Niv920B

Retail Investor - Feed me information as I know nothing

[Murray Hill Guy @MurrayHillGuy1]

Relationship gaps that matter way more than people admit:

- gym gap (5x a week vs. never)
- drinking gap (weekend drinker vs. basically sober)
- going out gap (always wants plans vs. loves staying in)
- travel gap (always planning a trip vs. 1-2 a year is plenty)
- money gap (spender vs. saver)
- living gap (city forever vs. suburbs ASAP)
- ambition gap (career obsessed vs. work is just work)
- texting gap (talk all day vs. “sorry just seeing this”)
- social gap (huge friend group vs. 2 close friends)
- sleep schedule gap HUGE one (10pm bedtime vs. 2am)
- fitness/food gap (tracks everything vs. orders whatever)

[TheManWhoFellToEarth @ReturnofColin2]

Proof, as if needed, of what an evil bastard Ricky Gervais actually is....

Jesus wept!! 🤦‍♂️😂😂

[CrémantCommunarde #GreenTransitionNow💚 @0Calamity]

I'm going to say this again in clear, simple terms so there can be no equivocation:
Prior to Brexit, immigrants very rarely came to the UK in small boats because it is an extremely dangerous mode of transport. They came in lorries. Organised smuggling gangs knew that because there was free movement of goods between EU countries that there was a high chance that a lorry concealing immigrants would not be searched.
I am sure you all remember that terrible case of a lorry-load of migrants from China and Vietnam that was abandoned in Essex. 31 men and 8 women died.
The onset of Brexit meant that gradually, from approx 2018 onwards, more and more stringent checks began being carried out on lorries, as well as increased security at ferry ports - even Newhaven-Dieppe are surrounded with high barbed wire security fences, and every vehicle leaving Dieppe is opened and checked, so I imagine it must be pretty much the same at Calais and Boulogne as well.
We have no idea how many people a year arrived in the UK unlawfully by lorry. The reason for this is because they were literally untrackable. Occasionally you would see a lorry stopped by the M2 or the M25 with a handful of people standing behind the safety barrier while the police had the blue lights on. But they certainly could not track what they didn't know about.
The likelihood is that there were a great many more people getting into the country. The overwhelming majority of them would disappear into the undergrowth, never to be seen again until either
a) they committed an offence
b) they were caught in raids working illegally
c) they either walked into a police station to claim asylum almost immediately or
d) they popped over the parapet several years later because they wanted to regularise their status, either by marrying, or because they had children, or under the Long Residence rules - it used to be 15 years but is now 20 years. If you can prove you have been in the UK continuously for 20 years and have otherwise kept your nose clean, you are entitled to limited leave to remain. Eventually you might get settlement after 30 years - again, if you can prove you have always been in the country in that time. You will not get nationality if you entered the country illegally these days, though, unless you can show that there is something exceptional about your contribution to society.
The small boats are different. The small boats are highly visible. The small boats - and their passengers - are very easy to spot, and very easy for the Coastguard and Border Force to track. A man from the BBC used to spend all his time stood on a cliff counting them post-Brexit.
Yes, there will be the occasional one that slips through undetected. But that is the opposite of the way it was with lorry smuggling, where it was the occasional one that was actually detected, and the majority slipping through un-noticed.
The irony of Farage, Lowe, Robinson, Tommo and all the other far-right screechers claiming we are unsafe because of "fighting age men" arriving on these boats is hilarious if it wasn't so desperate. When the boats arrive, every person is fingerprinted, screened and vetted as best we can, although another irony of Brexit is we no longer have automatic access to Europol except if we have grounds to suspect someone is a criminal rather than just an asylum seeker, so well done Brexit for that as well.
Also, as we are no longer party to what's called the Dublin Agreement, whereas before we could make an application to France to take them back, and take responsibility for the asylum claim, now we are out of the EU we can't do that either.
But at least we know who is here, we have their fingerprints, and we know who they are.
In short, we are arguably safer from the "fighting age men" now that at any time in the past 30-odd years. The numbers are reducing. The numbers of crossings are reducing.
I hold no candle for Labour these days, but at least they are processing the backlog the Tories (deliberately?) built up and those who don't have the right here are being deported as well.
Boris Johnson is as full of shit as he always was.
Feel free to share this.

[Massimo @Rainmaker1973]

Swans might have one of the most underrated landing techniques in the animal kingdom.

[Gandalv @Microinteracti1]

So, after eighteen months of lying on the supermarket floor screaming at Denmark, Donald Trump has been handed the 1951 defence agreement, which already gave America bases and the run of Greenland for as long as NATO exists, and which it was using so enthusiastically that it closed sixteen of its seventeen installations there. The grown-ups have simply wrapped the toy he already owned in shiny new paper, told him it was the biggest present anyone has ever had, and he is now running round the garden showing it to everyone. He will certainly make the history books, although I fear not in the chapter he was hoping for.

[Mark Kretschmann @mark_k]

I love AI videos! This one is so good

�

[Brendan May @bmay]

What have I just experienced. 🤯

[Robespierre (YouTube) 📢 @MaxFRobespierre]

Remember young people, if you don't vote... She will.

[ADAM @adamemedia]

The Trump regime is telling the world there is going to be a DEAL WITH IRAN tomorrow.

Right on cue, the markets are skyrocketing. Fortunes are being made by insiders.

Tomorrow they will likely say NO DEAL. Markets will plummet. More fortunes will be made… by the pedophile insider elite.

But what’s critical is understand is this; fortunes can only be made in markets by taking them AWAY from someone else. That someone else is all of us. Our pensions our investments our economies. All reduced to fun coupons for the Epstein class.

And all the while billions are being spent on a pointless war, lives are being lost and inflation is embedding into our supply chains, slowly eating away at our standard of life like an economic time bomb.

The world is being terrorised and held hostage by a fat orange cunt and I’m sick of it.

[Basil the Great @BasilTheGreat]

This is absolutely brilliant from Laurence Fox

It's a perfect moment to demonstrate not only how intolerant Islam is but also it proves the entire Oxford Union audience know as well despite pretending otherwise

Laurence is about to unveil an image of the Prophet Muhammad, the whole audience are in suspense, there are interruptions, they plead with him, they try to shut him down, the rules come out, there is an intake of breath

You can tell the room is completely on edge from this!

Because they know if he does, his life will be at risk and the Oxford Union may well be at risk too from the supposedly tolerant religion the other side are defending

Proving Laurence's point, that Islam is not compatible with our society at all

I won't ruin what happens you will have to watch for yourselves but Laurence's trick here is absolutely brilliant and well worth 3 minutes of your time

Enjoy

And @LozzaFox take a bow sir 👏

[Your Accountant @TJiMTS]

Andy Burnham, in two weeks of being PM, has perfectly illustrated the main problem in UK public finances.

Week 1: there's a cost of living crisis, so to help you we've taken £45 a year off your electricity bill and capped bus fares at £2.

Week 2: we don't have enough money to fund everything we want to do, so we're taking £630 a year out of your salary.

Same government, same month.

Credit where it's due first - taking VAT off electricity from October is real money, so is the £2 bus cap in January if you're on a bus twice a day. Immediate cost of living relief is genuinely needed by most people.

But I'm not sure how someone who couldn't manage without that £45 a year of relief is supposed to now manage with £630 a year less in their pocket?

The £630 is a 1.8% levy on income to fund a National Care Service costed at £18bn a year. On a £35,000 salary it's £630, on £50,000 it's £900.

It's charged as a percentage of your income.
It's collected out of your income.
It is not, apparently, income tax, because they're going to call it a levy.

It also only applies to taxpayers over 34... So you turn 35 and take a pay cut, at the exact age most people are stretched on a mortgage with childcare costing more than the mortgage.

But the UKs ACTUALLY problem? Spending is too high. And it's too high in ways that are fixable if anyone was willing to challenge the status quo rather than buy more votes with handouts.

This is where £1,383bn goes this year:

Health, £269.6bn
Pensions, £236.3bn
Welfare, £204.0bn
Education, £126.7bn
Debt interest, £104.6bn
Defence, £75.2bn
Everything else, £367.1bn

Health, £269.6bn: We need mandatory health insurance as an employment benefit and a hybrid model. Everyone hears "insurance" and pictures America, someone bleeding out over a copay, as if no other model exists on earth.

The Netherlands has mandatory private health insurance. Insurers are legally required to accept everyone. They cannot charge you more for being chronically ill. A risk equalisation pool moves money towards the insurers covering the sickest people. It's consistently ranked top three in Europe.

Welfare, £204.0bn: Income tax raises £330bn. So almost 2 of every 3 pounds of Income Tax taken from every working person in this country is spoken for by the welfare bill.

Welfare should be for people who cannot work. Disability, genuine incapacity, the people it was built to protect. It has drifted into a general income top-up, and the number that proves it is 4.2 million working age people now claiming at least one health related benefit, up a million since 2019.

Change how we determine eligibility, fix a lot of spending issues immediately.

Pensions, £236.3bn: The state pension is a Ponzi scheme, and I mean that technically rather than as an insult. There is no fund - the ONS says so plainly. Your National Insurance is not being put aside and invested for your State Pension, It just pays the payouts for last year's pensioners. Yours depends entirely on there being enough workers behind you.

Which, btw, there won't be. The ratio of pensioners to workers goes from 27% to 48% by 2050 (and these estimates are before we've seen the proper impact of AI/automation on jobs.

Australia already fixed this: 12% of earnings into a private fund with your name on it, mandatory, employer paid. It's your money, it compounds, it doesn't need a bigger generation behind you to work.

We could mandate the same tomorrow and let the state pension run down over the next 40 years, eventually saving £236bn a year.

You can't levy your way out of these problems. A 1.8% charge on everyone over 34 raises £18bn. It doesn't even cover the interest on our existing debt.

And in the meantime... If we're going to borrow anyway, why is none of it buying anything?

Norway found oil in 1969 and put the money in a fund... That fund is now worth $2.049 trillion. It holds a stake in roughly 1.5% of every listed company on the planet.

We found oil in the same decade and spent it.

The UK's National Wealth Fund is capitalised at £27.8bn. Norway's is about 73 times bigger.

So where is our position in AI, in data centres, in grid scale renewables, in batteries, in electric vehicles, in any of the things the next fifty years actually runs on? We borrow £133bn a year and almost none of it buys an asset.

Fix government spending immediately, increase government income over time (without milking people for every penny of 'levy' you can find), and quality of life will genuinely improve as people have more money in their pockets.

The UK has a spending problem, not a tax problem.

[Crewkerne Gazette @CrewkerneGaz]

Andy Burnham’s first PMQs went exactly as expected: a man in a black shirt, armed with long eyelashes and no plan, facing Kemi Badenoch with every line ready.

He avoided scrutiny before taking office, so we let AI do the job.

{satire}

[Massimo @Rainmaker1973]

Highest protein foods

[🎞️ ace .data.3d]

[Massimo @Rainmaker1973]

This Japanese model shows how earthquakes take place.

[Sam @SamCKx]

Keir Starmer rightly receives a standing ovation from the entire House as he bids farewell to Parliament.

He will go down as a genuinely honourable public servant, and one of the most unfairly maligned leaders in modern British politics.

He became a target of a new wave of politics driven by hostility, misinformation and propaganda, designed not to strengthen democracy, but to erode trust in it, whose goal is to concentrate power into the hands of those with the greatest wealth, resources and influence.

[Ulun @gmulun]

🚨 EVERYONE IS ABOUT TO BUY THE TOP

That's how most bull markets end.

$SPX still looks like it's following a textbook Elliott Wave structure.

If that's true, only Wave 5 remains.

One final push into fresh all-time highs.

That's when the crowd gets bullish.

That's when smart money starts selling.

My roadmap:

7,500 → 7,800 → 6,900 → 6,300

Beneath the surface, the market already looks weaker than the headlines.

Breadth keeps narrowing, momentum is fading, and only a handful of AI mega caps are driving the rally.

Meanwhile, valuations remain near historic extremes while investors continue pricing in the perfect outcome.

That's why I'm watching the 7,800 area so closely.

Not because it has to be the top.

Because that's where euphoria is likely to peak.

Retail buys the last green candle.

Smart money sells into it.

Turn on notifications. I'll be updating the roadmap as it unfolds.

[Beardo @BeardoTrader]

This isn't my expectation, but it's hard to ignore how closely this $SPY dotcom analog is tracking, especially if markets pull back over the next few weeks.

[Financelot @FinanceLancelot]

The S&P has broken upward so it's either 1 or 2.

[Ted @TedPillows]

S&P 500 seems to be forming a bearish diamond pattern here.

A breakdown below the $7,350 level could trigger a stock market dump.

[Niv920B @BNiv920]

@Milito177 Me not paying attention to her whiny ass and admiring real beauty going past behind her