MicroB

Ferris Bueller's teacher had a point. Its a good idea to pay attention in class, you might learn something. https://corporatefinanceinstitute.com/resources/economics/smoot-hawley-tariff-act/

Not always. What happens to average Thai wages if Thailand decided to start handing out work permits/visas for Farang? In reality, Thai managers won't be able to see massive pay rises because Cleetus from Mobile, Dirk from Groningen or Paul from Newcastle gets their £100k PA job transferred to the Bangkok office. Mass immigration might be one of the drivers for wage inequality, but is not the only one, and might not even anywhere near the most important. Sandeep arrives from India in the bright lights of London, and he gets a job emptying the bins for an office cleaning company which wins a competitive bid from a PLC in the City because they are paying mostly immigrant employees a wage much closer to the minimum wage than their competitors. There is a saving to the PLC which helps them reduce costs, contributing to the bottom line, and nudging everyone over the line for those bonuses. PLC employee wages go up because of Sandeep. Of course Wayne the bloke who got thrown out of school at 14 for sniffing glue, still can't anything better than cleaning skips for cash in hand. Rohit is an engineer with some experience. In India, his wage is £6000 a year, which is pretty decent there, but he thinks the UK offers more opportunities. His boss in India keeps telling him the grass isn't always greener, but Rohit is young, got a new wife and baby, and he spends a lot of time on Tiktok, looking at amazing snow and cars. He get a visa sponsor. He attends interview for a graduate engineer, advertised as starting at £45,000 depending on experience, which seems like a King's Ransom to him. He doesn't have quite as much experience as the other candidates. He comes out with out during the interview, he'll take the job for £10,000 a year. Does he get the job, driving down wages? No. What is happening is the UK company sets up an office in Bangalore, and employs all the CAD engineers they need there. Now the savings aren't really 1/10th of the wage cost, because they seem to need to employ twice as many people there, on shifts, because of the time difference. They design clever stuff that is manufactured in the UK by an additive process that is pretty automated. Normally those engineers would be a £60 PH overhead in the UK, now that's reduced to £20PA, taking account of the rented office in India, and that they need to have a travel budget so that some of the managers can swan out there every now and then. Wage growth is complex. There was this idea at one time of "trickle down" economics; Elon Musk now being a trillionaire (or close to it) makes you richer. It doesn't; its a garbage idea that the Oligarchs in Russia made the lives of ordinary Russians better because they became richer and brought more Bentleys. I think the opposite is also equally untrue; capillary economics, the idea that poor immigrants make other people poorer. No, what happens is you have a lot more people less well off than you. Where mass immigration can cause stress is on public services, and that is down to the humanity of the society. there is increased demand on education, healthcare. A society can be inhumane and stop migrants sending their kids to school, or, in the case of a publicly funded healthcare system, let them die in the streets, Or in the case of Farang managers in Thailand, make them send their Farang kids to an expensive international school, and take out private healthcare insurance. When Sandeep the cleaner is stopped from coming to the UK, the cleaning company doesn't turn to the semi-literate Wayne to start cleaning the Boardrooms. They invest in a few of those cleaning robots, made in China, designed by engineers in Bangalore, working for a Newcastle based start up selling whizzy AI enabled cleaning robots. Which had received a generous innovation grant from the government as an example of 21st Century Britain, taking on the world, after they won the contracts to sell robot cleaners to Bangalore airport, a stunning "export" win, given the airport had seen massive increases in passenger traffic. The Industrial Revolution had casualties. It lead to high level industrial espionage and mass infringement of patents to enable a cotton industry to be established in the nascent United States with its Revolutionary Government, who had recently inspired very bloody regicide in France. The Americans, as they called themselves, needed stolen technologies (Samuel "Slater the Traitor" Slater who stole the secrets to Richard Arkwright’s transformational “water frame” technology of cotton spinning) to make the mass slave trade much more profitable (picking cotton). It was ok, because 2 generations later, it fueled a rise in American innovation, beating that of Europe. Britain was cotton king (and sugar king) was no longer so, but that was ok, because they had made a ton of cash, and 200 years later became a service based economy, hardly affected by threats of tariffs. Not much of a navy, but then, the tea clippers, anti-slavery patrols, were just a distant memory. There is a Digital Revolution, and there will be casualties. And beneficiaries. There is an alternative, called Ludditism. A restriction on immigrants won't in itself cause an increase in employment rates. Jobs will still move overseas. There is not an easy solution, but people will offer easy sounding solutions. They always will because they need your vote, but not always have your interests at heart.

Make America Healthy Again didn't even make it to Inauguration day. The Mooch lasted longer.

Not straightforward to overturn SDWA.

https://www2.cepii.fr/PDF_PUB/pb/2024/pb2024-49.pdf The beneficiaries will be Mexico, with wages up. The rest of the world, US included, not so well. Trump wants to devalue the US$ to make US exports more competitive. He thinks he can force countries to revalue their own currencies through tariffs. But a devalued USD will increase import costs driving up inflation. But you might say that's the idea, getting Americans to buy nice cheap American goods, not foreign goods. I work in the medical field. I looked at US medical device makers. There are about 14,500 of them. But less than 80 actually manufacture more than 80% of their products lines at home. About 14,000 have more than 80% of their lines manufactured wholly or partly outside of the US. Those Made-in-USA companies are generally making high value specialist equipment, that the rest of the world needs. US companies are making plenty of money, but they are not invoicing customers in USD, so devaluing the USD will reduce margins. And healthcare products are fairly price inelastic. The UK found that out post Brexit, so have the Russians, who are in a worse state because their healthcare is dependant not just on imports, but imports from foreign companies. So the cost of healthcare will go up, meaning insurance premiums go up. And Trump won't be alive long enough, for the 10-15 years needed to essentially build a US medical device industry from scratch. Our company economists are predicting staglation for the US, and concurring about a cut in global GDP. Trump's efforts to devalue the USD will be largely unsuccessful, unless he removes the independence of the Federal Reserve.

https://www.thescottishsun.co.uk/news/13828692/thailand-paedo-edinburgh-jail-john-martin/ Don't think his family realise he will be ending his days in a grubby hostel, in Scotland

Unless said (allegedly) backward State passes abortion trafficing laws (Idaho, Iowa). Tennessee .is embroiled in courts as to whether their trafficing laws are legal. Alabama, Mississippi and Oklahoma looking at similar legislation. Then you have the ordinances in Texas that have encouraged people to take civil action preventing said travel. Take Idaho for example. When their HoR was elected in 2022, from where this awful law originated, about 1 in 3 people didn't bother to register to vote. Of those who registered to vote, only 57% actually turned up. Of those, 76% voted Republican. So the politicians took their mandate to pass this from the vote of Idaho resident. Such is democracy when people don't care much about it. I'm sure its a similar picture in other state elections, relatively low turnouts. Idaho isn't as bad as some States. "Only" 16% of the adult population are classified as having "low literacy", so 15th in the Nation. What does Low Literacy mean; the inability to read or write well enough to perform everyday tasks. Still being 15th for barely being able to read is nothing to boast about, when its the 29th least educated. Not only can't they read, Idaho residents apparently can't add up either. 20% have no access to healthcare, 16% are in abject poverty. Yet prosecuting doctors was high on the priorities of those lawmakers when they took their seats in 2022. Laws like that get states into the news, for grandstanding politicians keen to make a point. These are quite momentous laws. The Idaho State Legislature consists of 70 people, 49 of them men. 57 voted for this legislation. The way the electoral college was conceived was deliberately to stop the more populous States run roughshod over the small ones. The system gives more power to those smaller states, those poorers states, those illiterate states. And you saw that in the recent election, when the candidates didn't spend all their time in New York or California appealing to the most populous, but were hitting the road to places in the middle of nowhere. So when so-called enlightened people flee these "Dumb<deleted>istan" States, you are not reducing their power, their influence, but you are creating theocratic states of increasing influence. I guess some of these states could, in principle, be free to declare adultery to be a capital crime.

The FDA can greatly restrict the ability to perform an abortion legally.

Its relatively easy for the FDA to withdraw approval for mifepristone and misoprostol, or reinstate previous prescription requirements. Robert Califf has been director of the FDA for a long time, and will probably step down very soon. The Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine nearly succeeded in getting approval overturned last year for Mifepristone, which is used in about 2/3rds of abortions. Depends what Kennedy's role will be. The FDA isn't independent. Its part of the Department of Health and Human Services. HHS can and has done, over rule FDA approvals. The HHS wouldn't even need to have approval withdrawn, but insist on a tightening of the prescribing instructions, effectively killing it. The government could very well argue that while it respects the Rights of States to approve Abortions, the Federal government cannot be a facilitating party. The FDA might reduce the number of weeks which Mifepristone can be used; 70 days. 45% of abortions in the US occur before 6 weeks. Tweaking the prescribing instructions can reduce abortions, as well as tightening up where it can be prescribed. RFK is supportive of lack of restrictions on abortions, but maybe he'll have to drop his objections if he is really to be allowed to run "wild" at the FDA.

Mussolini kept the trains running. Fascists run for high office, fairly openly, in Italy. Il Duce studied the ideas of the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, the sociologist Vilfredo Pareto, and the syndicalist Georges Sorel and credited Charles Péguy and Hubert Lagardelle as influences. He was widely published, writing, among other things, "Giovanni Hus, il veridico" (Jan Hus, true prophet), a historical and political biography about the life and mission of the Czech ecclesiastic reformer Jan Hus and his followers, the Hussites. He literally invented Fascism. Does Trump display fascist tendancies? Probably. Does that make him a fascist? No, and that's not a complement. He's not a fascist, because he's too dumb to understand the ideology. Mussolini was certainly an intellect. He had developed an ideology that was probably shaped by a genuine concern for the Italian working man, except that it was totally evil. Trump has no concern for the working man, hence at his rallies, he revels in boasting how he doesn't pay contractors, if he can get away with it, because he's "smart". He has an idea about "America", and what he think that means, which seems to be based on an infantile view of the world. "America" includes heroes who fight and die for their ideals, frredom, except not him, because he's not a sucker, he's smart. His major influence in life appears to be a semi-literate Scots women, who was penniless, but not because she somehow found the money for multiple trips across the Atlantic, before finally finding herself at high society parties, meeting property developer, Fred Trump. Surely, the conversation was not the attraction, as I doubt Trump Senior could scarely understand her heavily accented, and stuttering Hebridean accent (labeled recently as the worst and least attractive of all the Scottish accents, which is going some when you hear Rab C Nesbitt https://www.welovestornoway.com/index.php/articles/34445-hebridean-accent-the-worst-in-scotland-study-claims).

Hey you're a Marxist/Communist/Libtard/God Botherer/ Holy Joe. It cuts all ways unless your name is Tommy Robinson/ David Duke/Anjem Choudary etc, then the perjoratives tend to be fairly accurate

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/10/28/fiona-hill-explains-trump-musk-putin-00185820 The problem with calling Trumpf a "fascist" is that it suggests he is an adherant to a particular ideology. He doesn't. He's an adherant to a form of government; autocracy, because basically he thinks a President should have all thos power "to get things done". That's how he ran his companies. That's how Musk runs his companies. Thats how Putin thinks he runs his country. Industry's non-political view on this style of management: https://taskworld.com/blog/what-is-autocratic-leadership-and-when-is-it-effective/ Many of us work for or have worked for a company where there is the "Big Boss", maybe the owner, maybe the founder who is now a majority shareholder, micromanaging his baby. Jim Ratcliffe at Ineos is an example. Look what's happening at Man United. I suppose he knows jack all about football. Similarly cars and bike racing. We've all be frustrated by such management making crazy decisions. We are also aware of the acolytes who say "trust the boss". Jim Ratcliffe, who made a fortune in petrochemicals, is now peeing away his money on cod-Land Rovers which aren't selling, and now might see Man United get relegated (here's hoping). Putin is probably cleverer than Trump, Musk etc, and manipulates them, as Hill describes. A fascist spends years developing his ideology. Trump has none of that. He's a reactionary, shouting at the TV, and surrounded all his life by sychophants.

A very good interview, describing how America might be sliding into its own form of an oligarchy: https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/10/28/fiona-hill-explains-trump-musk-putin-00185820 I think the actions of parts of the media in recent days (LA Times, Washington Post, and now USA Today) is illustrative of that. Luckily, Fiona Hill has gotten out of the US.

That they weren't the generals he wanted? Most of those executed were part of or aleged to part of the 20 July plot. Nearly 5000 people were executed as a result. The types of generals he wants ended up swinging from the end of a rope post-WW2; amoral men who had advanced through political patronage, not by ability.

Technically the Soviet people. Belarus and Ukraine gave much more than Russia fighting the Axis. Putin has always exaggerated Russian losses in WW2. In 2010, he claimed the USSR didn't need Ukraine to win WW2. It was a Ukrainian who raised the flag over a shatterted Reichstag. Ukraine supplied 70% of Soviet trains, 67% of mining equipment, 60% of coal, 70% of iron, 50% of steel, 59% of steel pipes. The Soviet Navy was constructed in Zaporizhzhia, Kerch, Kyiv, Mykolaiv, Odesa and Kherson. Aircraft were made in Dnipropetrovsk , Kharkiv , Kyiv and Kharkiv. Ukrainian losses accounted for 40% of total Soviet losses, according to the latest research.