Recent posts

#1

Gaming HQ / Re: Europa Universalis V confi...

Last post by Tamas - Today at 11:42:58 AM

Just realised that over half of my income is from vassals. Here is Europe and Middle East, kind of a letdown. A big mistake not to have a later start date:

#2

Off the Record / Re: Brexit and the waning days...

Last post by Sheilbh - Today at 11:36:23 AM

For Brexit, as you say it is similar - the critics who knew what they were taking about pretty much got it right, the politicians looking to scare voters didn't, because they weren't really trying to.  The difference is that whereas the fallout from Trumpnomics has been partially covered up by offsetting economic trends, the Brexit hit in the UK was exacerbated by a reinforcing trend of crashed productivity.  Double whammy.

I just want to come back to this point because I saw something today which is interesting on the productivity issue.

It slightly undermines my general argument that the UK lost a business model in the crash (and I think this is a wider global picture which started in 2007, which is the end of Globalisation 1.0) and has never identified an alternative.

The complication with this is that private sector productivity recovers pretty quickly after the crash and has been on trend for the last 15 years. It is public sector productivitiy that just stops growing.

The problem with that is that no-one's quite sure why. The obvious answer is austerity - but the problem is it stops growing before austerity (i.e. in 2007 not 2010). Also the first six years of the coalition and Cameron/Osborne were austerity but there was a lot of spending under May and Johnson and the productivity problem doesn't seem correlated to either. My theory is possibly that current spending budgets were saved as far as possible but capital investment that could boost productivity over the medium run was cut as individual services tried to manage tighter budgets. But I'm not 100% sure on that (even less 100% is that I do think there may be something to the criticism of embedding DEI, ESG and other "governance" ideas and policies).

I mention all that because the latest mystery is that there appears to be an uptick in public sector produtivity (and it may be too soon to tell) which is similarly difficult to explain. Labour have a spent a lot of money but it was a really, really tough public spending round and I think something like 80-90% of the increased spending went to the NHS and an awful lot of it went on a 30% pay rise for junior doctors. But, from my understanding, the possible uptick appears to be broad based and not limited to the NHS or the pay-rised bits of the NHS. The other bit that makes it really complicated is that the 2010s did protect the NHS budget but pushed through a really complicated reorganisation - so perhaps that took up a lot of productive energy. Problem with that is the current government are (rightly) unwinding that reform which is also taking up a lot of time and energy from people in the NHS.

So it's really unsatisfying but Britain's productivity puzzle is very focused in the public sector and no-one fully knows why which is great from a policy perspective

On the wider Reeves budget, I heard Paul Johnson, former head of the Institute for Fiscal Studies (which is hugely important, respected and pretty neutral think tank in this area) talking about this before today's change of mind. And I think it's a sign the rudderlessness isn't just Starmer because he said he's an economistwho has spent his life working in this sort of but looking at her speeches and her policies he has no idea what Rachel Reeves' ideas for the tax system or the economy are.

It makes me think of Lord Mandelson who is understandably persona non grata but was one of the architects of New Labour. The point he always made was that the press obsessed over the fact that Labour professionalised their comms, introduced a new type of American style aggressive spin doctor (Alastair Campbell) and did lots of focus grouping. But Mandelson would always argue that was secondary. What mattered and why New Labour was "New" was that they had gone back to first principles and had a radically different set of policies and views from "Old Labour" (in many respects actually just picking up the Gaitskellite-Bevanite divide in the 50s: basically European style mixed economy, modernisation and social democracy, not a nationalised planned economy on the parliamentary road to socialism). The comms and the election strategy flow from that re-think that him and Gordon Brown and Tony Blair were doing in the early 90s.

And I think it seems that Starmer and Reeves and the people around them have basically just done the thinking around what builds an election winning machine and an electoral coalition once. But havn't actually done any of the thinking whatsoever on their political or policy analysis.

#3

Gaming HQ / Re: Valve Announces the Steam ...

Last post by viper37 - Today at 11:24:36 AM

I'm quite excited to finally have a steam deck without the portability.

I wasn't being sarcastic. I have no use for a portable system.

Oh, sorry.

I fail to see the use beyond a PC.  Install Linux Mint, Steam a few software to bypass those annoying launchers and you're good to go with much more performance.

#4

Gaming HQ / Re: Valve Announces the Steam ...

Last post by The Minsky Moment - Today at 09:47:25 AM

You can install just about any application you want on a Steam Deck that runs in Arch Linux.

Alternatively, you can set up a dual boot of Windows and just install Windows applications.

Plug it in a dock and voila.

#5

Gaming HQ / Re: Valve Announces the Steam ...

Last post by celedhring - Today at 07:55:06 AM

My holy grail device would be a Steam Deck where I can also install basic productivity/entertainment software (although I guess you can already fool around with WINE on the current steam deck?), or an iPad where I can run PC games.

#6

Off the Record / Re: TV/Movies Megathread

Last post by Syt - Today at 07:34:35 AM

Ep. 3 of Pluribus. Zooming back in on Rhea Seehorn's character and a miserable misanthrope trying to deal with a benevolent always friendly hive mind that "just wants to see her happy."

Slow paced, but also a look at her own contradictions - on the one hand not wanting the hive to wait on her hand and foot, but then asking them to restore her local grocery store so she can do her own shopping, immediately setting dozens of people in motion like an ant colony to cater to this.

And realizing that the hive will take all her requests at her word and that it seems to come with serious responsibility.

I don't think this will be a show for everyone, but I really like it so far as a character study.

#7

Off the Record / Re: Brexit and the waning days...

Last post by Sheilbh - Today at 07:25:25 AM

It would have been politically painful, but probably necessary. And so much of this is downstream of Rachel Reeves' choices: accept the NI cut, pledge no increases in the main taxes, impose very strict fiscal rules on yourself and sacralise the OBR's role. (Plus I think her comms strategy has actively harmed the economy repeatedly over the last eighteen months).

Politically I think we're also very much in the "in office but not in power" phase for both Reeves who has agreed to a level of interference from Number 10 that would have been a resigning matter for Brown or Darling or Osborne, and for Starmer too.

On this I'd just add that there was an extraordinary intervention last week when groups ranging from the very left-wing New Economics Foundation to the very right wing Institute of Economic Affairs issued a joint paper on reforming the tax system. Their point was it's one of the most complicated tax codes in the world, with lots of weird aspects that make for strange incentives to such a degree that basically every economist thinks is a problem. Adding an extra £20 billion of small measures to raise revenue will not help

Edit: Also, perhaps not immediately, but if the government chickens out of raising taxes having previously chickened out of cutting spending (through Winter Fuel and benefits) then what remains which come into the Treasury's cross-hairs is infrastructure spending and capital spending. Plus ca change

#8

Gaming HQ / Re: Europa Universalis V confi...

Last post by Tamas - Today at 06:23:19 AM

I noticed the Ottomans were called "The Kingdom of the Ottomans." I found this very confusing. Then I clicked on them. They had converted to Orthodoxy 

Not even the most deranged alt-hist freak would talk about what would happen if the Ottomans had embraced Orthodoxy. Paradox has make sure totally deranged things like that would ever happen.

Now maybe Bulgaria just really kicked their ass and forced converted them during a war but I don't think so.

It happens because their pops are majority Orthodox, and currently you can freely convert to whatever majority religion your country has.

Actually, there are game rules where you can limit that as well as cultural conversion to be possible only within the same cultural group.

#9

Gaming HQ / Re: Europa Universalis V confi...

Last post by Solmyr - Today at 05:42:18 AM

I noticed the Ottomans were called "The Kingdom of the Ottomans." I found this very confusing. Then I clicked on them. They had converted to Orthodoxy 

Not even the most deranged alt-hist freak would talk about what would happen if the Ottomans had embraced Orthodoxy. Paradox has make sure totally deranged things like that would ever happen.

Now maybe Bulgaria just really kicked their ass and forced converted them during a war but I don't think so.

It happens because their pops are majority Orthodox, and currently you can freely convert to whatever majority religion your country has.

#10

Off the Record / Re: Brexit and the waning days...

Last post by Richard Hakluyt - Today at 05:08:17 AM

Reeves will no longer be raising income tax in the budget as trying to calm Labour's infantile internecine struggles is more important.

UK bond yields have spiked upwards and the pound is under pressure.

They really are utterly useless.