial fuel than you can get back out of it.
Which makes no sense for a fuel, in the overall, as the balance sheet will always end up negative. If you're making, say, hydrogen powered by renewable energy sources, then you'll always end up with less energy than you already had from those renewable energy sources. Because Thermodynamics won't let you ever reach 100% and, in practice, due to inefficiencies in the conversion process, you'll only net about a third, at its most optimally efficient, to a fifth, at actual real world efficiencies we actually achieve, of the energy that you had from the renewables in the first place. So it always makes more sense to just use those renewables directly.
And this is a "laws of physics" and "chemical efficiency" thing, that'll always be true, no matter how good our tech gets. At its most optimally efficient, the hydrogen round-trip gets a third. To run the planet on "green hydrogen" would require at least three to five times more wind turbines and solar panels, than even folks like me have been advocating for. We don't have enough renewables already - like, I reckon every home should have solar panels on its roof, absolutely all of them - that we're never practically going to ever have five times more than even that.
"Green hydrogen" is a storage medium, not a fuel. That is, it could be useful for something like aeroplanes, which have to carry their own fuel with them (as you can't exactly plug a plane into a wall socket mid-flight) and you accept the losses - the substantial losses - for the practicality of having a fuel that you can take with you. But for any ordinary land-based thing, it also makes more sense to plug into the wall.
The science and logic here is clear. It makes no economic sense whatsoever to depend on such fuels. It honestly never has done, but if you only concentrate on short-term gains, at the expense of long-term sustainability, then it can temporarily feel like it makes sense for a fleeting moment. Like trying to pay off your debts with a credit card. Sure, that might delay the bailiffs coming round to take all your property, but you can't borrow your way out of debt.
The only way fossil fuels make any sense at all is because we didn't put the energy into them. The Sun and gravity did that over hundreds of millions of years for us. We're just digging it up and drilling for it, then releasing that ancient stored energy by burning it.
But there's only so much of it on planet Earth, it replenishes at such a glacially slow rate that, actually, even glaciers are super-fast in comparison and I need a better word than "glacial" to capture just how slow we're talking. We only have a handful of decades to get ourselves off this shit onto something with long-term prospects, like renewables, before we're forced to do so anyway, as there are no more fossil fuels left.
And as these fuels run out, it's going to get exponentially more expensive, as the supply decreases - and gets harder to obtain - while the demand increases. Start at the end, then work backwards: How much would the last barrel of oil on planet Earth cost to buy? Literally the very last barrel, so that burning it will make oil extinct. It's priceless. It belongs in a museum. If priced accordingly, then no-one can afford to buy it and you absolutely wouldn't, at that price, ever contemplate actually using it.
It's not just that this stuff runs out. It's that, as it runs out, it's going to get scarcer and scarcer, and more and more expensive.
It's only an illusion of choice. Whatever your feelings on the matter, you will eventually get priced out of being able to afford it - and, you know, that'll hit the poorest first, then progress up to the very richest - until, one day, there isn't any left, so it doesn't matter. The only remaining options are renewable.
Like it or not, this is the future. The only possible future.
Accept that now, and get ahead in the new economy to come. Or cling on to the old ways, and face a catastrophic car crash that bankrupts planet Earth ten times over.
Everyone's had it wrong for a very long time now.
Putin's war has just unintentionally given us a "sneak preview". An example of how horridly wrong we've all got this, to depend a world economy - the continuation of our species - on the back of such a lame and dying horse.
Germany might be feeling it for being particularly over-exposed on dependency with Putin. But everyone's got that over-exposure. To Saudi, to Venezuela, to Iraq, to Iran. None of these players are remotely great options, are they? Everyone's in hock to some Medieval tyrant or socialist revolutionary or another. This is a terrible state of affairs for the whole planet.
Germany, ironically, might be the lucky one. It's suffering this now, so it realises the imperative to change things up and dig itself out of this hole. To go full blast and whole hog to replacing as much as possible with renewable sources, to get rid of that over-exposure as far as possible. And to do it right now.
Everyone's been getting it wrong for a few centuries now. Living on borrowed time, and just not thinking of how massive this debt is going to be, when it's finally cashed in.
And you'll notice, not a single word about carbon emissions and climate change. To be clear, all of that is also absolutely real and true, as far as I'm concerned. But I don't need to mention it, as the entire case can be made economically without touching any "save the planet" stuff. Though, you know, it will also incidentally help save the planet at the same time.
I prefer this "enlightened self-interest" case over the "touchy feely" environmental stuff, simply because the latter depends on the person you're talking to actually giving a shit for the planet and future generations and shit. Which, clearly, there are plenty of people for whom this matters not a single jot nor iota, as we've all heard those arguments and they've not done a single fucking thing about it. But "enlightened self-interest" doesn't depend on emotional reaction - even a sociopath can get it. This is economically bad for everyone, YOU included.
Be selfish, look out for number one, worry about your economic situation. It's actually the same conclusion, in the end.
"Words ought to be a little wild - for they are assaults of thought on the unthinking."
- John Maynard Keynes
- John Maynard Keynes
Re: Politics Thread!
I think you missed his "point" that AfD have been on the rise because of supporting Ukraine vs Putin. That's bollocks, of course, the extreme right has been on the rise across Europe for ages. Support for the extreme right pretty much track the growing rich / poor divide, much as it always has.
That's a pretty good eggcorn.KlaxonCow wrote:One can pick on Germany for over-exposing itself to the "tyrant toujour" of Putin.
"massive retard™", "full of shit™", "tiny bitch™", "retarted™", "a bit of a one trick pony™", "petty™", "simple minded idealistic twat™", "miserable humourless fucker™"
Re: Politics Thread!
tufty wrote:snaff
tufty wrote:bollocks of course
Re: Politics Thread!
Well duh.
"massive retard™", "full of shit™", "tiny bitch™", "retarted™", "a bit of a one trick pony™", "petty™", "simple minded idealistic twat™", "miserable humourless fucker™"
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Ratsoap
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Re: Politics Thread!
Because fucking marketing cunts would never call a spade anything other than a Deluxe Easi-Shift Earth Movement Solution.