MagnumOpus

Of course you can walk. But can you walk to your workplace, your kid’s nursery, your local bakery/supermarket, your doctor, your dentist, the pharmacy?

So it seems like they have been spot on? TFA quotes the OBR as estimating a 4% negative impact and the CEFR estimate of -5.5% cumulative impact.

But Apple’s excuse not to comply with it is privacy-related.

You are comparing monthly individual wages in Pakistan to annual household income in the US. That results in your numbers being nonsense.

Why should your children not pay tax on the valuables that they acquired without any work, when everyone else has to earn money and both pay income tax and then pay sales tax to acquire the same jewellery?

(And you don’t enter into the equation. You are dead by the time the taxation happens.)

Yes. They were talking about 8,000 metres of altitude. (Talking about Mallory should have been a clue too.)

One might even suspect that the particularly nice parts of London are full of NIMBYs who successfully petition against the eyesore of mobile masts being put up…

(Circumstantial evidence is that a particularly extra nice part of central London has no tube station, ostensibly to keep the riff-raff out, and is the only area with a proposed station on Crossrail 2 that voted against having a new station!)

Hckrnews.com is a far better frontent. Implemented the long line fix, and also preserves topics that were upvoted to the top and subsequently flagged to death by bot farms or the owners.

Many European countries still have their own (single-country) versions of debit cards - EC card/giropay in Germany for instance - and they are often accepted more widely than credit cards.

But international travel becomes painful. (Hence EC cards are co-badged as a fall-back with Visa Debit or Maestro, impossible if you are sanctioned.)

No, this is an artifact of Russian reserves getting frozen in 2022 and autocracies the world round getting more careful about having all their eggs in that basket.

The PRC’s SAFE is selling dollars and buying gold in a very covert but absolutely massive fashion, and most likely, so are many other countries in a smaller way.

Nitpick: it is one life per year for the billion invested. Which after the typical metro infrastructure lifespan of a century is actually viable because the cost for a working-age US life in medical and other contexts is probably around the $10mn ballpark.

(Assuming financing happens cheaply by the federal state rather than via PPP grift; and assuming that $50bn is the number, which in NYC is an underestimate by a factor of at least five…)

No need to rewire anything - just get a universal plug adapter for NEMA 6-15P (or whatever your kitchen outlet is going to be) from Amazon, plug it onto the UK plug of your kettle, and Bob’s your uncle. (The building inspector doesn’t need to even see your kettle and plug.)

It has both lossy and lossless modes.

Bloomberg reported last year that Sam is angling for the board to give him 7% of the company, and the board was seriously discussing it. The optics weren’t right at the time, but you can rely on something being in planning.

Sam doesn’t do anything for free, even though he is already a billionaire 2-3 times over.

Capitalism is supposed to have perfectly competitive goods to be efficient. IP protection - especially the obscene century-long protection of copyrights - renders capitalist competition into monopolistic competition, which no longer maximises consumer surpluses. Hence mandatory licencing can increase benefits for society - and in the past such models worked - e.g. for radio. Today, the only reason content conglomerates get away with it is that they can pay of sufficiently many legislators.

COVID was a black swan, the completely irresponsible and unnecessary redistribution from taxpayers to company owners that was the PPP was a choice. (One that most other governments worldwide didn’t make.)

That is very very variable. In the last five years, raw lithium carbonate world market prices have been swinging from $10/kg to >$70/kg and back. So right now LiFePo is getting cheaper, but if lithium explodes in price again, battery prices will rise too.

Macbooks shipped to Europe don't ever touch US ground (and I'd wager 99.9% of their parts don't either). So US tarriffs should be irrelevant - and the EU doesn't have big China tarriffs outside of EV and solar panel anti-dumping retaliation.

The utility will bill the 40p/kWh to its industrial customers (and residential customers on “agile” smart meter tarriffs), and the customers can decide whether they need the power even at 40p, or whether they shut down their bitcoin mine/aluminium smelter/EV charger/floodlights for those two hours.

In the longer term, price spikes like this incentivise the building of batteries - which might be marginably profitable most of the time but profit big time (and help big time) in periods of price spikes.

“Marginal pricing” is just how a market economy works.

If there weren’t marginal pricing, nobody in the private industry would build more wind farms or submarine power lines or battery capacity - which are lucrative because they produce peak-time power cheaper than imported gas — and these are the things that will drive power prices down eventually.

That’s not the EU’s fault, is it? At best the import taxes (if any) are on the EU. VAT is added by your country, and if something is more expensive after everything than importing it yourself, that’s on a lack of competition in your marketplace…

At least since the mid-1990s Echelon revelations in the EU parliament anybody who cares knows that Bad Aibling (and similar stations all across Europe like Bude/Morwenstow in the UK) had been operated by the NSA in collaboration with US Army intelligence (if the official name of “18th United States Army Security Agency Field Station” didn’t clue you in.

Officially it has been transferred to the BND; experience suggests all data from there still goes straight back to Fort Meade… (And in exchange the BND gets some morsels back on people _they_ are not allowed to spy on publicly.)

Incorrect. The decision was made by the SPD (leftist)+ Green coalition government in 2000, and was a condition by the Greens to enter the coalition (and then was adopted by an SPD chancellor who later took a job with Gazprom).

When the conservatives got back into power a decade later, they started to roll back the nuclear exit. But during the panic after the Japan tsunami this policy became unpopular so the conservatives reversed course and stuck with the disastrous Green policy.

But make no mistake, if the Greens did not make it into government, the Atomausstieg would never have happened.

Subjects to read for details:

* “Atomkonsens” 2000 and “Novellierung des Atomgesetzes” 2002, Kabinett Schröder,

* “Laufzeitverlängerung deutscher Kernkraftwerke”, 2010, Kabinett Merkel II

* “13. Gesetz zur Änderung des Atomgesetzes“ 2011 post-Fukushima, taking back the 2010 extensions

the Russian state very quickly tucked its tail in after that

Russia retaliated by disallowing tourism to Turkey in the summer of 2016, causing about $5 billion of damage to the Turkish economy.

https://carnegieendowment.org/static/media/images/202105-Pri...

Some do, some don't. Traditional banks will ask for a proof of address (and only accept a council tax bill, utility bill or rental contract). Some new online banks like Revolut will allow you to get around that step.

I know - I went to Oxford instead of LSE for my masters degree exactly because the reputation of the latter is not there outside a narrow subset of finance/econ professionals in the UK. Even though the LSE programme was older and more established and cheaper.

The same is true in the US as well: The University of Chicago and University of Pennsylvania are probably world beating for economics and finance research respectively -- but I would still recommend people to go to Harvard/Stanford for an economics-focused undergrad or finance MSc or MBA if they have the choice, due to the name recognition and the network...

Cambridge's reputation for sciences is the best in the country, way ahead of Oxford outside a few niches. The tripos part III Masters programme is selective and demanding - and most students are doing it while applying/angling for PhD programmes so from what I hear the pace is high.

people are less naive about it and also realized they don't really care all that much about their second cousin's vacations or their old classmates' life updates

Young people do care - but the "checking on friends" and "showing off my glamourous life/vacation" has moved to Instagram and Snapchat. Partly because Facebook is full of "old people" and thus less cool. As the Insta generation starts to have their own kids, those kids indubitably will look for another platform...

This is very much wrong. The Greens were never in a coalition with CDU/Merkel. (Merkel was in coalitions with the SPD/Social Democrats and FDP/Liberals.)

Greens were in a coalition with the Social Democrats led by Chancellor Schroeder; Schroeder agreed to the Greens’ demands for nuclear exit and negotiated a board role at Gazprom for himself after his political career.

Merkel initially wanted to reverse or freeze the exit timeline but bowed to public opinion to continue it once the tsunami hit Japan.

The nuclear exit was started 10 years before that - mostly also because of vibes: the Green Party became junior coalition partner in the government for the first time, and the greens had a longstanding anti-nuclear stance from their roots in the 1970s anti-nuclear weapons movement… They pushed for the nuclear exit.

When the conservatives regained power, they vowed to cancel and stop the exit timeline, but then came Fukushima and an irrational media panic - and Merkel did what she does best.