there’s a good tutorial to host ollama and a vector database here

cool but then all the energy companies will be able to do that, so they will:

• enable a much more competitive market for everyone else
• still have huge investments to make to get a seat at the table
• struggle to win business because their brand is trash

electricity supply is regulated in the UK to the extent that companies cannot make money while fully complying with Ofgem rules, that have matured over the past 40 years or so.

They will either make no profit at all, or end up paying the regulator large fines all the time. I’m fine with this.

No, they need to be made to put it right. But that requires a strong regulatory framework, sustained pressure from government backed with expertise and oversight from a capable civil service and it will take years.

Or we can burn it all down and get faraj who will not give two shits about water quality. The choice is ours.

100% I’d love to see nationalised utilities more than anyone else but we need to be realistic that the choices are:

1. the government spends an obscene amount of money to buy out the private interests, economy collapses and faraj gets in, or
2. the government changes laws and takes ownership of the companies (and the debts) some way, needs to borrow tons to service the debts, economy collapses and faraj gets in, or
3. the government just straight up steals control and the shareholders eat the losses. The above scenario plays out where pension funds collapse, the country is punished by investors withdrawing, economy collapses, faraj gets in. Free holidays to El salvador all round.

Yes the concept of a wealth tax is indeed popular in the UK right now, but the challenge as with similar taxes that target the wealthy (like capital gains taxes) is that there are so many loopholes that implementing it to be effective is really tough. An example:

• a high net worth individual owns a company worth £100m. what tax should she pay? if it’s a 1% wealth tax, how does that tax get collected? does she have to sell some of the business to the state each year for zero cost? does she have to find another investor to buy some of the business and pay that out to the government?
• the business has a bad year and is now only worth £80m. does the owner get a £20m tax break now? should the treasury refund the £1m?
• the business owner goes to the bank and takes a loan of £50m with the business as security. what tax is due now? the owner can use the £50m for whatever she wants, but taxes are not due on loans.
• she uses the £50m to buy a large amount of property abroad as an investment. what tax is due on those next year? does she have to sell a property every year to pay the wealth tax?
• finally, the business owner decides to take a stake in a large overseas renewable energy company and buys a 40% holding worth £10m. what tax is due on that holding and how is it collected?

most wealthy individuals have very little in the bank, and their wealth is based on notional ownership of valuable assets like companies. this is just one example of where it will be very difficult to implement a tax system that doesn’t cause business owners to take their money elsewhere to invest, or on the other hand to have endless court battles to force them to sell assets at some value to pay a tax bill.

Greens come out with some crazy policies sometimes which turn off leftie voters.

Why don’t Greens align on a sensible, costed and achievable progressive policy platform instead of making half their manifesto fringe issues like banning GM food, banning nuclear power, interfering in medical research etc.

Tor operator here.

If you don’t have a second IP for your relay, don’t host at home. You will have CAPTCHAs everywhere, many sites will block you and your ISP will eventually contact you to stop degrading their IP space reputation.

Most website owners don’t discriminate between Tor exits and relays. They subscribe to block-lists that include all known Tor IP addresses. Major online services will make your browsing experience really shitty and once you’re a “known Tor IP” it will take months to remove that reputation.

You can run a Bridge instead, but you will eventually have the same problem.

Reform next government, Musk invited over to destroy civil service and steal citizen data for AI. Somehow there’s still no money for anyone. Economy crashes, inflation through the roof, recession. Some form of the Rwanda plan returns to appease voters. Brits told that factory and fossil fuel jobs are the future. Brain drain.

Labour elected to form next government, promising not to raise taxes but somehow make everything better.

This bill is targeting critical national infrastructure and including data centres into the scope of the national cyber resilience effort.

The fines are for companies (telcos, utilities) who fail to patch against known vulns in a timely manner, meant to light a fire under those companies who don’t care enough to invest in cyber defence and are routinely compromised.

This is a good thing for national security.

quite right, it’s the mk14 my bad

mk16 for DMR - why does this make it the worst?

Twingate is another option if it’s just device to device networking and you trust all the devices that are in your network. It’s free for personal use and peer to peer so no issues with TOS if you’re streaming.

it’s all a big ploy to give the US bargaining chips when negotiating with the UK for trade agreements.

“well we’re going to tariff the shit out of you unless we can sell chlorine washed chickens in your country”

“oh also fuck your publicly owned railways and roads, you’ll sell them to us at a discount or you’ll be sorry.”

“by the way we’re still going to endorse and fund far right parties and destabilise your democracy - that’s just what allies do, right?”

🤡

you’ll put those savings into a stocks and shares ISA where any gains from stocks are tax free guaranteed.

If you have more than £20k a year to put away into stocks and shares then yeah you need to pay some tax bruv.

Far less. In the UK half of all wealth is owned by the top 10% but there is very little concentration in the top 1% compared with the USA and other nations like Italy, Russia and China. Also, the degree of wealth inequality has mostly remained consistent for the last 10-15 years.

Another factor to consider is that for the top 10% (which in the UK you are in if you earn more than £52,000) hold around 50% of their wealth in pensions (which are taxed) and around 32% in properties on average.

Have a look at ONS data to back up what I’ve said. https://www.ons.gov.uk/visualisations/dvc1727/Fig2/datadownload.xlsx

I still do believe that there is a better balance to be found with tax and wealth, but I’m less convinced that the answer is solely based on going after a 0.1% of wealthy.

agree, but a reminder that the top 1% pay 30% of the taxes the treasury receives.

fair. US debt to GDP seems to be around 100-120%[1] whereas in the UK there was briefly a spike of debt to 100% of GDP[2].

As a much smaller nation whose currency isn’t used as a world trade mechanism, britain devalue its currency too much, so there are fewer economic levers to pull when managing debt.

[1] https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/USA/united-states/debt-to-gdp-ratio [2] https://www.msn.com/en-gb/money/other/uk-debt-hits-100-of-gdp-adding-to-rachel-reeves-headache/ar-AA1qSNYF

the thing is, it’s a gap between the money the government is spending and the amount of money it gets through taxes and other incomes each year.

So it’s money that has to be borrowed from folks, every year to keep things going as they are. And each time that money is borrowed it needs interest paid on it which makes the problem worse. Especially with the high interest rates around the world.

So british people are working hard, paying their taxes and a percentage of those taxes is going towards servicing debt that has been built up, by poor spending decisions in the past.

It’s like payday loans for governments. you’ve either got to get spending under control, make more money somehow (tricks in the car park or maybe sell crack) or eventually reach the end of the road.