Emerging From Gorse @Dozyapeth

@litewhisperer @threadreaderapp unroll

@litewhisperer @threadreaderapp unroll

The world's first trillionaire is backing the far right mobs and their politician backers. Don't think for a second that these men have ordinary people's interests at heart.

Politics Global @PolitlcsGlobal

a week ago

🚨🌎 BREAKING: Elon Musk has become the world’s first trillionaire

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What is it about the the bond markets that the Telegraph’s billionaire owners love so much? We need a government which sets the terms, the people’s terms, and an elected plan, not the interests of the 1%. Change is coming.

I recently heard a leading public figure claim that high-income countries need more GDP growth in order to increase innovation in things like renewables, EVs, and life-saving medicine. This makes little sense: Why do we need to increase *aggregate* production, indiscriminately, from an already very high level, in order to get these specific innovations? Why do we need continued growth in fast fashion and industrial beef in order to innovate better energy systems and medicines? We don't. This is massively inefficient and unnecessary. Instead, we can use industrial policy and public finance to target necessary innovations directly. And this does not require high-income countries to achieve even higher levels of GDP. It can be done right now. Look at China. China has led major innovations in exactly these technologies - renewables, EVs and life-saving medicines, as well high-speed rail, aerospace engineering, microchips etc - with a GDP per capita that is 70% less than that of the US. How? By leveraging industrial policy and public finance.

It always astonishes me how there is virtually ZERO public debate - or even public awareness - in Europe about the decisions that will most shape ordinary people's lives. These days, the EU is drafting a new anti-China legal framework where - quite literally - the more affordable and competitive Chinese products are, the more illegal they'd become. You'd think EU citizens would want to be informed about such things - as it couldn't be more consequential for their prosperity. Yet I bet virtually no EU citizen is even aware of it, beyond a vague sense that there is some sort of trade dispute going on. So what's going on exactly? It all centers around a new legal instrument the EU is drafting called the "overcapacity instrument" (euobserver.com/218003/china-t…). First of all, the very notion of "overcapacity" is pretty ridiculous to begin with, especially the way it's being defined by the EU, as it basically means being competitive enough to export. By this definition of "overcapacity," pretty much every European industry that's ever run a trade surplus - German cars, French wine, Italian fashion - has been guilty of "overcapacity." I'm not even exaggerating: if you read this study by the EU Parliament on "Industrial overcapacities, with a focus on China" (europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes…), they define "overcapacity" as building more capacity than your domestic market can absorb. So the moment you build capacity to export abroad, you're in "overcapacity." Utterly ridiculous. And what this "overcapacity instrument" is about is creating a permanent legal mechanism for the EU to block Chinese competition across whole sectors of the economy, if they happen to be in "overcapacity." In effect, this means that if China is competitive globally in a given sector in such a way that it exports a lot, that's proof of overcapacity, and legally it'd mean that the entire sector can be restricted from the EU market. Which means it really, factually, is a legal framework where the more affordable and competitive your products are, the more illegal they become. Which is a CRAZY economic concept! 🤦‍♂️ Please note that it's different from the anti-subsidy legal instrument, which the EU has already put in place in 2023 (the "Foreign Subsidies Regulation": competition-policy.ec.europa.eu/foreign-subsid…). This "overcapacity instrument" would be above and beyond this: it wouldn't even matter if a particular sector was subsidized by the Chinese government or not, the mere fact of its competitiveness in exports would be grounds for restrictions in the EU. It doesn't take a genius to understand how badly this could impact everyday people: this is European consumers being forced to pay more for worse products by law, so that uncompetitive European firms don't have to improve. Politicians frame it as avoiding a "China shock 2.0" but really this is choosing an even steeper self-inflicted decline than is already the case, where EU citizens would subsidize mediocre EU companies that would have even less pressure to catch up. It's a hidden tax: subsidies for uncompetitive firms paid by consumers instead of governments, which in turn makes them less incentivized to become competitive. The first "China shock" did de-industrialize Europe somewhat, but at least it made things cheaper for European consumers. If this becomes Europe's response to a second "China shock" not only it'd make everything more expensive but it'd do nothing for EU industry: you don't become competitive by banning the competition... Look at China itself: the way it industrialized was NOT by banning Western firms but on the contrary by welcoming them strategically and learning from them. You learn to compete by... competing, duh! What I find most shocking in all of this isn't even the policy itself - you can make arguments for and against protectionism, and reasonable people can disagree. What's shocking is that virtually no European media outlet is explaining any of this to the public. This is unarguably one of the single most consequential economic decisions the EU will make this decade, affecting the price of everything, and it's being drafted in near-total silence. No newspaper is running the headline "EU plans to make Chinese goods illegal if they're too affordable" - even though that's essentially what's happening. But that's what you call a "democracy" with "freedom of expression" these days apparently...

But aren't Communists supposed to be scowling and miserable and dress in grey buttoned up to the neck in grey brick buildings under gloomy grey skies with bars on the windows? That's what they tell us in the movies.

Jason Smith - 上官杰文 @ShangguanJiewen

3 weeks ago

China builds its urban spaces for the people. Because it's the People's Republic of China.

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The “we can always tell” crowd just got bodied by an edit of Darren Grimes in a beard

There is no "financing" for the government - the £ it spends via money creation of the BoE are returned via tax and bond revenues (French for "returns"). Thatcher's "taxpayer money" is mumbo-jumbo: There is no such thing as "taxpayer money"!

Andrew Neil @afneil

3 weeks ago

Typical of the MMT mumbo-jumbo on social media. The idea governments can simply finance spending by printing money without regard/resort to taxation/borrowing is inane.

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As the interim dean of the School of Communication and Journalism, I can tell you that whatever this sloppy snark is, it isn’t journalism, and we hold our students to a higher standard. Do a modicum of research, would you.

Andrew Neil @afneil

3 weeks ago

This is very good news. Can we all stop paying tax now? It would seem the MMT nutjobs think we can get along just fine without.

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@JoeSegar @TS9gbn @ShockatAdam Or is this just a rubbish joke to deflect from the fact that you have no real response to the accusation that you're essentially a Nazi?

@JoeSegar @TS9gbn @ShockatAdam Well, you've clearly stated that you're *already* in favour of mass murder? But just to be clear - are you saying that you *would* go full Final Solution if there were another UK Islamist terror attack?

This is disturbing. And it accords with my own experience, where Western pundits will pronounce very strong opinions about China's political system, with great certainty, but when you ask them even basic questions like "how do NPC elections work", "how do CPC elections work", or "what is the CPPCC", they have nothing to say, they literally don't know.

Arnaud Bertrand @RnaudBertrand

3 weeks ago

This is genuinely incredible and says SO SO MUCH about the perception of China in the West. This is the #1 news show in France, and the host - David Pujadas - asks the pundits around the table (a sample of the top media figures in France) if they can name 3 living Chinese

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Hi @UKLabour so this happened and do you know what happened next? The money owed was paid. Just like that! How about making him pay the hundreds of millions of pounds in UK corporation taxes he’s been avoiding through intricate corporate structures?!

Democrats Deliver @DemzDeliver

4 weeks ago

🚨 NEW: Zohran Mamdani forces Jeff Bezos to pay $9 million in unpaid fines for harming NYC’s air quality.

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The point of these attacks is twofold: 1. Flood people with nonsense until it feels true. 2. Grind people down until they lose hope. We know the answer to that: fight back - with hope & a plan for change. There is absolutely no way they win this. Join.greenparty.org.uk

@JoeSegar @TS9gbn @ShockatAdam Yes. You're an Islamophobe in the sense that a 1930s supporter of the Nazi Party was a "Judaeophobe".

890 killed during a 'ceasefire'.

Haaretz.com @haaretzcom

4 weeks ago

Israel has killed 890 Palestinians in Gaza since the 'cease-fire.' Here's how | Amira Hass haaretz.com/opinion/2026-0…

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Capitalism is so good that it has only existed for 0.00000011% of the Earth's life, yet in that time it has helped push the planet toward a mass extinction event.

Let me trace the timeline here because nobody's connecting it. Step 1: Scrape the entire internet. Every book, every article, every conversation, every piece of art, every forum post. Do it without asking. Do it without paying. Step 2: Train a model on all of it. Call it "artificial intelligence." Step 3: Go to BlackRock's Infrastructure Summit and announce: "We see a future where intelligence is a utility, like electricity or water, and people buy it from us on a meter." Step 3 is where you sell people's own knowledge back to them. On a meter. They took the collective output of human thought, compressed it into a model, and now they want to charge you by the token to access a version of what you and everyone you know already created. One Reddit user put it perfectly: "They stole all this data from us, the people, our life's work, creativity, art, by devouring the internet and blowing through all copyright laws. Now they want to sell it back to us in the form of a utility." Imagine if someone photocopied every book in the public library, burned the library down, and then opened a subscription service for the copies. That's the metered intelligence business model. And they're pitching it to infrastructure investors as though they invented water.

Vivek Sen @Vivek4real_

4 weeks ago

SAM ALTMAN: “WE SEE A FUTURE WHERE INTELLIGENCE IS A UTILITY, LIKE ELECTRICITY OR WATER, AND PEOPLE BUY IT FROM US ON A METER.”

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@JoeSegar @TS9gbn @ShockatAdam Stop backpedalling. We both know what you said, we both know what you are. Own it.