FourPacketsOfPeanuts
@FourPacketsOfPeanuts@lemmy.world
- Comment on Is the UK shut down during easter? 3 days ago:
4 day weekend
- Comment on MPs vote in favour of historic bill to allow assisted dying after emotional debate 3 days ago:
Well that seems like a bad idea
Person,: “I’m paranoid that the state is out to get me and want to end my life!”
The state: “well, we’ll be happy to help…”
- Comment on MPs vote in favour of historic bill to allow assisted dying after emotional debate 4 days ago:
Explain?
- Comment on MPs vote in favour of historic bill to allow assisted dying after emotional debate 4 days ago:
Wow, unexpected. Finally some boldness to be humane about end-of-life situations.
I just hope it comes with sensible checks and balances.
- Comment on First UK arrest made over filming of women on nights out without consent 4 days ago:
Bad title. He was arrested for harassing them, which included videoing without their consent. Filming in public remains completely legal and consent isn’t required.
- Comment on Another offensive pub name 6 days ago:
Pub owner should have said that they were exercising their religious freedom and quoting Jesus in Luke 13:32-34. And then sue PETA on the grounds of religiously motivated harassment.
- Comment on Cheshire mother who kept her baby hidden in a drawer for three years jailed 6 days ago:
So many questions
- Comment on Not disparaging the dead or anything. But why does it seem in the US we are expected to feel sorry for a person who overdoses on illegal drugs? Didn't they make the choice knowing the outcome? 1 week ago:
It’s worth continually highlighting that drug use led to death, deliberate or accidental because people have a tendency to overestimate how safe occasional use is or how glamorous the lifestyle is. Reporting the truth now and then is important, this isn’t even “anti drug” propaganda. It’s just what happened.
- Comment on The world's first foldable phone maker is now out of business 1 week ago:
So… they folded?
- Comment on Thames Water supply ‘on knife-edge’ with £23bn repairs needed 2 weeks ago:
That’s because you seem to be assuming nationalization has neither an actual nor political cost. It has both.
Chancellor’s budget had been under a microscope with people wondering how on earth they’ll balance the books without raising taxes on people (as they promised). Chucking in the nationalization of the country’s biggest water supplier like its spare change is nuts.
Private investment is fine, even preferable, so long as it’s regulated properly. That’s Ofwat’s job. If you don’t think Ofwat can do that job properly then I’m not sure why you’d think similar people would do better running the entirety of TW…
- Comment on How To Compress A Video Without Losing Quality 2 weeks ago:
Poorly written “advice” columns that exist only to hawk you some product is everything that’s wrong with the way interactions over the internet work nowadays. It’s ghoulish.
- Comment on Thames Water supply ‘on knife-edge’ with £23bn repairs needed 2 weeks ago:
You realize that when a business is privatized they don’t give it to the civil service right?
Of course.
Though what’s happening here is that Thames Water can no longer issue dividends to investors without permission from the regulator Ofwat given things are in such a mess. The government doesn’t want the service to collapse because it doesn’t want the cost of nationalising it. So some balance has to be stuck, allowing Thames Water to issue some return to private investors, (they’d previously not received dividend on their investment for 7 years) so that they don’t withdraw their investment altogether. Additional private investment that was in the pipeline was withdrawn when it was seen that Thames Water wasn’t able to offer a return from its profits, which has what’s made its cash situation worse.
But this is the nature of private investment. It has to be courted, motivated. The government is trying at all costs to avoid the huge cost of nationalising TW. And to do that it has to be allowed to issue plans where it’s both delivering its service obligations but also distributing profit.
It is being heavily scrutinized and the regulator has already put in controls over what it can do financially. My point (although I was being flippant) is that you need genuine good business experience and leadership to sail a group as large as TW away from being this close to collapse. A lot of it involves showing a credible plan for making it work within budget and delivering some return to investors so that vitally needed investment can be secured. This is really difficult to do but from reading their interim report, they’re just about managing it.
I think calls from various MPs for them to revise their compensation / dividend schemes are a type of virtue signalling. There is a huge amount of attention on this. They’re paying compensation packages comesurate with what it costs to buy leadership skill from the business world to be able to handle the complexity of the operation. MPs all know that, they just also want to make suitable noises so that when voters look at the numbers and go “how much?!” that they’ve looked like theyre right along side them tutting and shaking their head.
But in reality anyone in parliament knows they need to buy in leadership from the business world. It’s just political view much they publicly acknowledge that fact.
- Comment on As AI and megaplatforms take over, the hyperlinks that built the web may face extinction 2 weeks ago:
Interesting. Is that because it blocks JavaScript, ads etc?
- Comment on Thames Water supply ‘on knife-edge’ with £23bn repairs needed 2 weeks ago:
While that’s obviously gross, I’m not sure some budget public service pleb who wouldn’t last 5 mins in a real business wouldn’t simply make things worse
- Comment on As AI and megaplatforms take over, the hyperlinks that built the web may face extinction 2 weeks ago:
“The first rule in government spending: why build one when you can have two twice the price?”
- Comment on As AI and megaplatforms take over, the hyperlinks that built the web may face extinction 2 weeks ago:
Lovely :)
- Comment on As AI and megaplatforms take over, the hyperlinks that built the web may face extinction 2 weeks ago:
Can we carve out a part of the internet please where we go back to super basic html pages that are a mix of self hosted hobby blogs and university research sites? It was good then. Everything’s gotten so noisy, and busy, and shit.
- Comment on Bluesky says it won’t train AI on your posts 2 weeks ago:
It’s widely celebrated that Jean Baptiste Kempf, who could have easily sold VLC for tens of millions, declined to do so keeping the enormously popular video player free and open source
- Comment on Bluesky says it won’t train AI on your posts 2 weeks ago:
These were a couple of PhD geeks who hit it big, it’s certainly not inevitable that intelligent people get absorbed with money, see the creator of VLC for example. It’s just sad that these guys could have been rich AND kept the internet ‘pure’ and research focused. But instead commerce has crept in and taken a shit on what was once a clean simple brilliant search service.
- Comment on Do the ultra-rich consume popular media? 2 weeks ago:
Bezos + Lauren Sanchez apparently binge watch Fallout, Baby Reindeer, Presumed Innocent and Severance…
“My favorite time is when the house is calm and quiet and Jeff and I are deciding what show we’re going to binge that night,” Sánchez told the magazine.
“It takes a little bit of time to decide,” she added. “You can imagine our tastes are a little different. But I love our TV time, we just have the best time.”
Among their favorites is “Fallout” – a post-apocalyptic drama based on the video game series of the same name. The series airs on Bezos’s own Amazon Prime TV. But the couple also watches shows on rival platforms Netflix and Apple TV.
“We recently saw Baby Reindeer, which of course everyone saw,” Sánchez told People. “We also just finished Presumed Innocent, which was incredible. Oh, and we loved Severance.”
- Comment on Bluesky says it won’t train AI on your posts 2 weeks ago:
Now that I think about it I’m not sure why they had to accept investor money at all. I wonder if it would have turned out differently if they had remained 100% privately owned?
- Comment on Bluesky says it won’t train AI on your posts 2 weeks ago:
I don’t get it. They were rich beyond most people’s wildest dreams. Why did they jump aboard the enshitification bandwagon?
- Comment on Is it really possible to tax the rich? 2 weeks ago:
Yes that’s true, I was trying to make the point that the ownership of the company is usually directly responsible for its success, whatever form that takes. And forcing the dilution of ownership (by taxing a company on its overall market cap rather than its profits) is only going to be disruptive to whatever arrangement made it successful in the first place (be that forcing control out of the hands of a good founder or diluting the control of a group of investors that approved a good board). Don’t get me wrong, that might sometimes be a good thing. It’s just that the logic “you’ve made this company is so successful you’re going to have less control over it” is unlikely to work out well in the long run. Better to take more taxes from profits if anything (as long as that’s internationally competitive) or have stronger laws preventing companies with huge value from muscling in and taking over competitors or whole industries (eg Musk etc)
- Comment on Is it really possible to tax the rich? 2 weeks ago:
And what exactly is the difference between a loan and a loan acting as income?
- Comment on Is it really possible to tax the rich? 2 weeks ago:
Why? Are any loans ever taxed?
There were tax evasion schemes in the UK where wealthy people could take loans from an offshore entity they contributed to and never pay the loans back. But this was shutdown fairly quickly by HMRC (British IRS) and a bunch of people were fined / went to jail. Don’t know if the same is true in America?
- Comment on NHS-branded baby formula could prevent parents paying too much, watchdog says 2 weeks ago:
More of this sort of thing! State shouldn’t be involved in the market of choice. But in the market of “no choice” it should absolutely step in and give people basic quality options to help prevent them being gouged.
- Comment on NHS-branded baby formula could prevent parents paying too much, watchdog says 2 weeks ago:
I think they should do it and print breastfeeding class info on the container if they really want to
- Comment on Post Office: Fujitsu boss 'does not know' if Horizon is reliable 2 weeks ago:
“is it fit for purpose?” is a better question because if you don’t know if it’s reliable you have your answer already
- Comment on Password problem behind UK air traffic control failure 2 weeks ago:
Problem with one line of data? Better shutdown the airspace.
Amazing this hadn’t happened before with a strategy like that.
Also, duplicate waypoints are allowed, just not in the same region. But also exit points don’t have to be explicitly indicated and the system will just look for the nearest waypoint in another region.
Sounds like the whole thing was a needlessly hacky messy standard. I’ve dealt with quite a few of them, but to tolerate it in air traffic control? Good grief…
- Comment on Is it really possible to tax the rich? 2 weeks ago:
Companies do pay other taxes roughly comparable to their size, I was just simplifying for the sake of explanation. Employee tax is one example. Don’t know how it works in the US but in the UK all businesses will pay a “national insurance” tax contribution for every employee they have. This is a level that can be turned by the treasury. But increasing any tax burden discourages the activity that leads to it. Taxes on employees, although paid by companies, are seen as “anti job” taxes. Taxes on profits are seen as “punishment” for honestly raising a profit in the home country (rather than various offshore licensing schemes). The raw market value of a company could be taxed, but that sort of perversely encourages a company to download its value.
Ultimately we want companies to be successful, the only issue with it is when the ownership is concentrated in the hands of the very few. Unfortunately that appears to be what drives success in many cases. Small ownership = focussed quick decision making. Sometimes that really is what’s led to an American company seeing the success it does rather than some Chinese competitor gaining the edge.
That’s why I throw a lot of this back on consumers. We’re the democratic force in all this, and we have a lot of power when we act en masse. Why is there one Amazon instead of two? Because people also choose cheapest and they fail to properly value the fact they can have all sorts next day (even same day) when that service never existed ten plus years ago. If they valued that properly then they’d be more able to see competitor B at $10 is still providing them good value service even if Amazon is selling the same at $7.
I’m not sure that’s it’s healthy to stop people having free choice of where to shop. People being able to vote with their money is what makes capitalist countries the innovation experts of the world.
The issue is what happens when that capital concentrated into a small number of hands starts to wield anti-choice power and / or political power. So I think people building successful companies and being wildly rich (on paper) is fine, but legislation should stop them hoovering up smaller competitors (anti trust laws). And money should certainly be capped and prevented from undue influence in political processes.
The US and UK are quite different in that regard. Our anti trust laws could be better, but at least our political processes are relatively short and the use of money in them held to a reasonably high level of disclosure. Both could be improved.
And I think they will when the population elects a social-good minded government that’s pro business. Typically in the past I’d personally say this mostly lines up with what used to be called New Labour. They certainly did some social good but they made some appalling mistakes trying to partner with business.
I don’t know that the equivalent hope in the US is. I see the democrats gets criticised a lot of not being well connected to working class people and too cosy with big business. But campaign finance laws would need to change before the way in which month and politics interacts could ever reasonably change.
Which all feels a bit far off, which is why I come back to what small actions individuals can do… Buy local, from small businesses, be prepared to spend more to spread wealth a little more evenly, buy domestic, not foreign, avoid the services of megacorps wherever you can, enable others to do the same. Who knows? Can you imagine a community run Amazon that cost a bit more but funneled profits back into the local community? Things like this can be tackled regardless of what’s going on in the halls of power.