JoeEvans

An interesting article here: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/mar/31/trump-greenland-us-morally-wrong-strategy-disastrous The gist of it is that Trump's ridiculous posturing on Greenland is incredibly self-destructive, because it trashed the US's long-standing alliances and relationships while gaining nothing, given that the minerals etc in Greenland could be accessed via a straightforward commercial deal that would cost vastly less than any military action. That's what I'm seeing across the board in the States - irrational, self-destructive dim-wittedness, driven by damaging, unconscious psychological factors instead of fact and analysis.

I think there's a pretty broad zone of solid, playable basses that are better than basic cheapies without being stunning deluxe coffee tables. Something like a Reverend would be at the lower end of the zone, good enough for any actual musical function but under a grand new. For £1500 you get pretty much anything in that zone if you're happy to go secondhand.

Yes - the US faces a different and much more damaging version of this, with the potential for lots of younger academics and professionals to leave for Europe and elsewhere.

Is it though? As I say, that could just be people with million-pound houses selling up and retiring abroad, in which case all we're losing is their pensions being spent here. It might be that a skilled 25 year-old moving here gains us more than the departing 65-year old costs. After all, we don't have to pay their end-life medical costs...

That might or might not cover the first part of the question, depending on how many moved here during the same period, ie the net migration of millionaires. It doesn't take much to be a millionaire given property prices, that might just be a normal or even low number retiring abroad. But it definitely doesn't answer the second part - has the UK been measurably damaged by this economically?

Is there an example of a country that taxed the rich so much that many if them moved elsewhere, with the country suffering economically as a result? It's often mentioned as a risk but I'm interested to know if it's actually something that happens. For example, are there large numbers of wealthy Scandinavians living in lower-tax countries, visible and countable by economists?

I think 'tax planning' shades pretty gently into 'tax avoidance', and as mentioned above, HMRC often have to go to court to clarify the boundary between avoidance and evasion. More broadly, it's an argument about the meaning of words, and words don't have fixed definitions - people use them in different ways and dictionaries just report those usages.

Buy a secondhand ACG. Simple.

In reality the lines between acting without regard for tax; tax avoidance; tax evasion; and downright fraud and criminality are pretty grey and blurred. They denote broad ideas not precisely defined activities.

I work for a charity and we've recently been upgrading our cyber security, on advice from our IT support company who told us that there are active teams of Russian hackers employed simply to look for anything they can do to cause disruption, chaos and expense. So it's not just about protecting against simple financial fraud, you need to protect against random professional malice too.

Although a brief Google suggests that they whole plane would have been $156m when new so the aluminium would be 0.12% of the total cost; I suspect that the plywood cost makes up a very much larger proportion of the price of a cab than that.

Couldn't the earth connection to the rails in the sliding pickup just be a bit of copper braid, squeezed against the rail by a piece of closed-cell foam, neoprene or similar, in a little recess in the pickup housing?

I think that Trump can only conceive of business transactions as having winners and losers. He's drawn to tariffs because they make he feel like a winner, doing damage to his opponents and forcing them to submit to his will. But in reality business transactions don't work like that. Every purchase leaves both parties better off - the buyer valued the goods more highly than the money, and the seller valued the money more highly than the goods. Business transactions are therefore collaborative and mutually beneficial, and when you restrict the options for such collaborations, both sides are left worse off. Tariffs damage both countries involved. But Trump can't see that because he has no conception of collaboration, cooperation and mutual respect.

Tesla's price/earnings ratio for forecast sales for 2026 is still 75 or so; a good P/E ratio is normally thought to be maybe 25. So Tesla is still valued three times higher than is justified by forecast sales. I can only assume that stock is bought and held by true believers who don't base investment (or voting) decisions on nasty facts.

The other financial factor that can't be ignored in US politics is cryptocurrencies. The amount of money now invested in crypto is insane, and around 28% of US adults have some crypto investments. For a lot of people it's tied in to a whole worldview - libertarian, techno-utopian, anti-government, and pro-Trump largely because they think he's pro-crypto. There are some wild views out there - a lot of people apparently believe that in due course Bitcoin will become the primary global currency, with a single Bitcoin worth a billion or more. But these are wildly unreliable investments with zero real value - the biggest market bubble in history - and it's highly likely that in due course a lot of people will lose a lot of money. I think that crypto and MAGA are deeply intertwined, not just practically but psychologically - all about belief in something utterly unsupported by reality. I think both bubbles will eventually burst together in a very messy way.