Opening a cafe

Easy-peasy in the UK, according to Rupert:

“Starting and running a business in 2025 Britain - let’s walk through it. You’ve got a good idea, managed to save a few quid to invest and want to give it a go. Let’s say it’s a cafe. Generate wealth, create jobs and contribute to your local economy. Great idea. You just picked the wrong country to do it in. Registering the damn thing is complicated enough, and that’s the easy bit. Next up is the bank account? You’re treated like a criminal and it takes week - opening a cafe, not a terrorist cell. You manage to find a premise, good location. Oh, it costs a fortune. Rent through the roof and you’re forced to pay thousands to the council. For what? The filthy high street? The rapid customer service? Hmm. Yet another rip off. Inspections are a nightmare, it’s never-ending bureaucracy from people who have never created anything in their lives. But somehow you get it off the ground and things go well. You need to expand, hire someone. Ouch. PAYE, national insurance, pensions, HR policies, health and safety risk assessments. One wrong step and you’re facing an employment tribunal. Is it even worth the risk? It’s becoming more and more expensive, and risky, to hire people? Why bother? Maybe you try and get independent contracted help. Ah. IR35 puts a stop to that. We wouldn’t want any flexibility now, would we? That would make too much sense. Your accountants already cost an absolute fortune. They’re bleeding you dry just so you comply with the layers and layers of regulations. But let’s say it’s gone well, and your hard work is paying off. Turnover hits £90k. The dreaded VAT threshold. That means if you essentially then have to start charging VAT. That means everything gets 20% more expensive for your customers. Or you are forced to absorb the costs. Or you deliberately make less money to stay below the threshold. Just brilliant. Maybe you want to keep the cafe open later? Serve some alcohol? Have some music on? More licences. More costs. More inspections. More bureaucracy. Why bother? Waste collection even costs a fortune. Remind me, why are you already paying the council? You try and ring the council, you’re on hold for 30 minutes. Brilliant. Customers are waiting. You finally speak to someone. They’re rude, and haven’t got a clue what they’re doing. They promise they’ll get back to you, but they only work four days a week and on Thursday they’re working from home. No answer, you have to chase and chase and chase. Incompetence reigns. Right. We’ve got through all of that, now you want to pay yourself? Not unreasonable is it? For working 16 hour days to get the business off the ground? Corporation tax slices your profit down. Maybe there’s some left. Dividend allowance has been cut, so there’s less to take there. Tax rates are up too. Hmm. Okay, well let’s take a small salary and some dividends. Maybe you’ve got student debt too which takes a large chunk? It is brutal. Even making money costs money. It costs to deposit, it costs to accept card payments. No holiday, no protection, no respect. All risk, and you’re treated like dirt by the Government. You look at it all and just think, why bother? Why not work for the public sector as some irrelevant bureaucrat obstructing everyone else? Get 60k, 35 days holiday and you can literally never be sacked. What’s the point? Why take the risk? Just do that instead. We desperately need to back British enterprise. Reward those who take all of the risk. And actually, support local businesses where we all can. We should be slashing corporation tax, doubling the VAT threshold, increasing personal allowances, abolishing business rates for high street small firms, reducing national insurance contributions, cutting tax on salary/dividends, brutalising red tape and PLENTY more. If you do these things, you will generate MORE tax revenue. It is really not a complicated principle. Does Reeves understand that? No. The woman is clueless. Absolutely clueless. She does NOT understand what she is forcing on business owners. Let’s see if she can run our cafe for a week. Absolutely NO chance. I’m with the men and women who build businesses, create wealth, and generate opportunities. They have my full respect. The politicians running our country certainly do not. My message to our cafe owner? Keep plugging away, it will get better. Please know that at least one MP is fighting for you in Westminster.”

If It’s Not Illegal, What Basis Can There Be For Fines?

They've not given up trying to stop the population from freely discussing things:

Social media business models endangered the public by incentivising the spread of dangerous misinformation after the 2024 Southport murders, MPs have concluded, adding that current online safety laws have “major holes”.“It’s clear that the Online Safety Act [OSA] just isn’t up to scratch,” said Chi Onwurah, the committee chair, after a seven-month inquiry. “The government needs to go further to tackle the pervasive spread of misinformation that causes harm but doesn’t cross the line into illegality. Social media companies are not just neutral platforms but actively curate what you see online, and they must be held accountable.”

Accountability is a good thing, but MPs seem to only regard it as such in other people. 

The committee called for fines of at least £18m if platforms do not set out how they will tackle significant harms that derive from content promoted by their recommendation systems even if it is not illegal.

I sincerely hope the big social media platforms treat this ridiculous overreach by these arrogant little pipsqueaks with the contempt it deserves. 

Further fallout from Afghani-gate

Just now, five topics are vying for punditry for me … Sandie Peggie, the Afghan thing here and in the US (at OoL from me), the failure of Reform to turn up to the rape gang meeting at Westminster for those girls, obviously Epstein … plus everything else that’s going on.

Right … the Afghani scandal:

Free Advertising!

The Met Office should name storms after fossil fuel companies, campaigners have said, after the weather forecasting service opened a storm naming competition.Climate campaigners have recommended the Met Office names its storms after various oil and gas corporations to remind the public of the link between burning fossil fuels and extreme weather.

Oil and gas companies promptly say "There's no such thing as bad publicity!" 

Hundreds of people have submitted ideas to the Met Office. While some have named specific oil and gas companies, others have suggested names such as “bigoil” and “fossily mcfuelface”.

Ah, that's the UK populace I've grown to know and admire...! 

The release of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere has made the storms we experience more extreme, research from the forecaster has found. An attribution study cited by the Met Office found that rainfall in the winter season of 2023-24 was 20% more intense due to human-caused climate change, and the amount of rainfall observed during the season was 10 times more likely.

Of course they did... 

Scientists predict that while the number of storms may not increase during climate breakdown, their intensity most likely will. This is because rising global temperatures contribute to more frequent weather anomalies such as the “Spanish plume”, which is when hot air from the Iberian peninsula moves northwards into the UK, creating unstable conditions that can lead to intense summer thunderstorms with heavy downpours and lightning.

I wish! I could do with a really good thunderstorm, haven't really had one in ages. Another of the scientist's promises that never come true... 

Why are normies, plus us at times, so politically mindless?

Just how spurious was this meme?

Obviously the Antifa mindless are mainly male and the soup and paint throwers over artworks are college/university girls, brainwashed from childhood by single mothers, teachers, the entire culture … and so it goes on.

Then the average voter, the normie, who thinks a BBC audience construct is actually fair debate. How did Labour get in? 20% of the vote?

We were all played, esp. those of us who, disgusted, did not vote. After all, Labour never openly said they would do all this.  Tories not quite as bad but still bad. And now Nige has hoodwinked Reform that he has no intention of handing over to Islam.

All right, meritocracy, in which only political thinkers vote … who sets the exam? Fabians?  Civil servants … which is the same thing?

Understandably, It's Enough To Put One Off One's Taxpayer-Subsidised Sausages...

Bertin has noticed that her desire to talk frequently and openly about extreme pornography is not shared by all her Westminster colleagues. “I’ve definitely seen people swerve at lunch, not wanting to sit next to me for fear of what they’re going to hear coming from my mouth,” she told fellow delegates at the launch meeting of her pornography taskforce this week, prompting a flutter of sympathetic laughter.

The jokes just write themselves with this one, don’t they? 

Since being appointed by the former prime minister Rishi Sunak to lead an independent review into the regulation of online pornography in December 2023, Bertin has observed how a double taboo has made most politicians extremely reluctant to engage. Some simply find the subject hugely embarrassing; others stay silent because they do not wish to appear prudish by criticising the proliferation of extreme and often illegal pornographic material online.

And some are just a little too enthusiastic about the subject… 

The government needs urgently to appoint a minister for porn, she recommends, to ensure that the issue gets the attention it deserves, rather than being passed reluctantly between the Home Office and the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology.

I recommend a hard-drive check for anyone who throws his/her hat in the ring for this role! 

Fabians … there are just so many of em in power

GB Shaw was one, RH Tawney, Norman Geras (Euston) … so many more Wiki):

… including Ramsay MacDonald, Clement Attlee, Anthony Crosland, Roy Jenkins, Hugh Dalton, Richard Crossman, Ian Mikardo, Tony Benn, Harold Wilson, and more recently Shirley Williams, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, Gordon Marsden and Ed Balls. 229 members of the Society were elected to the House of Commons at the 1945 general election.^[37]

Lil ole me was one at 18/19 at university, woke up/grew up though.

Note the Israel flag there beside the Union flag.

Reform’s Uniparty wing v the nonWoke in general

In the wake of Yusuf Farage’s latest stunt against Rupert Lowe:

… following all the others, inc. the gun collection, plus the latest stunt on James McMurdoch, it’s probably time to look at how blinkered Reform supporters are deliberately being, plus the normies not being aware in the least, hence they’ve heard that Reform are THE protest vote these days … I’ve seen this at ground level, with Farage cast as the bold warrior taking on the Uniparty, esp. Labour.

I tweeted earlier this week that I’m all for grassroots Reform and in an election, if no Rupert approved indie was on the paper, then yes, I’d put my mark in the Reform box.

So how can I reconcile that with our constant calling out of the gang of three … Yusuf and his acolytes Farage and Tice?  The answer is … with difficulty.  Yet there are indications of where the divide truly lies:

Someone writing that was possibly a C&UP voter back before all this blew up … might have been UKIP, Tory leaning.  A Douglas Carswell or Roger Helmer. Even using the word Tory is loaded … it brands you immediately, whereas if you run a Union flag in your profile … that in turn has connotations.

Then there is the Sarah Pochin type … LibDem, having been typical leftwing-Conservative, almost social-democrat. Good job in the city or home duties, property, respectable but playing the radical, a conservative kipper sort of person, maybe even libertarian.  None of this low class Tommy Robinson “nonsense” … shops at Waitrose, civic-minded … a middle to upper-middle centrist.

Rupert?  He’s still quite loaded at this point before Labour steals it, he’s not really “of the street people”, is not really the demo-going type to see Tommy.

There’s yet another divide: 

And therein lies the divide … almost the class divide. In my case, I was public school, ra ra, Boat Race, cricket, rugger, sailing, Conservative voter for decades, a good address … but my beginnings were humble … a Yorkshire builder father and visiting nurse mother … not exactly east end or Gorbals but not in line with my education either.

Point is that I can feel at ease in either social situation, happily living in this Labour stronghold, with a nice abode with nice views.  I’m not sure everyone is of that mind and thus Tory 2.0 is a nightmare scenario.  For other antiWoke, the notion of Rupert leading these forces is anathema … what’s the resolution?

Well, under FPTP voting … there is no resolution, even in the face of the invaders en masse. One half of us antiWoke do not want to even hear such far-right talk from me.

In some ways, we can get around it by calling ourselves Brexiteers … that was pretty broad in definition.

Hmmmmm.

But It’s The Type Of ‘Reduced Functionality’ That’s A Good Thing!

Elon Musk formally exited his role in the Trump administration on Wednesday night, ending a contentious and generally unpopular run as a senior adviser to the president and de facto head of the so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge). Though he promised efficiency and modernization, Musk leaves behind a trail of uncertainty and reduced functionality.

Good, because it’s in all the areas where increased functionality is a bad thing!  All the places where we’d rather the government was a little less effective.

The timing of Musk’s departure lines up with the end of his 130-day term limit as a “special government employee” but also plays a part in an effort by the billionaire to signal a wider shift away from Washington as he faces backlash from the public and shareholders.

So the departure isn’t the gotcha moment the progressive press thinks it is?

Musk’s initial pitch for Doge was to save $2tn from the budget by rooting out rampant waste and fraud, as well as to conduct an overhaul of government software that would modernize how federal agencies operate. Doge so far has claimed to cut about $140bn from the budget – although its “wall of receipts” is notorious for containing errors that overestimate its savings.

Errors like the ones governments always make, you mean? 

Doge’s cuts have targeted a swath of agencies such as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Organization, which handles weather and natural disaster forecasting, and plunged others such as the Department of Veterans Affairs into crises. Numerous smaller agencies, such as one that coordinates policy on homelessness, have been in effect shut down. Doge has brought several bureaus to their knees, with no clear plan of whether the staff Musk leaves behind will try to update or maintain their services or simply shut them off.

When Doge staffers entered the General Services Administration agency that housed the 18F Office, former employees have said they appeared to fundamentally misunderstand how the government operates and the challenges of creating public services.

Well, yes, clearly - they thought these organisations, drawing as they do on US taxpayer funding, should work to provide the US population with improvements to their lives, when in reality their function was to ptovide sinecires for the useless sons and daughters of politicians, or provide people inforeign countries with things or services US politicians thought they should have, but which their own governments wouldn't ptrovide for them. 

Is there something wrong with that?

While Musk is returning to his tech empire, (Ed: errr, not quite) many of the former employees and inexperienced young engineers whom he hired to work for Doge are set to remain part of the government.

So the experiment begins - will they go native? 

What seems farther away than ever in the chaos, however, is Musk’s promise to make the government more efficient and better serve the public. “You don’t need that many people to decide to just cut things,” 18F’s Young said. “But if you actually want to build things, that takes thought. It takes effort.”

It takes the effort to stop funding the things you shouldn't have been funding so that you have the resources to build those things, though... 

The moment Grok went MAGA

(1311) There seems to have been an issue with some readers seeing the text below the intro earlier today.  I've gone back to the start and what appears below was the sshot below the intro. The intro itself I'll leave out.