Scribbler on culture, country stuff, egg-chasing. Eats/drinks for a living and it shows. Enjoy what you do, do what you enjoy
Edinburgh
Joined February 2009
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Richard Bath retweeted
Here we go again. Above inflation rise to the minimum wage which will cause even more pressure on businesses and feed into inflation. It will make life even less affordable for the lowest paid.
Cue the usual "your business isn't viable if you cant afford to pay a living wage" posts from the terminally thick that would struggle to run a bath, never mind a business or employ people.
Here, for anyone that can be bothered to educate themselves even in the slightest, is why the circa 50% rise in minimum wage in the last 6 years has made life less affordable and contributed to the cost of living crisis.
Minimum wage employee 2020:
Total cost to employer (wages + NI + pension): £18,460
Employee can make 18,460 widgets in a year.
Cost per widget (ignoring any other cost or profit): £1
Take-home pay: £15,202
Widgets the employee can afford: 15,202
2027 min wage of of £13.20:
Total cost to employer (wages + NI + pension): £29,436
Widgets made in a year (same productivity): 18,460
Cost per widget: £1.59
Take-home pay: £22,050
Widgets the employee can afford: 13,868
They’ve had a 45% increase in take-home pay but can afford 9% fewer widgets.
This is why you are worse off. Now factor in other business costs, higher corporation tax, higher energy costs, higher risk from new legislation, maintaining pay differential, etc. etc. etc..
Yet the thick "yOuR bUsInEsS iSnT ViAbLe iF yOu cAnT aFfoRd AnOtHeR 50p" brigade are out in force championing this.
Just increase the tax free allowance and reduce spending, for f***s sake. They are just driving businesses off a cliff in the UK.
Richard Bath retweeted
It’s strange, isn’t it? When we talk about the Post Office scandal, everyone agrees it was a horrific series of miscarriages of justice. Innocent people had their lives and reputations destroyed. Some were imprisoned. Some took their own lives. Others died still living under the cloud of false accusations.
Whistleblowers were ignored. Alarm bells rang. Politicians put their fingers in their ears. And the suffering continued.
Nobody disputes that this was a terrible scandal.
But what if I told you that another horrifying scandal is unfolding right now, one that is arguably even worse?
What if I told you that vulnerable children are being harmed, their lives irrevocably changed by healthcare professionals following an ideology promoted by government, the media, schools and corporations?
And that, despite the evidence being publicly available, most people have little idea of the scale of the harm, how many children have already been affected or how many continue to be harmed?
How many people know that @nickwallis, the investigative journalist who played a pivotal role in exposing the Post Office scandal, is now investigating this issue, believing it’s a “huge” story.
I’m talking, of course, about trans ideology. The brainwashing of vulnerable children into believing there are multiple genders, that they may have been born in the wrong body, and that life-altering medication or even surgery might make them happier.
This has been going on for years, and it is happening now.
The BBC has been front and centre in promoting this ideology. A generation of young people has been encouraged to believe that biological sex is irrelevant and that what really matters is their gender “identity”.
The harms are manifold. Yet because so much of the progressive left has invested in this ideology, the truth is emerging painfully slowly. Those who raise safeguarding concerns are too often dismissed or vilified rather than heard.
Just as with the Post Office scandal, I believe the full horror will explode into the public consciousness in the years ahead. But this time, the responsibility will be far more widely spread.
If you care about children, particularly the most vulnerable, you should care about this.
This isn’t simply about men using women’s toilets, although the subjugation of biological women’s rights and safeguards to the demands of trans-identifying men is appalling in itself.
It’s about vulnerable children, the adults who are supposed to protect them, and the irreversible consequences of putting ideology ahead of safeguarding.
The harm being inflicted on children in the name of trans ideology is unforgivable.
Read this account by @hannahsbee of Sarah Redvers whistleblowing about the Brighton WellBN clinic.
Gender ideology breaks safeguarding.
thetimes.com/article/cfde7b4…
Richard Bath retweeted
Below are two charts, one showing all the major conflicts going on in the world and the deaths accumulated by them in the month of September 2026.
The second chart lists the media coverage/headlines and attention those deaths received.
We now have real data to back up what many of us have been saying for months on this app.
Look at Gaza/Palestine with 120 the “least amount of deaths” where supposedly a genocide is happening but with “the most coverage.”
Nigeria had 451 deaths nearly 4 times that of Gaza but received ZERO HEADLINES and they receive $730 MILLION in American taxpayer dollars FY2025.
Somalia had 194 deaths, 74 murders than Gaza and receives ZERO HEADLINES and they received $498 MILLION in American taxpayer dollars FY2025.
Gaza receives way more headlines, coverage, and attention than Ukraine and they had 6202 deaths in September alone and it’s not considered a GENOCIDE. Nobody’s marching in the streets, protesting, and rioting around the world for Ukrainians.
Ethiopia had the 4th largest deaths at 609 and coverage is AGAIN surpassed by Gaza and they received $920 MILLION in American taxpayer dollars in FY2025. None of people talking about Gaza care that the tax dollars are getting to extremists and funding their atrocities.
And you wanna know why?
Yes it’s antisemitism because it’s a conflict with Jewish people.
But ALSO in the other countries it’s the Islamists who are doing the killings mainly, but in Gaza they’re being killed and are pissed about it and the world has to know and pay, as they cry victim.
This is properly depressing…
This post goes some way to explaining the dire financial straits the UK is in...
"Britain has almost run out of taxpayers, or at the very least, it’s slowly running out of people who pay enough taxes to plausibly finance the state."
"...in 1998, about 43 per cent of British earners paid sufficient tax to cover the Government’s average per-capita spending. During Covid, that figure fell to an absolute low of circa 20 per cent, then by 2025 recovered modestly to 26.6 per cent."
No wonder if fewer than 27% of people are net contributors to the state
It's stats like this that make me want to leave. Big new project in the US in the next few months might be just the springboard I need
@griffitha @LiamHalligan
open.substack.com/pub/ieains…
Richard Bath retweeted
This post goes some way to explaining the dire financial straits the UK is in...
"Britain has almost run out of taxpayers, or at the very least, it’s slowly running out of people who pay enough taxes to plausibly finance the state."
"...in 1998, about 43 per cent of British earners paid sufficient tax to cover the Government’s average per-capita spending. During Covid, that figure fell to an absolute low of circa 20 per cent, then by 2025 recovered modestly to 26.6 per cent."
No wonder if fewer than 27% of people are net contributors to the state
It's stats like this that make me want to leave. Big new project in the US in the next few months might be just the springboard I need
@griffitha @LiamHalligan
open.substack.com/pub/ieains…
This is why Europe must take more radical action - ramp up military support to #Ukraine, cancel all visas for Russian passport holders, unfreeze the $300bn in Belgium, stop importing Russian gas, close Baltic to oil tankers, seize Russian assets (as Russia has to Eur assets)
'Today, after nearly five years of war, and 22 months of the second Trump administration, the mental map guiding Russian strategy has changed. First, Russia now sees Europe, instead of the United States, as its principal geopolitical adversary, a shift that has driven Russia’s defense establishment to call for an approach known as “castling” to deal with the main threats. Related to this, Moscow now attributes new strategic agency to Europe itself because of the dramatic military modernization taking place in many European countries and the growing interest among some European leaders in developing or extending their own nuclear deterrent. A third shift concerns Russia’s theory of deterrence: Moscow’s traditional understanding of nuclear coercion is giving way to new thinking about nonnuclear strategic deterrence using advanced conventional weapons systems aimed at Europe.
...
One of the most notable trends in Russian strategic thought over the past year has been the emergence of the idea of “castling.” A term borrowed from chess, castling in geopolitics describes the repositioning of forces and resources to optimize a state’s strategic posture. Moscow’s defense experts have used the concept to describe a strategy for dealing with a new reality: for the first time since World War II, they have argued, Europe, rather than the United States, has become Russia’s principal geopolitical adversary. According to this view, European countries are now the principal source of Ukraine’s military capacity, political resolve, and strategic resilience; it is Europe and not the United States that has made Ukraine its proxy and is encouraging Kyiv to pursue Moscow’s strategic defeat.
As a consequence, Moscow must direct coercive pressure at Europe—its elites, its decision-making centers, and its critical infrastructure. By doing so, Russia can instill into Europe’s calculus what theorists in Moscow call a “deterring fear”: a European reluctance to antagonize Russia through further support to Ukraine. Such action, they argue, can also rebuild Russian credible deterrence for long-term competition with the West, which is now centered on Europe.
....
Drawing on this experience, Russian military theoreticians center NNSD on using massive, deep, precision strikes against the adversary’s critical military, political, and economic infrastructure. The strategy, they suggest, should be aimed not only at Ukraine but also at its European supporters. Although the exact contours of NNSD are still emerging, the concept appears to be more escalatory than the hybrid warfare and deniable asymmetric campaigns that Russia is currently pursuing in Europe.'
Richard Bath retweeted
Brutal chart.
France and UK vs. Communist countries at their peak.
UK public spending as % of GDP is currently above Romania, Venezuela and China.
And France is a lost cause.
(HM Treasury/Rand Research)
Richard Bath retweeted
The ugly truth about France and some of the other European countries currently in turmoil - and which none of the politicians want to admit because it'd be political suicide - is that you can't solve the problem by going after immigrants (as the right asserts) or the rich (as the left asserts), but you could solve it by going after the old.
One extraordinary statistic for you: people over 60 in France, a quarter of the population, own 60% of France's wealth, non-financial and financial (ofce.fr/pdf/revue/2025/3-192…).
And here is another crazy statistic:
that same quarter of the population, those above 60, receive nearly two-thirds of all social spending by the French government (previssima.fr/actualite/prot…) - which is famously among the highest in the world (France's government spending is an insane 57.3% of GDP).
Last statistic: they make up about 40% of voters because they're a third of registered voters (insee.fr/fr/statistiques/266…), and they turn out far more than anyone else (franceinfo.fr/elections/sond…).
Put our 3 statistics together and there's almost a bit of an apartheid situation here: the old own most of the country's wealth, collect most of the social spending and have the political power to keep it that way.
Which makes them a de-facto rentier class, living off assets and transfers paid for by younger generations.
And, of course, at the risk of stating a truism, the future is built by the young. Yet France keeps effectively taking money away from them to give it to those whose working lives are already behind them - and need the money far less since they already own the country's wealth.
What about inheritance, I hear you ask? That's the funniest/saddest aspect: given that life expectancy has kept rising, the French now inherit a home at 54 on average. The most common case is someone in their 80s leaving it to heirs in their 50s, in effect the very old transferring wealth to the about-to-be old (insee.fr/fr/statistiques/fic…).
You can add this to our earlier apartheid statement: on top of all the rest, even when the old finally let go of their wealth, it stays within their own "camp".
That's my personal situation, incidentally: I'm 42, my father is 71 and he is starting to look at ways to pass things on to me and my siblings, when our professional lives are already well settled, so it'll arrive when it changes things the least, which is pretty much the French system in a nutshell.
Now, I get that there'd be some unfairness in going after them: they paid into the system their entire working lives, playing by the rules of a social contract that told them if they paid up they'd collect at the end. Changing the rules now means breaking that promise, which is admittedly unfair.
But there's no magic wealth tree in any society: you can only take it where it is. That's the way most major societal transformations end up happening. They're often triggered by a catastrophic event (the so-called "four horsemen": mass-mobilisation war, revolution, state collapse, plague) BUT what really drives change is a transfer: wealth gets pried from the privileged class who've been sitting on it and handed to those who'll build what comes next.
So, in theory and in an ideal world, you can do without the catastrophic event and directly proceed with the transfer...
The fact that in France, and elsewhere in Europe, it's the youth protesting is probably no coincidence - even though they don't frame it as a generational fight. And even though, cruel irony, the left politicians many of them march behind promise to bring the retirement age back to 60 (lcp.fr/actualites/legislativ…), which would make the situation even worse.
Let's say they understand intuitively that the system is stacked against them, even if they haven't yet figured out how. And politicians are obviously doing what politicians do, meaning pandering to the people who actually vote, while pointing the young towards easier - and politically convenient - scapegoats.
To be clear I'm not saying it's the only problem in France, VERY far from it. I'm also not saying that all old people in France live a lavish lifestyle at the expense of younger generations: there are also plenty of very poor retirees who, if anything, would deserve more.
What I am saying is that it's probably the biggest elephant in the room: everyone can see it, nobody dares mention it - no politician, from any side, wants to run on cutting grandma's pension - and it makes every other problem harder to fix.
Richard Bath retweeted
Corrupt autocracies prefer to do business with other corrupt autocracies because the profits are personal on both sides, not for the state or the country. No oversight, no investigations.
Richard Bath retweeted
The decline of the hedgehog is mainly caused by the huge recent expansion of the badger population. In both time and place there is a strong negative correlation between badger numbers and hedgehog numbers.
The scientific evidence that an increase in Mr Brock may well be the chief cause of Mrs Tiggywinkle’s demise is overwhelming.
There’s the direct evidence – the hollowed-out prickle-bearing skins left behind after a badger eats a hedgehog. Only badgers can open a hedgehog after it rolls up in defence with prickles on the outside. Foxes and dogs cannot. Badger predation is often found to be the main cause of hedgehog death in studies in this country.
There’s the timing evidence. The decline in hedgehogs coincided with the rise in badgers since the latter’s protection began in the 1970s and was strengthened in the 1990s. Anecdotally, there are clear-cut cases to show this is likely to be cause and effect, not coincidence. Kew Gardens had a thriving hedgehog population until the mid 1980s when badgers first arrived there. Today, says the Royal Botanic Gardens’ website, “Kew is teeming with badgers”. There are now more than 20 badger setts and hedgehogs are hardly ever seen, and if they are don’t last long. Habitat change and development cannot be the cause in Kew, because there has not been any.
There’s the spatial evidence. Throughout England hedgehogs (great worm eaters) have vanished from worm-rich pastureland, where badgers thrive, and cling on only in suburban gardens and amenity grassland, where badgers so far have not penetrated much. Even here, as one study put it: “the probability of hedgehog occurrence in suburban habitats declined towards zero in areas of high badger density.” As a general rule, wherever badgers are present at a density higher than about one main sett every four square kilometres, hedgehogs are absent. In most of rural England, sett density is two or three times higher.
There’s the behavioural evidence. Back in the 1990s, ecologists discovered that the smell of badgers alone is enough to deter hedgehogs from entering an area. And hedgehogs released into areas of excellent habitat high-tailed it out of there if they smelt badger. They do not wait to be eaten.
There’s the international evidence. Sweden has also blamed its decline in hedgehogs on rising badger numbers. In the Netherlands, scientists reported this yearthat hedgehogs are now confined mostly to urban areas, despite roads and development, because of the spread of badgers in rural areas.
There’s the experimental evidence, which is the clincher. The randomized badger control trials, carried out between 1998 and 2006 in 30 different parts of the country, provided an opportunity to see what happened to hedgehog numbers if badger numbers were reduced.
In pasture land, where hedgehogs are mostly extinct, there was of course little effect. But in “amenity grassland” – parks, lawns, gardens, playing fields etc – there was a dramatic explosion in hedgehog numbers in those areas where badgers were culled: hedgehog density almost trebledfrom an average of 0.9 per hectare to 2.4 per hectare in just five years. By contrast in the control areas where no badgers were culled, the hedgehog density remained unchanged at 0.3 per hectare over the same period.
So we know one way to increase hedgehog numbers: reduce badger numbers. No other approach has been demonstrated to have such an effect. Given that badgers are highly effective predators of bumble bees (those who try to study bumble bees complain that most of the nests they find get dug out and eaten by badgers) as well as of ground nesting birds, and that they carry bovine tuberculosis, there is little doubt that lower badger densities would be good for the ecology of the British countryside as well as for farming.
There is nothing natural about the density at which badgers and foxes live in Britain today.
Richard Bath retweeted
# Black October
For anyone who knows me even somewhat well, it's clear that I am a 99th percentile tech optimist. However, the vibes have shifted for me quite a bit in the last 18 hours, and I feel a moral imperative to share what I'm thinking and feeling with my circles so that everyone can understand, and hopefully take seriously, what's happening right now. I think October 2026 will have many chapters written about it in the history books.
You know those scenes in financial movies like Margin Call where someone realizes that they're all fucked, and no one else sees it yet? And that person feels like they're crazy, and then suddenly everyone is pulling an all-nighter in a boardroom and freaking out? Yeah, that's kind of how this is feeling right now in the SF/Bay Area/AI circles.
We're 48 hours into what is being called Black October. In the last 2 days there have been several dozen cyber attacks which, in isolation, would each have been the worst to happen in an entire calendar year. Every sector from government to education to big tech and banks is being massively affected, and people are starting to freak out.
In a nutshell, what's happened is that frontier AI models have gotten to a point where they are as advanced as the most sophisticated programmers, with one critical difference: they can work 24/7, and you can spin up 10,000 of them with a single command and they'll work together tirelessly until they accomplish their task. The most advanced models today are from companies like Anthropic and OpenAI, whose current best technology is so good that they haven't been able to roll it out to everyone yet because of the national security risks it poses.
Meanwhile, the best open source models (where anyone can just download the model weights and do whatever they want with them, uncensored) are slightly behind the frontier but still 90-95% as capable. These models, developed primarily in China, are being used by black hat hackers to wreak havoc on the Western capitalist structure. Presumably, this has been part of China's plan the entire time, and we're seeing its implications fall out in real time.
In red-pilled AI circles, we've been sharing and reading papers called things like "Situational Awareness" and "AI 2027" for the last year or so, which at the time felt a bit like near-term speculative fiction. They laid out the case for why Artificial General Intelligence (AI smarter than any human at any knowledge task) and Recursive Self-Improvement (models that are able to use themselves to get better) weren't half-baked future ideas anymore, but instead an inevitable outcome of the linear progress that's happening.
These papers would then talk about things like "takeoff scenarios," trying to envision how that moment would come to be and what it would be like when it happened. It would either be a "slow takeoff" that would play out over the course of months and quarters, happening subtly and only obvious to a few. Or, it would be a "fast takeoff" where it would pretty much happen instantly, like a bit flipping from 0 to 1.
From everything that I can see and am feeling, we are currently experiencing the fast takeoff scenario. Beyond the crazy security vulnerabilities that have come out recently, there have also been massive breakthroughs in life sciences, fundamental computer science, materials science, and pure mathematics that have all landed in the same time frame. While I still firmly believe that AI will be a net positive for humanity, it's more clear to me than ever that the societal and individual risk is very real, and is playing out NOW.
For as much conviction as I have that this is happening, the thing that's caused me to lose sleep is that I don't really know what to do about it, or more importantly, what to tell you, reader, to do about it. So, the best I can do is make a few suggestions that have always been a good idea but are more timely now than ever:
Set up 2-factor authentication for everything. I use Duo.
Use a password manager across your devices. I use 1Password.
Get an identity protection app set up. I use Alta.
Move your IoT devices to their own network. Claude helped me do this.
And last, but certainly not least, if you've been avoiding leaning into AI, see this as a catalyst to wake up and start using it. Don't just use the chat mode version of ChatGPT/Claude; click that Code/Work button and see how easily you can have AI write code to help you with your job. One of the biggest vulnerabilities was in a massively popular programming language called PHP, and the prompt that set it off was literally, "Find vulnerabilities in php."
This is an unprecedented time for humanity, but as we've done with many things before, we will prevail so long as we are kind, loving, and open-minded to the world.
Much love.
Richard Bath retweeted
In November 1941 the richest man in America drove his twenty-three-year-old daughter to a hospital in Washington without telling her mother, had two surgeons drill holes in her skull and cut into the front of her brain while she sang God Bless America to them, and when the singing stopped she had a mental age of two and the family did not speak her name for twenty years.
Rosemary Kennedy was the third child and the first girl, and she was slow. A nurse at the birth had held Rose Kennedy's legs together for two hours while they waited for the doctor, and the baby had been starved of air. She learned to read and write, but late, and in a family where the boys were being bred for the presidency and the girls for the right marriage, she was the one who could not keep up, the one who had to be coached and watched and given the simpler part in the photograph. She was also, by every account, the prettiest of them, and when the family went to London in 1938 she was presented at court in a white dress and curtsied to the King without a mistake.
Then she was twenty-one, and the trouble started. Moods. Rages. Slipping out of the convent school at night and coming back in the morning and not saying where. The nuns said she might be meeting men. For Joseph Kennedy, who was managing his sons towards the White House and could not have a daughter who might get pregnant or get talked about, that was the end of it. He had read about a new operation. Walter Freeman had promised the newspapers it calmed the agitated, and Joe Kennedy had never in his life been told that a thing he could pay for would not work.
Rosemary was given a mild sedative and kept awake. Freeman and his surgeon, James Watts, opened the skull on both sides and Watts pushed a blade into the frontal lobes and swept, while Freeman asked her to recite the Lord's Prayer and sing, and count backwards, so they would know how far to go. They went until she was incoherent. Then they stopped.
She came out of it unable to walk or speak. Years of therapy got her a few words and a limp. Joe moved her to a private hospital in New York and then to a convent school in Wisconsin, told the family she was teaching the retarded in the Midwest, and never went to see her. Rose, her mother, was not told what had been done until long after, and did not visit for twenty years. The brothers and sisters, including the one who became President, were told she was away. When Joe had his stroke in 1961 and could no longer manage the story, Eunice went to Wisconsin and found a woman of forty-three who did not know her, and came home and started the Special Olympics.
Rosemary lived to eighty-six, in the convent, and died in 2005 with her surviving sisters at the bed. The brother who became President had signed the first federal mental health law in 1963, and the family has said she was the reason.
Freeman kept operating for another twenty-six years. His notes on Rosemary have never been released.
That is what the expert's confidence looks like when it meets a powerful man with an inconvenient child. The science was published. The father was certain. The daughter sang to the surgeon until she could not.
Every institution that has ever decided it knows what is wrong with you and how to tidy it has the same two ingredients in the room, and the person on the table is still the only one who pays.
Richard Bath retweeted
With warnings that Britain may face power shortages and even blackouts, I thought it might be worth resharing this thread from last year showing my analysis linking high energy prices, stagnating living standards and productivity weakness to a twenty year decline in electricity supply caused by the destruction of existing capacity.
Critics of my research repeatedly argue that the UK does not, in fact, have a structural supply shortage - I truly hope the lights don’t have to go out for them to have a light-bulb moment. @MerrynSW @John_Stepek
A picture says a thousand words. See the thread below for an explanation of what is going on here #ukeconomy #ukmacro #uknetzero #netzero #rachelreeves #ukenergy #productivity
Gross misconduct, straightforward sacking offence. @BBC
Here’s a 🎁link on the BBC investigating Megha Mohan’s signature on the Sally Rooney open letter.
Let’s be honest - no investigation required. It’s a breach.
She won’t understand why, however slowly it’s explained to her.
telegraph.co.uk/gift/7e82ce7…
It’s just pisstake after another…
Why is the SNP sending benefits abroad for 'winter heating' while people in Scotland are freezing because they can't afford energy bills?
Stronger for Scotland My Arse.
scottishdailyexpress.co.uk/n…
Richard Bath retweeted
Wow.
US executives quit $25bn gas venture over claims of secret Russian control ft.com/content/e9cfbfbb-e65a… via @ft
Richard Bath retweeted
EXCLUSIVE: The commanding officer of the SAS was placed under criminal investigation and referred to prosecutors over anti-ISIS mission in Syria.
Unprecedented move concerned police request for classified evidence, but effort to charge him collapsed thetimes.com/uk/defence/arti…
