I never thought of it before but your comment just made me realise this would be a great backdoor way to get the PR ball rolling. Make the lord’s elected with a full PR system. Maybe with half the seats going up for election every 7 years or something.

They pay a lower rate.

If they were dead set on doing a tax cut (unfortunately for the good of the country) at least they made it an NI cut rather than an income tax cut.

I can see a way forward for labour if they want to raise more money without straight up reversing these cuts by abolishing NI (or gradually reducing it to phase it out) and correspondingly increasing income and/or capital gains tax.

They can chalk it up as making the tax system fairer by removing the tax on which employees pay more than self employed or those with passive wealth-based income. Simultaneously they can say they are building on the one positive outcome of the previous budget.

Thanks for writing this.

When a nationalised company is seen as inefficient or poor service. We all instantly know who to blame. The ministers in charge of that company. Whereas we see an extra layer of blame for privrate non competing companies.

Specifically this aspect is not something I’d really considered before but it’s an astute point.

The numbers quoted indicate much more of a sea change has occurred than I would have expected.

in the 1960s around an eighth of British voters switched their choice between elections. By the 1980s it was a fifth. At the last election Professor Edward Fieldhouse, a political scientist at the University of Manchester, and his colleagues concluded that most of the electorate were swing voters. Politicians see it on the doorstep. “In 1997 around 40% of voters were up for grabs but today it is probably around 70%,” says Jonathan Reynolds, Labour’s shadow business secretary and an MP in the north-west.

Maybe there’s hope for PR within the next 20 years.

Mr Robot, you missed an important sentence:

Abolishing the non-dom tax regime would raise an estimated £3.6bn a year.

Britons, for instance, think they live in a country where only 37 per cent of people would give 1 per cent of their income to the climate fight, but the study indicates the real figure is 48 per cent.

"48% Vs 52%” Oh god it’s the cursed numbers again!

If you’re handy with a screwdriver and a hacksaw + hammer you could disassemble it and put the smaller pieces in the bin one by one.

They’re really descending into the pits of weird fringe politics - like the sort of stuff you’d see from pre-Farage UKIP.

It also seems to be the opposite strategy to Johnson, who was essentially the bullshitting yes man that wanted great, wonderful, positive things for everyone but with no plan on how to achieve it. Instead of grand visions of new (unfeasable) infrastructure projects based on (non existent) future technology that the government will help develop, and impressive sounding targets (with no execution plan) to “make Britain world beating”, we now have policies seeking to actively block and slow development of anything new. Johnson was popular because he was promising progress and great things to everyone. Sunak is now attempting to do the polar opposite of what Johnson used to achieve electoral success, presumably because he’s aiming for the opposite of electoral success???

Yeah I think YSH can pipe around structured data. This wiki page has some details:

https://github.com/oilshell/oil/wiki/Structured-Data-in-Oil

Oils is interesting.

https://www.oilshell.org/blog/2023/03/faq.html

Checkout lemmit.online

BNC connector, such a satisfying screw and click into place mechanism.

I can imagine a hacky way to anonymise voting would be to have a pool of fake user accounts on your instance. When someone on the instance clicks to up/downvote, a random fake account is used to make the vote instead. This would then kind of work like a vote tumbler and keep the voting anonymous but still work with activity pub.

Maybe activitypub is actually a bit crap and we should all be using something better like nostr though?

The two potential roads seem somewhat equivalent to me:

1. Threads federation is blocked by the main Mastodon instances. A huge user base of non-techies starts using Threads and it dwarfs the rest of the fediverse acting as a singular centralised platform. The fediverse continues to be a techie/ideological anti-corporate community as it is now with a relatively small community in the grand scheme of things.
2. Threads federated with some of the big Mastodon instances. Fediverse instances outside of Threads get a large amount of growth as people see the extra content available in this larger federated environment. Growth of Threads still outpaces all other fediverse instances combined. Meta then carries out some form of EEE tactics and some large chunk of the userbase of the non-Threads instances switch to Threads. The techie/anti-corporate community continues to use fediverse instances without any interaction with Threads.

Both scenarios end in a large centralised platform run by Meta and a small community that want to avoid a corporate platform.

I think it’s also wise to separate the effect of large corporate instances in the fediverse between effects on Mastodon (where users follow users) vs Lemmy/Kbin (where users follow communities). In the case of Mastodon, the effects of EEE tactics will be strong due to a more powerful network effect because it’s important that a particular person is on the same platform as you (i.e. this is a similar situation to XMPP and gchat). In contrast, you just need some people to participate in a Lemmy/Kbin community to make it worth joining, but it doesn’t matter exactly who, meaning that membership can be small and sparse but the community still has a meaningful existence (i.e like niche forums).