The Anti-Targ

I'm breaking my fortnight rule it seems. So long as the loans are denoted in RMB then the only country the loans harm is the borrower. RMB is the only infinite resource China has, and unlike banks that have to make profits from loans and can't use loans for the purposes of influence and control a country can very much lend you it's own currency with an expectation that it may never gets repaid, unless the borrower gets out of line, because making money was never the point of the lending. Just like people should never have believed the lie that govts are like households, they should also stop thinking of govts like they are commercial banks.

To be fair, I try to keep my preaching of MMT to fortnightly. People should be wary of the magic money tree because govt spending will always require discipline, and who has a terrible track record for spending discipline when they have lots of money to throw around? The people you put in charge of public finances should be honest, trustworthy and mature, as well as having the general public good at the heart of their motivations.

Oppositions don't win elections, incumbent governments lose them. The current polling is almost entirely down to the Tories losing the confidence of what appears to be a large majority of the country. That the votes are mostly going to Labour is by tradition as much as anything. I would wager most Labour MPs want to do what should be done to fix the broken things, but they still believe the balanced budget myth and that taxes pay for govt spending. Until the left in general stops swallowing that lie it will never be able to deliver on the policies it really wants to deliver. The correct thing to do is cut taxes on productive activity, wages and salaries (at least for people in the bottom 66%), VAT and company tax, and increase spending in the areas of greatest need, and of course axe planned govt spending that clearly is a waste of money (Rwanda plan). I will give HoI some credit for actually recognising that the magic money tree exists. Too many people don't even know that. Though not sure what's worse, knowing it exists and insisting that it never be used, or not knowing it exists and thus placing harmful constraints on govts out of complete ignorance.

That's similar to the drunk person causing a car accident excuse IMO. I was drunk officer so the accident wasn't my fault. Idiot kids shove their snouts into the political trough to climb the worst career ladder without really knowing what they're getting into. Do they not have any real skills to get a bit of life experience and wisdom before they jump into the cesspool?

I'm all for dunking on pharma as being the unhealth sector since they rely on people being sick to make huge profits. May the seven save them from people everywhere finding out how to live a healthier life. But not to worry capitalism is here to keep large populations poor, undernourished, badly housed and under-educated, and to keep the slightly less poor in mind and soul destroying jobs. There will always be a market for the things they make. But kooks offering snake oil as miracle cures are just as bad. Give humans healthy food, healthy homes and quality education and they can take it from there.

The longevity depends on the brand I think, and how dry it is to start with. I think the less expensive brands have a higher water content and will go fuzzy sooner. The brand I'm buying at the moment one 250g block has lasted months and is only getting drier over time with no sign of fuzz. The brand I froze was because a previous block I had did go fuzzy. I don't use Parmesan very often so I need a brand that will have good fridge longevity, so I'm glad I seem to have found one. Further to spaghetti all'assasina and also Parmesan cheese, Chef John on Youtube has developed a french fry variant that uses a lot of Parmesan cheese, which I have made once so far and can highly recommend. Just don't tell anyone who's a purist that it's called french fries all'assassina.

I've frozen parmesan in the past and it made it crumbly, taste was still fine though.

Bibi already trying to pivot to Russia as its protector even before Biden does anything?

People in mixed metophors shouldn't stow thrones in grass houses.

If Kate is alive and fairly well all you need is a strategic leak to the media that Kate will be in a certain place at a certain time on some private outline and there will be more than enough press with ultra-HD cameras up in her face asking all sorts of questions as she steps out of a car on the curb side and walks into some high end boutique and it would be all "nothing to see here, what has all this wild speculation been that we knew nothing about until today?" Job done, Kate confirmed wthout the Palace having to come out and say that yes Kate is alive and well (enough). That something as fairly simple as this staged spontaneous appearance hasn't happened is...curious.

A day or two in the fridge for flavours to mature makes sense, like aging steak, there are chemical processes that happen at fridge temperature for a lot of foods, especially spiced foods (not necessarily just hot spice), that enhances all sorts of flavours. Freezing pretty much puts a stop to all those maturation processes, thought the ice crystal formation inside the cells of both plant and animal cells damages cell walls and cell membranes which means when thawing the insides of those cells will leak out of the damaged membranes, which possibly when re-heated adds flavours that wouldn't be there if the cell contents had stayed locked away. So I would say perhaps experiment by putting the bolognaise sauce in the fridge for 24/48 hrs then freezing and see if that develops the flavours even more. Then report back on the results after doing double blind trials on at least 10 batches of sauce (freeze half of each batch immediately and freeze the other half after a day or two in the fridge). Find out if the family perceives any difference and if they do what's their preference. Food science experiments can be fun for the whole family, as long as you don't kill anyone with toxic food of course.

I always had to sneak vegetables into our meat sauces for pasta so the kids would eat it, usually by grating carrot, courgettes and mushrooms so they basically disappeared from view. More recently throwing in brown lentils has been good to extend the volume esp as meat prices have been higher than they used to be but again barely noticed. Can't call it bolognaise since I almost never use pork. My new thing the last few months has been spaghetti all'assassina. Possibly the best vegan dish in my life.

Arnie and Rod putting literal (roading equivalent) of band-aids on the pot hole problem. Which countries don't have pot hole problems? I'd guess the ones that have well engineered roads and that have a decent road maintenance budget.

It's a bit old, but some of the 1%ers appear to get it, https://www.theguardian.com/news/2023/jun/30/uk-super-rich-beware-pitchforks-torches-unless-they-do-more However as I've said a few times, higher taxes, esp in countries like the UK with floating exchange rate sovereign currencies, aren't necessary. Different taxes, for sure, but for the average schmo there is no justification for a bigger tax burden, indeed for the average schmo there should be less tax. Tax what is harmful (fossil fuels as an easy example) and unproductive (buying and selling existing houses and the passive income derived from renting such houses); don't tax (or lightly tax) things that are beneficial (building new houses) and productive (growing food sustainably, wages and salaries).

So is the Mordaunt conspiracy legit, is there going to be a new PM, who gives up all her PM powers to be a sock puppet for the just one faction of the Party?

I watched the King Ralph documentary, even being a quintessential American bozo doesn't disqualify you. Harry is fine...though people are getting shot by random people all the time in that country.

Relative of Roose or John?

So basically no viable alternative to the Obama nuke deal, is what I'm seeing. So do nothing, and we're seeing what do nothing is doing.

Delaying what seems to be inevitable provides more time to move the country further towards moderate-ness and consequently preventing what was once thought of as inevitable. We'll never know what Iran would be like if the deal had remained in place, but we can be pretty certain that nixing the deal made Iran more well disposed towards come hither looks from Russia and China. But let's not delude ourselves, Trump axed the deal simply because it was Obama's deal not because of sound foreign policy rationale. Unless there was a clear alternative course of action more likely to succeed then doing something was definitely better than doing nothing. Nothing is what we have right now and Iran doesn't seem to be moving in a desirable direction.

What was objectively bad about it, or was it just the vibe of the thing?

I guess the level of threat this poses depends on how Putin defines Russia's existence. If it extends to Crimea and the more recently annexed parts of Ukraine then there is basically no reassurance at all that nukes won't come into play.

Couldn't a witness speaking publicly about the classified documents case possibly harm the prosecution? Maybe the prosecution doesn't think this witness adds much value to their case, so they don't care if he goes public. But it probably means they should remove him from the witness list for the trial.

I guess once some people have decided that a person is being witch hunted by the deep state it doesn't matter what the truth is about their alleged crimes, any conviction will be dismissed as illegitimate and proof that the deep state is out to get anyone who dares to defy the woke agenda. The deep state seems to be doing a pretty shit job if Andrew Tait is a big scalp.

Accidentally, or accidentally on purpose? Is that streamer a friend of / apologist for Tait?

The main problem with running on an improving economy is that while taking a look from orbit it's clear the economy is doing pretty well, when you zoom in the benefits are uneven (which has been the case for decades of economic growth), but when you combine the last couple of years of inflation and the ongoing uneveness of the benefits of growth you get the temperature in the bot being used to boil the frogs suddenly turned up, so the frogs are feeling it more acutely than back when the slow erosion over the last 30 years. Biden can run on the economy if he has clear and easily understood policies for how to translate growth and stability into more wealth for the low and middle income majority of the country. If he doesn't have that then running on the economy is going to fall on a lot of deaf ears. And you can't just say the rich will pay their fair share of tax to preserve the benefits that currently exist. People need more, not more of the same.