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Isn’t Mozilla VPN just rebadged Mullvad (but you have to identify yourself)?

Doesn’t MS have a half stake in OpenAI ? Or have I got the wrong company?

Yeah. It’s deffo men. Good luck with that, if you’re wrong.

4 or 5.

I don’t exist. I had a meeting and voted. It was unanimous.

I get that you’re angry you can’t get a job after three years at uni and 50k in debt.

I get that you’ll never have a home that you own.

I get that having children will be an unplanned, largely unfunded activity for you.

I’m get that being a twenty something influencer has cred, but as your retirement age goes up and up faster than your chronological age and the state keeps raiding your personal pension that you’re forced to keep funding, spare a thought for the other influencers of 55 years that you’ll become and those diminishing returns.

But this hill that you’re stating that you wish to die on isn’t the cleverest way to solve the previously stated problems, whether the migrants are illegal or just 'Mercans claiming to want to avoid Trump but actually looking for free NHS healthcare because they’re getting old.

Console yourself that the political classes (stated in court) that they much prefer people from any other country over you, and that is why you to be a productive member of the populace and keep quiet.

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You’ve missed the point. The most important point is that the government quite clearly stated that illegal migrants are more important to the ruling classes than the British people who fund them (both). The Tories are just as vested as Labour. One-person populist party, Reform, are just beginning to admit they agree too.

The rest of it - the good or evil of your political position, whether the judge was a stooge, veganism etc - is bullshit. Irrelevant.

They can’t go to far down this line, they’ll have antitrust issues. They’re a mature company doing what mature companies do and letting the middle (marketing) managers who couldn’t run a bath, run the company by focusing on cost reduction not earnings growth, and bury it.

We saw this with HP. Remember how we all used to buy HP printers for Linux? I still have my 1990s - please god - LaserJet and can still get toner.

That’s why I don’t use a VPN company. I use Google VPN.

No slimy VPN data slurper getting my skinny.

Supermarkets or pharmacies. You can walk away whenever you like.

The wealthy have the resources and access to professionals not to pay tax. So they don’t.

I agree that they should pay tax, but they don’t. It is how/what it is. Good luck with getting them to pay a wealth tax over and above.

There are two main things that seem to work:

1. Having taxes at low levels for everyone generally. The expense and hassle of untangling the last set of measures and re-tangling to avoiding low levels of tax simply isn’t worth it.
2. After a two or sometimes three generations, the wealth is frittered away by overindulged children, messed up childhoods and their access to drugs and alcohol in lieu of parents. Sometimes the children are so wealthy, well-educated and taught to wealth preserve that that doesn’t happen.

I’m sorry you’re living with that. COVID took my plumber neighbour out for three weeks every time and he was fairly fit. He had a hell of a time and went through it twice.

You’re at best very tangential to my point. I’m not disputing that COVID happened. Just that flu probably continued at some level, whereas the stats disagree. I can only conclude that all flu of late is, in fact, COVID; IANA specialist D.

Anything that attacks the respiratory system long term sucks. Breathing has been quite helpful to me during my life. YMMV.

Joseph Chamberlain apparently quotes Powell in his book which reads: “All political lives, unless they are cut off in midstream at a happy juncture, end in failure, because that is the nature of politics and of human affairs”

It is often abbreviated “All political careers end in failure.”

I think Truss tried to do a Lawson (with her Chancellor) and bring taxes down but it was too far, too fast. Lawson went from 83%[1] to 60% and then 40% as the top rate, if I recall. Truss’s Tory party then (as now) was Labour in but name, same policies but Cameron was pleased to call it Austerity (like the mid, post WW2 era), and they wouldn’t stand for tax reductions.

It’s all messed up.

Labour have done nothing for normal people like us - they’ve had the Tory leasehold reform Act on the books for an eternity without a implementation date (maybe because many MPs have BtL portfolios) and haven’t moved to make owners of flats live in a less feudal situation.

Tories removed free speech hidden in the latter clauses of the Online Safety Act 2023 (with help from Labour) because they knew what was coming.

[1] with top ups making it 97% marginal.

You might have read that I wrote only the poor pay tax. There were no poor people within the 98% bands and high income/HNW people wouldn’t have paid it anyway.

Oh so the rich are completely different from the rich of yesterday year. I don’t think so. Drawing plenty of wealthy people in? I bet you’re going to say trickle-down wealth next, you know you want to. G’wan.

You know, of course, a person can voluntarily pay amounts to HMRC or other authorities whenever they like. They don’t have to wait for a request by the authority. The amount on their tax demand is a minimum value.

'Mercan?

Sorry. You won’t have guessed that the comment was tongue in cheek.

The ‘economist’ trained chancellor apparently was sick on the day they studied diminishing returns. And she has never met anyone who lived through the seventies like an early Gen X or older (I find that strange: most of us played with Lego extensively).

We went to the the IMF for 13% of GDP then, but it would be 100%+ of GDP now.

But yeah, you put the taxes up. Doesn’t really matter how much anymore.

Denis Healey (Chancellor at the time) later joked about “squeezing the rich until the pips squeak.” when marginal tax was 98%.

Meanwhile millionaires are leaving the UK in droves, the acknowledgement that ‘only the poor pay tax.’ has been a thing since the 18th century.

Apparently that bloke is still trying to teach Charlie how to put toothpaste on his toothbrush. Mate, he’s in his seventies, that opportunity for learning toothpaste has past.