Desolation of Smug

I suppose Rachel Reeves played a blinder with the budget. At least it wasn't as comprehensively leaked as the last few by the Eton boyz. Of course there's a few attention grabbers, but the big play is attempting to sweep up the desolation of Smug left by the last lot.

And we see the sly boys and girls playing the markets in its wake. They are simply gambling and messing up everything for the rest of us. 28-30 is the entry age, and it seems that 2 years in business is the typical requirement. Safe hands? eh?
 

But back to the budget...I see that a few things like car tax on electric vehicles didn't get mentioned, yet I received the notification a day before the budget that I've got to pay road tax again from next year. And that fossil fuel tax for cars is being held down again. Not exactly electro-friendly.

Don't get me started on fiscal drag which is 'only' set to last until around 2030. I'd always envisaged that the rise in personal allowance would compensate for essentially a fixed income, but no, that's another source ready to plunder.

There's shenanigans around the employer tax too, which affects smaller businesses. If I still had my company I'd be paying an extra £650 employer contribution per annum or so. Hmm, makes me reconsider if I should restart it again, for my book writing. The interesting aspect is that pensioners are now being pickpocketed. I can't tell you how distressing it is to get those big extra tax bills at the end of the year. 

You could say it's a 'nice problem to have', but I can't help thinking how I scrimped and saved to have retirement income, only to see the government wasting it on frivolous schemes and subsidising big projects like nuclear submarines - oh no - wait - that was the last lot.

Unredacted Steele

A curious book, in which Christopher Steel reveals much of his life story. From school to post-Trump legal battles. I was expecting more new stuff, but I think I'd desk researched much of it previously, so the surprises were limited. 

Steel comes across as earnest, thorough and meticulous, and with huge depth, although his detractors vehemently consider otherwise. A major premise is whether Russia (Putin) interfered in the last US election (probably) and what The Kremlin is doing in the current one. Steele posits that Putin wants Trumpi to win and that the Kremlin have so much Kompromat on Trump that they can easily manipulate him.

He adds, later, that the Kremlin is cultivating anyone they expect to have significant influence, so even if the dice were to fall remarkably in the other direction that things would be covered. I'm guessing that is an increasingly unlikely outcome.

My sense is that Trump has probably done so many terrible things, that most people are inured and desensitised to whatever is discovered next. By hand-selecting most of the High Court Judges, Trump can also leap free from just about anything. I read Company Intelligence Report 2016's rebuttals by Trump's Council and laughed out loud at the very explicit denials.

Then we see that the FBI seem to have played Steele through the more recent events. Someone called Amy was initially a real person and then turned into an anodyne bot respondent to string Steele along in the later stages. He doesn't say that in his book, although I started to get a sense of a Gogol storyline playing out.

It seems as if many people in power don't want his perceptions to surface, presumably because they bring down many houses of cards. Easier to 'move along, please' instead.

So it's an interesting quandary. I suspect Steele, drawing from many detailed sources, is fundamentally correct in his analysis, although he is subjected to an absolute torrent of challenge, from Trump, Trump's supporters, the far right as well as (contrariwise) many people of power in Russia. It means he has somewhat lost his voice in this heady mix of well-known names.

And Steele suggests the shift in emphasis of the Kremlin influence model, with Sergei Kiriyenko in charge of foreign election interference. Not simply US elections, but any where there is a significant angle. 

Trump and others continue to use 'Lawfare' to try to block any attempts to be corralled and we see certain august bodies watching it all from the sidelines. These bodies are not even daring to probe senior resettled Russian officials such as Oleg Smolenkov and others who know what's on the various undisclosed tapes.

We can look at this as the early stages of strategic chaos and as Steele describes it, a new world disorder.

a few more days

I've mainly tuned this one out. It was shouty enough when I was in New York recently. Christopher Steele's book considers the Trump win a catastrophe.  A "new world disorder".

Strategic chaos.

Wobble the market

 

Goofing around, I thought I'd try this little micro-economic exercise in the FT. Interesting...I got it close to the balanced numbers but had to break a couple of Fiscal Rules that the government recently declared. The effect was to make the markets wobble, but I think it says more about the vacuousness of the markets holding the economy in their thrall.

It takes about 5 minutes to set up the parameters for a round. Fascinating.

Chunks of German with the fabulous Anja

I'm pretty sure I blogged once before about Anja, who is teaching me German. The amount of equivalent English words makes German a natural for me.  Some sample Denglisch : Apfel, Baby, Ball, Blau, Boss, Buch, Bus, Computer, Eis, E-Mail, Ellbogen, Finger, Glas, Gras, Hobby, Hotel, Information, Job, Jewel, Knie, Kuh, Milch, Meeting, Mutter, Name, Neu, Park, Radio, Reporter, Radio, Ring, Schule, Sweatshirt, Taxi, Tourist, T-Shirt, Wasser, Zoo. Other words are available.

I'm in a regular German Stammtisch every week and we chat together and discuss German grammar und so weiter. They also make fun of my use of (for example) einchecken - for check-in. I guess you could say registrieren.

I'm always the one who protests at having to learn all of those tables of 'der, die, das' and so on and say it interferes with speaking to one another. I say I prefer a 'Lego block' approach to a language where I can assemble pre-formed phrases to make longer sentences. 

Well, it turns out that Anja agrees and she calls it 'chunking' - from the British Council origination of the word - although I can't help thinking about tinned carrot jokes. 

Anyway, yesterday was a case in point where I was on a one-hour 'party' call with Anja and then jumped off the call onto Zoom with my Stammtisch buddies. For personal reasons I've missed several of the Stammtisch calls and they were surprised to see me return. However, I was immediately asked if it was alright to be tested on definite and indefinite articles and found myself in a world of nominative musculine singulars and so on. 

Now I'm more of a bluffer, so I'll admit my word-endings can sometimes come out wrong, but on the whole I go for what I think 'sounds right'. Anja has the precision to know the grammatical underpinnings and will correct mistakes, but I think we both agree it's better to have a go at the sentence rather than to remain quiet. Here's an introduction...

a Rorschach of my crash - Rachel K.

Rachel's on the left with Emily, in a Photo Booth in Woolworth's. It's not now. 

I'm mad keen on Kushner's The Flamethrowers and also just read (I'll do it again) Creation Lake. I'll review it sometime, - spoiler- five stars. 

Because of Creation Lake, I also read The Hard Crowd, which comprises essays from Kushner on many topics from her life. Starting with the Los Cabos bike race, the Baja 1000, where she's injured as she crashes a 130-mph bike when someone pulls out in front doing 30 mph. The essay evokes the grit, oil and attitudes of the riders. Something of Reno's wipe-out on the salt flats in Bonneville. With a 20-year old's perspective, so not all-knowing.

The inspirations for The Flamethrowers crop up a couple of other times in the collection, notably when she describes some pictures, which I could recognise as the novel's cover art. Weirdly I checked the current cover and found it was something different. 

Kushner is one of the coolest friends you'll meet. From Eugene, Oregon, to San Francisco, working in nightclubs, with the biggest rock bands, mentored by Don DeLillo, time in Cuba, also Jerusalem,  New York, France and Italy. And an interior worldview packed with intelligent and provoking outlooks. 

Always on and challenging. High stakes.

The internet

It's becoming worse. 

More of the systems that I use are exhibiting faults. 

I listed the undeclared change to Microsoft email yesterday. They'll, no doubt, say it was fully documented. But I didn't get or read the memo. It's a more pervasive problem. 

In the days of programmers and analysts, there was a testing protocol for new additions which ran something like - code test, module test, integration test, system test, operational proving, live. Modern systems are rebuilt daily with all the new candidates slapped in. So the effect can be somewhat wobbly.

Breughel was prescient with his tower of Babel painting illustrating Genesis 11: 1-9. One of the earliest puns, too: “Therefore its name was called Babel, because there the Lord confused the language of all the earth.” - A play on Babel and Balal "to confuse". Whatever it is , there are daily bugs and mis-fires all over the system now. 

My typical morning as far as 10:05...

1. I see a friend pop up on Facebook - I'm alerted via email. I try to read his message, but it suddenly wants a recovery code. I request one, but nothing appears. I don't respond to my friend. 
2. I want to check something in my medical records, yet find that all the older ones have mysteriously vanished from the system. 
3. One email system stops working mid-September, yet doesn't issue an alert. 
4. My electricity supplier has recently installed two new smart meters but can't pick up their data in the internet control panel. I have a new home display but find it inscrutable.
5. I try to bookmark an article but the subscription service it is from tells me incorrectly I have used my free download limit. Yes, I'm signed on. 
6. A service that I use swamps me with marketing messages becasue it hasn't separated out tranactional responses.

I could go on but I think that's enough.  

I know, I should focus on all the other systems that do work properly.

As useful as...

So now Microsoft have sheepishly stopped the routine access of Outlook from MacOS. I had to search the internet to find a notification. I've had to reset everything using Exchange now. 

"The safety and security of your information is top priority for Microsoft. To help keep your account secure, Microsoft will no longer support the use of third-party email and calendar apps which ask you to sign in with only your Microsoft Account username and password. To keep you safe you will need to use a mail or calendar app which supports Microsoft’s modern authentication methods. If you do not act, your third-party email apps will no longer be able to access your Outlook.com, Hotmail or Live.com email address on September 16th." 

 Lucky I don't depend on Microsplot mail for anything. Modern authentication methods.

Cyber

Tesla have previewed the cybercab. One has to separate the technology from the personality histrionics of its chief advocate. I'm pretty sure it will work though. My own Level 2 car with its Full Self Driving is pretty cool. It does all the stuff that my old Merc did - intelligent cruise control, speed limit adherence, self parking, and so on. 

I realise it's more about my confidence to let it get on with the driving now. I'm still nervous when it's reverse parking in a close space, say to back up to a charger point. Or that it can do a kind of controlled overtaking where it puts a blue box onto the diagram of where it intends to position during the manouevre. 

It begs a question though. The cybercab is doing all of this in a form-factor hardly any different from a regular car. But then something like Waymo takes a Jaguar and adds enough gadgetry to make it a candidate for a robo-cop movie.

I guess I'd be more cautious around a tricked out iPace.