Do they think we are stupid?

 It's no surprise that AI is disruptive. One area where it is definitely causing waves is the software industry.  Historically developing software was "linear".  If it was a big project then you needed more people to deliver the code. Sadly with all things human - the more people you add to the mix the less productive they became.  Choice of software language could yield some gains  eg the Erlang/Elixir programming language can deliver equivalent functionality to Java with approximately 1/10th of the lines of code.  The holy gain of software has always been abstraction - allowing more and more detail to be hidden.  I always say "abstraction is evil" - the further you get away from understanding how things work, the more likely you are to have catastrophic failure events.  eg AWS outages taking out half the internet. For software consultancy businesses - to double revenues, it usually means doubling the number of software developers. Growth was lin...

 The US and JD Vance have commented about the murder of Henry Nowak. Clearly the UK police are more scared of being considered racist than they are about doing their jobs. That is quite evident and therefore Vance's comments seem justified. JD Vance's comments come from a place of concern that equality and fairness - the bastians of Britishness - are being eroded.  However Starmer's response is that this is political interference.  I certainly don't consider this political interference.  If it is then Starmer is a hypocrite. On the 3 June 2020 he said that  George Floyd's  murder exposed racism in the USA and he was surprised Boris had not confronted Trump on it. Later in June 2020, Starmer and Rayner said "We are appalled by the response of President Trump and the failure of our own government to condemn his actions in the wake of George Floyd’s killing". So therefore Starmer must have been politically interfering in the USA in 2020. Certainly in 2024 Sta...

With all the talk from Andy Burham and Wes Streeting of re-joining the EU against the democratic will of the people, it's reassuring to see that some French still love the British. Marine Le Pen has stated that she would oppose Britain joining the EU without Britain holding a referendum.  Merci madam ! At least some politicians respect due process and have integrity. I suspect part of the reason is she still has a bitter taste in her mouth from Jacques Chirac.  France held a referendum in 2005 where the population voted against the EU constitution.  Rather than accept the voice of the people - he stealthy (we need a new adjective to describe the sleazy behaviour of politicians) went ahead and agreed and signed up to it anyway. 

 Although Wes Streetling has pretty close to zero chance of being Prime Minister, that hasnt stopped him opening his mouth.  Today he has proposed a "wealth tax that works" and said he estimated the reform could raise £12bn a year. Hmmm. So basically he wants to equalise capital gains tax with income tax. Currently  capital gains tax is complicated.   If you are selling property then it is 18% if you are a 20% tax payer and 24% for higher rate tax payers.  If you are selling some other asset then it's 10% for basic rate tax payers and 20% for higher rate tax payers. If you're selling a business (ie an entrepreneur then it's now 18% but was much lower). Last tax year I had some experience with the capital gains tax process.  I ended up being taxed on money I had spent/invested because I couldn't find the receipts from 20 years ago.  That's unfair.  There is no longer any inflation relief (used to be called indexation relief) so I paid tax...

 Today's ONS statistics were not good news.  Unemployment has risen to 5% in March with the biggest job loss of 100,000 since 2020. On the "positive" news wage growth fell from 3.6% to 3.4%. The stats are for the period Jan-Mar this year.  However the minimum wage 8.5% increase takes effect from April so expect this to trigger around a 0.3% increase in inflation.  Hard pressed hospitality businesses have to absorb this high cost.  My personal observation from Wetherspoons is they have solved the increase by having fewer staff. There used to be about 4 people behind the bar and it's now 2 or 3 people. There appears to be a correlation between increased minimum wage and rising unemployment. As the ONS reports quarterly this effect of the minimum wage will be baked in by July (one quarter later) and it's effect will not longer be reported since they report relative percentages rather than absolute increases. In July the Ofgem energy price cap is expected to rise fr...

 Rachel is keeping quiet lately whilst the Starmer fiasco rumbles on.  I guess she's hoping no-one spots the unintended consequence of her tax policies. The Sunday Times rich list has shown that 20 of the UK's 157 billionaires are no longer on the list because they have decided to leave the UK and no longer pay tax here.  1 in 6 of the rich are no longer on the list....they are on some other country's rich list instead. Rachel decided to tax the non dom rich by making their world-wide assets subject to UK inheritance tax.  She could have said something like the annual fee is no longer £60k / year and is now £600k / year and IHT only applies to your UK assets and probably most of these 20 billionaires would have stayed. She naievely thought the rich were stupid and would therefore stay in the UK enjoying the tropical weather and other UK advantages and willingly pay potentially hundreds of millions more in tax. It is likely that these billionaires were generating UK t...