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Post by patman post on Mar 26, 2023 17:30:07 GMT
Do you remember him? He used to run the Telegraph when it was actually worth the cover price. Now it is a trash paper similar to the Daily Mail.
His view is that there is a ultra ideological so-called right-wing of the Tory Party which are those who voted down the latest deal Rishi secured from the EU and have generally speaking been a big pain in the arse. To name names we would be talking about Johnson, Redwood, Duncan-Smith, Mogg, Truss and so on. He says these people have existed for a long time and for decades being arguing with the more moderate Tories such that the Tory Party is in disarray and generally failing. He goes on to say they live in the past. They have this idea of the empire, their arguments usually refer to the past and they are idealogical rather than practical. He believes they are generally stupid, immature and have a total disregard for speaking the truth, so as you can imagine they are very unhelpful when the rest of the party wants to see some results.
Now in my view a lot of people could say this, but coming from Max Hastings I think one has to take it seriously. He's been around the block a few times, knows politics inside out and is a smart man, plus you could not accuse him of being pro-Labour or anything like that. I've come to the same conclusion myself about living in the past, although I would say it is far more widespread than just this group. It often goes hand in hand with a military background. All that marching eh? Traditions that have been passed down for hundreds of years. Max thinks we aught to get modern.
By the way, since that deal was struck about 2-3 weeks ago Starmer's rating has dropped 7 points.
BvL, I've listened to Hastings talk about Boris a few times over the years and there is one glaring fact that the casual and indeed impartial observer would say stands out like a pork chop at a Bar Mitzvah: Hastings does not like Boris. Ever since Boris's days as a Telegraph hack in Brussels Hastings has not liked him, Hastings has never liked him and this is not a secret. So please don't think you have found a ground breaking link, this is not breaking news. The only people who ever ask Hastings about Boris, are people who want to hear bad news about Boris. I wonder if it's because Hastings got a serious amount of grief because of Johnson's misreporting and made-up quotes in his reports from Brussels.
Another of Johnson's bosses, Andrew Neil, who fired Johnson, told GMB in 2022: "Boris Johnson is a member of a party of one. It's not really the Conservative Party it is the Boris Johnson party and that is all that matters, he has always put himself ahead of anything else including the country and the party, parliament, everything.
"It doesn't surprise me that we can barely trust a word he says it was for these reasons we parted company in the first place. I am seeing this being played out on a far grander scale than I did when he worked for me at The Spectator."
"We are now seeing the consequences but we are not in a constitutional crisis we are in a political crisis and we are in a crisis of government but the pain will soon end, it will soon be over and he will even have to face the inevitable."
Personally, I'd trust the opinions of both Hastings and Neil above anything Johnson says...
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Post by bancroft on Mar 26, 2023 20:33:57 GMT
Hastings does not do root cause analysis, IMO he just regurgitates what is already known and adds his own melodramatic take on it.
Neil is better as he asks questions from other political pundits as well as giving his own opinion.
Tories are divided between businesses that want to get back into Europe for bigger profits and those that realise the Tory grass roots wants their culture back not flooded with Europeans trying to abuse benefits or cause crime.
Just wait and see shortly we will hear things from other EU countries as the criminals that were here have largely moved abroad.
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Post by Baron von Lotsov on Mar 26, 2023 23:39:59 GMT
Huawei might be clean now yet for how long and while we are close to the USA then China won't be trusted in certain ibdustries. I think the firm has been run well from the start. There has been some propaganda against them for copying software, but it was trivial and the kind of thing any software firm could accidentality do by using a file that was not shareware. I mean a big corporation like that gets legal claims all the time. Their success was initially in the home market where they simply made good functional phones that people could afford, since for a long time China was very poor. Neither is the claim it is connected to the government true either. The problem is if we as a country punish a foreign firm for no good reason other than suspicion and heresy, we damage our reputation as a business partner. The worst thing of all is acting irrationally. It adds risk to business investment. You could invent half a billion in the UK and suddenly the government has a change of heart and you could lose it. Investors are nervous people by nature. |
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Post by bancroft on Mar 27, 2023 12:00:54 GMT
It is not a question of whether the product is good more a question of it will be used to spy on us if not now yet in future and that is the major concern.
There is little doubt we are in a cold war with China not as serious as with Russian yet still a cold war.
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Post by Baron von Lotsov on Mar 28, 2023 13:45:16 GMT
It is not a question of whether the product is good more a question of it will be used to spy on us if not now yet in future and that is the major concern. There is little doubt we are in a cold war with China not as serious as with Russian yet still a cold war. Do you understand encryption? Even if anyone could tap the encrypted message it would not do them any good. The second point was that it was checked out by GCHQ and found to be clean. Our government did the right thing regarding the due diligence of getting it checked out and any reasonable human being will see that since it passed the test the firm should expect to be able to sell it. But what you don't seem to quite get is this was bogus all along and the US is playing a game of market protectionism so it forces us to buy their less advanced equipment at twice the price. Since they started stripping out Huawei 5G from the US the 5G services are now worse than 4G because the cunts have not engineered their 5G properly. Huawei 5G uses a special dual band technology to give both reliability and high speed data. It is the best in the world and we are being forced by the US to ban it. Another reason the US forbids it is not the Chinese could spy on us, but that because the Huawei system is secure the system forbids the US to spy on us, which is does all the time with its own backdoors. For example Whats App is insecure. Indeed all Western comms have backdoors in them for the NSA to spy. Even Samsung TVs could enable the NSA to spy on the owner and hear everything in the room the TV was in, even when switched off. I suggest we stand up to the US and tell them to stay out of our affairs. They have no right to dictate to a sovereign nation. A lot of this spying by the US is not even for security, it is commercial intelligence, like what large companies plan to do and that kind of thing, especially useful for hostile takeovers and the like. |
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Post by bancroft on Mar 28, 2023 18:19:22 GMT
I am not disputing protectionism works and lets not forget China has gotten powerful from certain US factions that have sold advanced tech to China while China artificially protected its currency.
You mention encryption and like I said today it is clean but we are in a cold war with China so it would be foolhardy to even take a chance that in future it would not be used for espionage IMO.
Nothing to stop you getting a personal mobile or smart device from China if that is your choice.
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Post by Baron von Lotsov on Mar 28, 2023 19:14:44 GMT
I am not disputing protectionism works and lets not forget China has gotten powerful from certain US factions that have sold advanced tech to China while China artificially protected its currency. You mention encryption and like I said today it is clean but we are in a cold war with China so it would be foolhardy to even take a chance that in future it would not be used for espionage IMO. Nothing to stop you getting a personal mobile or smart device from China if that is your choice. As I was trying to explain this idea here of why you don't intervene in the market I have a video here of the situation regarding the banking crisis.
What is claimed here is that the unprecedented government intervention forcing shareholders to sell Credit Suisse to UBS was the reason why Deutsche Bank's shares have crashed out. Investors are scared that the government could take their property too and decide what to do with it. This really gets to the heart of what property ownership means. To own something is to control it. The reverse is also true though, if you are smart, you do the opposite and provide a financial system that can't be messed about by whimsical governments. This is how the City of London traditionally operated. The MPs just did not understand it so kept their noses out. The investors on the other hand saw London as a place which always honours a deal, like cast iron certainty. It is why it is one of the most important financial centres in the world. Same rules today as tomorrow. China has now cottoned on to this principle and one reason why it is measured in its response to sanctions. It does not want to be seen as the one sanctioning anyone. There is greater value in this cast-iron certainty the money is safe in their hands.
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Post by bancroft on Mar 29, 2023 11:34:37 GMT
The Banking crisis more or less proves without regulation investment banks and other financial institutions will go out of control in their bids to increase profits. The banking crisis was not caused by regulations more by not having enough and not enforcing it.
The current crisis is the knock on to try and destroy Russia economically as other countries are dumping dollars for international trading and without this demand the US cannot fund its budget deficits so they are putting up rates to try and protect their currency. Nato allies are also putting up rates which is damaging economies on the rebound from COV-ID. Rates will go up further because of the war in Ukraine and as more countries de-dollarise. This will harm economies as less will invest in shares and people will have less disposable income.
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Post by Baron von Lotsov on Mar 29, 2023 13:37:24 GMT
The Banking crisis more or less proves without regulation investment banks and other financial institutions will go out of control in their bids to increase profits. The banking crisis was not caused by regulations more by not having enough and not enforcing it. The current crisis is the knock on to try and destroy Russia economically as other countries are dumping dollars for international trading and without this demand the US cannot fund its budget deficits so they are putting up rates to try and protect their currency. Nato allies are also putting up rates which is damaging economies on the rebound from COV-ID. Rates will go up further because of the war in Ukraine and as more countries de-dollarise. This will harm economies as less will invest in shares and people will have less disposable income. It's the type of regulation which is important. For example a regulation that made transactions safer and less prone to internet tampering would have a positive effect on market confidence.
The problem now is that there has been too much money printing which caused interest rates to be artificially low. If you print a load of money you see a short-term positive effect in that GDP rises, but after about a year you will start to see inflation creep up. This is simply understood as there being no free lunch. You can't generate wealth out of financial manipulation. What generates wealth is industry and industry relies on a stable financial system. Industry makes more wealth out of long-term investment. It takes decades to build industry up so it is making a good profit. The long cycle industries are the complicated ones, like aircraft manufacture, which are the ones which make the most money. What has gone wrong here is they have created a bubble where assets are over-valued. This happened in the run-up to 2008 and we find ourselves in a similar position now. The low interest rates have created zombie companies. Remember in around the 2000s those new internet start-ups were valued at billions of dollars, well this was part of a bubble where these things were deliberately over-valued. The wealth generation was fictitious, only existing on paper. This false accounting is now giving rise to panic and large withdrawals from banks. China has dumped $450bn of US treasury bonds. The yields are now sky high. One wonders if the pound may become a safe haven as the dollar goes tits up or whether it will be dragged down by the dollar. At the moment Asian markets are seen as safe havens. China is rich now because of its stable long-term industrial policy.
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Post by bancroft on Mar 29, 2023 18:53:18 GMT
China is cultivating the BRICs and is getting cheap fuel from Russia while Europe has to buy dearer LNG from the US like Germany meaning they will lose a competitive edge on costs.
Yep COV-ID money printing increased national debt and made billions for certain companies and now we need to pay more taxes.
Inflation has not been driven by consumerism yet COV-ID and Russian sanctions.
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Post by Baron von Lotsov on Mar 29, 2023 19:44:31 GMT
China is cultivating the BRICs and is getting cheap fuel from Russia while Europe has to buy dearer LNG from the US like Germany meaning they will lose a competitive edge on costs. Yep COV-ID money printing increased national debt and made billions for certain companies and now we need to pay more taxes. Inflation has not been driven by consumerism yet COV-ID and Russian sanctions. I agree, inflation is definitely made worse by high energy costs. The trouble is it has crept into wages now so those who had savings are effectively taxed on the amount they had. This has been going on for decades that people's financial wealth is eroded by the money printing. The Brics are now going to have a go at creating a currency that is worth what a basket of their own currencies is worth in proportion to the size of their economy, so it will track the yuan to a large extent. Inflation is low in China. They were far less affected by the 2008 crash as well, only feeling a secondary shock-wave from dips in consumer demand. |
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Post by johnofgwent on Apr 1, 2023 15:37:44 GMT
Off on a tangent we go……. Sanctions are really bad for business. I profoundly disagree. My uncle made an absolute fortune as chief engineer aboard a vessel whose owning government chose to break a few … Sanctions are an absolute godsend to certain entrepreneurs |
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Post by Baron von Lotsov on Apr 1, 2023 20:53:14 GMT
Sanctions are really bad for business. I profoundly disagree. My uncle made an absolute fortune as chief engineer aboard a vessel whose owning government chose to break a few … Sanctions are an absolute godsend to certain entrepreneurs Well it is this attitude that has fucked British industry. You can take the piss for a while, but all the time you do your customers are working out how to cut you out of the game. It's short-termism and those who do benefit do so at greater losses to everyone else. The reputation of the whole country plummets. If you are intelligent, which I do rank the Chinese as very intelligent, you play the long game. You build up your reputation over decades as cheap and good. You end up as a household name.
Arm is a household name, but not for much longer. Softbank have put up their licencing fees as they have made losses in other investments and want to milk ARM. Meanwhile China, a huge customer of ARM, have taken upon themselves to use RISC-V, an open source and extensible instruction set. It's too late for Softbank, because the RISC-V code is already underway. ARM will find out pretty soon.
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Post by johnofgwent on Apr 1, 2023 22:52:04 GMT
I profoundly disagree. My uncle made an absolute fortune as chief engineer aboard a vessel whose owning government chose to break a few … Sanctions are an absolute godsend to certain entrepreneurs Well it is this attitude that has fucked British industry. You can take the piss for a while, but all the time you do your customers are working out how to cut you out of the game. It's short-termism and those who do benefit do so at greater losses to everyone else. The reputation of the whole country plummets. If you are intelligent, which I do rank the Chinese as very intelligent, you play the long game. You build up your reputation over decades as cheap and good. You end up as a household name.
Arm is a household name, but not for much longer. Softbank have put up their licencing fees as they have made losses in other investments and want to milk ARM. Meanwhile China, a huge customer of ARM, have taken upon themselves to use RISC-V, an open source and extensible instruction set. It's too late for Softbank, because the RISC-V code is already underway. ARM will find out pretty soon.
Well that's an interesting joining up of dots. The ship i was referring to was owned by the saudis and was smuggling sugar and other foodstuffs and the British were doing themselves no favours at all by adhering to said sanctions while all around them others were basically ignoring the ‘rules’ I agree entirely the british attitude is totally fucking the ability to make profitable deals. Rule one of dealing with Saudi is to ask ‘which prince requires a facilitation fee’ and for some bloody stupid reason some twat in westminster thinks he’s doing everyone a favour by passing a set of anti bribery laws …. |
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Post by Baron von Lotsov on Apr 2, 2023 12:48:15 GMT
Well it is this attitude that has fucked British industry. You can take the piss for a while, but all the time you do your customers are working out how to cut you out of the game. It's short-termism and those who do benefit do so at greater losses to everyone else. The reputation of the whole country plummets. If you are intelligent, which I do rank the Chinese as very intelligent, you play the long game. You build up your reputation over decades as cheap and good. You end up as a household name.
Arm is a household name, but not for much longer. Softbank have put up their licencing fees as they have made losses in other investments and want to milk ARM. Meanwhile China, a huge customer of ARM, have taken upon themselves to use RISC-V, an open source and extensible instruction set. It's too late for Softbank, because the RISC-V code is already underway. ARM will find out pretty soon.
Well that's an interesting joining up of dots. The ship i was referring to was owned by the saudis and was smuggling sugar and other foodstuffs and the British were doing themselves no favours at all by adhering to said sanctions while all around them others were basically ignoring the ‘rules’ I agree entirely the british attitude is totally fucking the ability to make profitable deals. Rule one of dealing with Saudi is to ask ‘which prince requires a facilitation fee’ and for some bloody stupid reason some twat in westminster thinks he’s doing everyone a favour by passing a set of anti bribery laws …. One thing I've noticed about our stupid people is they will much more readily adopt bad practices of foreigners than to adopt the good ones. The one that really gets me is lying regarding marketing. China has a different way of going about trade. I don't know if you ever shop on Alibaba, but in case you have not you will see a big difference between say a British industrial website selling its stuff and the same product on Alibaba. On Alibaba you get the lot. like all the detailed engineering performance tests, engineering drawings and even details down to how the products are packed with prices and quantity breaks and terms of business. It's all useful stuff for the buyer and very easy to do business. On a British industrial website it is written by some complete fuckwit dreamer from the arts department. They will tell you a story, produce a bit of theatre, but when it comes to stuff you need like numbers, you have to contact the bastards and prise it out of them. It all ads up to a lot of wasted time and frustration. I have a rule of thumb when buying that goes, if the price is not printed it is not a selling point. It's the same with jobs. If the offer does not include a £ sign then move on. Same goes for other specs, like say efficiency. If it is not mentioned then it is not efficient! |
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