Online Privacy Guide v1.0
Digital privacy is for everyone, that includes your neighbor, your mother, your mates. It needs to be easy to understand, show clear progress and be achievable in little snippets.
https://t.co/b1I2lF353B
1/4
Some websites stop you from pasting information into fields. But Brave fixes this.
In Brave, just right-click the field and select "Force Paste."
This bypasses the website's block and pastes the information normally. 🪄
This is an excellent piece from the quite brilliant @KathrynPorter26:
£700m+ at Hinkley Point C on fish protection. An acoustic “fish disco,” low-velocity intake heads, a fish return system. Billed as more than any power station on earth.
It saves a sliver of what the Atlantic fishing fleet kills every year.
A country that builds an underwater speaker system but can’t build a reservoir. This is why nothing gets built in Britain.
Share this far and wide, my friends. People need to reckon with the reality before we can change it.
Learn 12 words by heart and you can flee your country with your wealth intact. That's not a metaphor. That's the most profound monetary innovation in human history.
#OPSEC365 095/365
Your app store download history is a behavioral record — including everything you deleted.
Fertility trackers. Mental health apps. Debt tools. VPN clients. All retained under one account. Cronk's aggregation problem: unremarkable data points combine into disclosures more sensitive than any single item.
Apple and Google both respond to warrants for purchase history.
Maintain distinct accounts per context. Your install and delete timeline is a dossier of your private life.
Will EU keep cookie banners on websites or get rid of them? The debate continues but you don't have to wait for the EU's decision. You can get rid of these annoying pop-ups with Brave right now.
Our browser blocks these pop-ups, and the tracking cookies, by default.
The UK's revolving door of prime ministers highlights a structural problem of chronic policy inconsistency and short termism.
Persistent deficits, debt now around 95% of GDP and weak productivity have left successive governments with very little fiscal room.
Governments too often behave as if the Laffer Curve is irrelevant, reaching for higher taxes while ignoring the point at which the tax base starts to shrink as capital, talent and businesses leave.
Capital goes where it is treated best.
The harder and more important work is supply side reform, fiscal credibility and productivity growth, but that has repeatedly been undermined by short political horizons.
The speed of technological change, especially in finance and digital assets, only makes long term planning harder. Policy too often reflects well resourced lobbying rather than deep technical expertise.
Without credible rules and a commitment to growth over short term fixes, any new prime minister will inherit the same constraints.
H/t to @khalafroula.
The key thing to know about Burnham is that he has even less political conviction than Starmer, and, much less brains. He has never worked a job in his life - every penny of his existence has been paid for by you, the taxpayer.
He has the mercurial ability to be near-simultaneously both *for* the current thing and *against* the current thing. He doesn’t understand why we are “in hock to the bond market” that we are set to borrow untold billions from this year.
But most importantly he has inherited all the same problems Starmer did, several of which have been exacerbated by Reeves’ Keynesian economic illiteracy and student activist politics:
1 - Labour's landslide was the public saying “NOT the Tories” it was not a vote of confidence in Labour.They still lack broad political support in the country, 2/3rds of voters favoured other parties in 2025, likely even more now.
2 - Labour is still split between Blairite and Corbynite esque factions; or rather - the centre left and harder left… and the seam between them is more a crevice now than a mere fissure, and it will only deepen as they face mounting fiscal challenges- many, ironically, of their own making - such as lying about the £22bn fiscal black hole, clamping down on non doms leading to capital flight, extra CGT on farmers, entrepreneurs and family businesses (the lifeblood of the economy), increased NICs to fund wage increases for their client groups at the expense of the private sector - leading to plummeting hiring and widespread redundancies, business confidence totally shot to bits, high street shops and hospitality shuttering leading to further unemployment (inc NEET unemployment at 1.01m/13.5% of that demographic). Just a series of utterly insane decisions only explainable by a combination of economic illiteracy and student politics appeasing both the high tax “economists”, “academics” and their fanatical adjacents (Torsten Bell et al) and all the other wet permatards in her party.
3 - YOOKAY ™️ now enjoys an insane 94.7% debt to GDP (PSND at 95.1%). And the borrowing was increased £140bn in the life of this Parliament which has in part led to the cost of our national debt running at a wholly unsustainable £125bn a year. We are already massively over taxed (highest tax burden since WW2) so just taxing people more won’t help - other than cause even more financial strain as households already at breaking point get squeezed harder, the productive net contributors continue to flood outward and the state imports more net fiscal drag human QE, whilst failing to track either number and getting a nasty surprise in Q1 ‘27 tax take.
5 - Labour still has massive reliance on unions esp public sector unions (as we saw with RRs NICs to fund higher wages for their unproductive members), so reforms to that type of stupid self serving fiscal policy are politically impossible.
6 - Reform, who may see support waning, have captured large sections of the Red Wall. How to win them back? Can’t see that as politically viable for the internal dynamics of the PLP. Greens have captured the more fringe mentalists and young university educated people who feel they have increasingly no stake in society. This Reform-Green pincer also further stifles their available policy choices.
All that aside, Burnham has zero understanding and even less vision than Starmer. You would need someone of Blair’s calibre to even begin to navigate through this minefield of political and fiscal complexity. Labour have no one remotely close in terms of talent or experience.
He’s the pin up boy for now - until those behind the curtain grow tired of him and replace him with someone else either within or without the PLP. I see a strong chance of a GE sooner than most people are pricing in.
It’s going to be a circus. That is for sure. Andy from t’north is just the Enshittification ™️ continuity candidate.
Bitcoin is money.
Its value ultimately derives from a few key properties; its limited supply, the impossibility of changing its rule set without rough consensus, and the irreversibility of the transaction record, but its core function (and ultimately why it is worth anything at all) lies in its ability to transfer value through space and time in a trustless way between just two parties, and without depending on a third party to do so.
Other monies can move value through space nearly as fast, and some can transfer value through time almost as well, but in its ability to do both, Bitcoin has no competitor.
In the UK, and in many other countries, Bitcoin's core value transfer function is fettered by its tax treatment.
Bitcoin itself is of course unaffected by tax regimes, but those people who use it are; and if it is treated as an asset it is typically subject to capital gains tax when it is bought and sold and even (as in the UK) when it is simply transferred. This is misguided and misunderstands the core nature of Bitcoin; and we are working to change this.
HMRC recently requested feedback on whether stablecoins should be exempt from capital gains tax if and when they are used in a simple payment transaction. @bitcoinhodlco submitted feedback that went further - arguing that this exemption should be extended to ALL cryptoassets and particularly to Bitcoin, if Bitcoin is simply used as a means of payment for goods or services. In short, the CGT treatment should be derived from the function that Bitcoin (or a stablecoin) is performing.
At present, owing to the lawful 'bed and breakfast' treatment of Bitcoin by HMRC (also known as 'spend and replace'), the Revenue sees limited tax receipts from treating Bitcoin as an asset when it's being used as a means of payment. However, it is highly probable that VAT receipts would rise owing to a higher velocity of this money in the economy were the rules amended.
Today, we have a system of maximum complexity and administrative burden, with minimum gain. Amending the rules would change this, and recognise that while Bitcoin is many things to many people, money is definitively one of those things; and that recognising Bitcoin's use as money would send a clear message to the world that the UK is ahead of the game in thoughtful, real-world regulation, rather than the depressing alternative.
Our executive summary is here and the full paper is shared at the link below. We'll publish a summary on the company blog in due course.
If I were to summarize the ideas of David Deutsch, it would be to take new knowledge very seriously because it’s the most powerful force in the universe and the source of all true change.
For almost two centuries it was followers of Karl Marx's crackpot economic theory who wrecked economies and dispossessed, murdered and enslaved people on the promise of returning nonexistent fruits of their labour to them. Now it seems to be the turn of the Scrooge McDuck theory.
Britain’s problem is not that it needs a more “relatable” PM. It is that we are spending five times more on social security than national security, and that no politician wants to take the unpopular decisions needed to restore our public finances.