Did overhear an amusing City conversation tho. Bloke bemoaning that he’d bought his wife a £200 Libertys advent calendar as a Xmas present, but now realises it ends on the 24th. So she has no present for Xmas day and he’s going to have to buy her something else. (There was a lot of swearing added.)

That would have made it even worse, but fortunately not.

lol, only teasing you. Hope it was a good Guinness.
I was in a sports bar in the City last night (reasons…) that was one of the most unpleasant pub experiences I’ve had for a long time. And paid considerably more for a pint, amongst a lot of very pissed and jolly City types. Raise rates.

Wetherspoons?

Well, those may well not be the right tools to deal with all the downsides - eg regional impacts, which may need some kind of industrial or regional strategy rather than just redistribution. But different people can have different views, obviously. (Either way, you can still believe in trade.)

I think you can believe that trade boosts growth but there are downsides to globalisation need to be confronted. Indeed, I think almost all economists believe those two things. So not really strange?

Do we know if he ever said that he lacked the resources to run basic IT operations securely?

Thing is, people also complain (rightly) about long transfers. You can't avoid those but also aim for wide geographical coverage.

As a neutral, it was a pen.
Disallowed goal seemed a bit mean, but if you’re offside and you actually duck under the goalbound ball, you’re pretty likely to be penalised imo.
More importantly, Man City look ominously good.

it's a K-shaped economy, apparently, which am taking to mean you need to be on K to make any sense of this at all

And will continue to do so

U OK hun?

Those days are long gone. It’s nativist right. Our own MAGA.

Fun that you are still writing this piece. How do the overall numbers look compared to your pre-election predictions?

The UK’s enormously ambitious decarbonisation push may or may not succeed. But to see someone like you join the right wing pile on against the UK is bleak.

So what was your post based based on (other than exposure to right wing US media that appears to have singled out the UK - which has a left wing government - for particular ire?)
The idea in particular that the UK aspires to be a ‘great power’ is particularly weird (and a bit Trumpian).

No one in the UK claims or wants us to be a ‘great power’. We just get on with being what we are, as best we can. The US right seem obsessed with us at the moment, I guess partly because we have a left wing government they hate. It’s depressing to see you join them

As for “it barely qualifies as a developed country” - well, that begs the question of who’s been swallowing far right media. Not sure it’s us.