Comments by "MeTube - tacticalvote co uk" (@OneAndOnlyMe) on "Richard J Murphy" channel.

  1. Richard, could you do a video to explain why does the government pay interest on the national debt? Why doesn't the government simply borrow at 0% interest? Thanks.
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  2. Richard, you've misunderstood what we mean by "analog to digital" for the NHS. It's not just about digitisation of paperwork. Yes, we have computers and databases now, but the process and workflows have largely remained analog because all we've done is digitised the paper forms and records, but not optimized processes and workflows. Additionally, GP practices and hospitals are running on different platforms because no one took an enterprise wide architectural role. So while there are databases etc,. they are not all the same database which necessitates expensive interfaces to be built and maintained. The whole of the NHS should be on a single platform, in much the same way that Civil Service, parliament and Cabinet Office now are. The NHS should have its own in-house IT function similar to the IT function within government. This NHS IT function should be dedicated to health service technology innovation. The NHS IT function should directly employ IT service operations staff (who could be based anywhere in the world) to cut out the profit margins of third party IT consultancies (CGI, PwC, etc), but all IT service delivery should be governed and run by the in-house NHS IT function. The NHS IT technical architects and IT service owners should all be direct employees of NHS IT.
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  3. Politicians don't harm people. Greed and insecurity harms people.
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  4. Aren't gilts (government bonds) effectively borrowing from money markets?
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  5. And, many of the jobs in the City are support roles, for example, for every trader there will be 10 support roles (mid office, back office, tech, legal, compliance, etc). Those are real jobs with high salaries, paying 40%+ tax. The same can be said for the Civil Service, most jobs are the supporting roles necessary to make the whole function properly.
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  6. Keynes could not say that today, not in the 21st century and the globally connected economies that need to trade 24/7. The demand today is for round the clock trading, so much so that many exchanges and platform operate out of hours trading. Trading (equities, commodities, futures, derivatives, currency), mergers and acquisitions, asset management, fund management, venture capital (funding new business and innovation), pensions and insurance products, management consulting services, legal services, technology services (infrastructure and software development). Salaries start at around £75k with decent bonuses starting at around 10% of salary. 1 trader requires around 8 support personnel (mid office, back office, technology, legal). In the 21st century trading equities and commodities, futures and options, is not just for the City boys and girls. It's for anyone who has the knowledge to do so from anywhere in the world. (Worked in technology, interest rate derivatives, JP Morgan; energy trading, BP; consulting, various banks.)
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  7. Your attack on Starmer (on Twitter) while he's mourning his brothers death is despicable. Do better, Richard.
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  8. I have no problem with people in the FIRE movement. I could do the same with my ISA income. I only choose to work because what I do for work is more of a passion and doesn't feel like work. So I'm being paid for my favorite hobby. Some people argue that FIRE movement are using infrastructure and service but not paying tax, to which I argue we still pay VAT, stamp duty and other consumer taxes. No one would accuse someone earning below the income tax threshold of not paying taxes.
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  9.  @garethhumphries4039  Interest is irrelevant. Even if the borrwing is 0%, it's about the management of the cancelling out through taxes. You can't just tax and tax people.
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  10. The UK has Parliamentary democracy. That's out chosen and preferred system. We do not want direct democracy.
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  11. That's a huge generalisation. Young people are working and do want to work. They want good jobs, well paid jobs for which they've studied and trained. Outside of London and other metro centers, housing is still within reach, granted you need a sizeable deposit, but a couple can save £15k each within a couple of years when both are working in good jobs.
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  12. Democracy is NOT just about voting on things. Democracy is about rule of law, justice, a representation mechanism, and a free press. There is no one version of democracy.
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  13. I consider Keir Starmer's Labour party centre left.
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  14.  @billB101  Not just another, the current queen of pop music.
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  15. "Get Brexit done" was a Tory slogan. Labour's is "Make Brexit work" - whish it self is code for "demonstrate that it can't work" so as to win over public trust and support for closer ties with EU.
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  16. Most Civil Servants are not on "huge" salaries. Civil service salaries are very standardised, it's not like the private sector where you can move around and keep bumping your salary up every few years. Also civil service covers a lot of things, it's not just Whitehall. Teachers, council workers, the job centre, anything where a service if provided by government, central and local, there are civil servants. That person you speak to when you call DWP, that's a civil servant.
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  17. This also goes to prove why we cannot just use averages and medians across the population, because different sectors attract different rewards. These graphs should be broken down by sector and compared sector by sector. Some professions will always be valued more than others. In finance, legal, tech and engineering we are paid for our skills, not our time. In tech £90k is deemed to be in the lower end these days for the experienced computer scientists and software specialists.
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  18. Every business has these common functions, HR, IT, Finance, Marketing, Customer Service. In all these functions, the "operations" side can be automated because these are very standardised functions. HR Ops - 90% of the work can be automated and augmented with AI, needs only 4 to 7 people even for a business with 50,000+ employees. IT Ops - 90% of the work can be automated, needs only 10 or so people, even for a business with 1,000+ servers and a globe spanning network infrastructure. Finance Ops - 80% of the work can be automated, I recently did a reduction of a 30 person team down to 6 using automation (not even using AI, just workflow automation). Marketing Ops - 95% of the work can be automated (or outsourced entirely), needs only a small internal management layer. Customer Service Ops - 90% of the work can be automated, 9 out of 10 interactions are standardised query/response. Contact centers can be scaled up using virtual digital agents instead of hiring additional human agents. Where any job has defined processes and procedures, the workflow can be fully automated with humans only needed to handle the exceptions. This is what we are doing already today and have been for the past decade. The difference now is that the solutions are cheaper and no longer only affordable to large enterprise budgets. If you don't believe me, look at these things: ServiceNow platform (Customer Service, but also anything an organisation needs to do) Workday platform (HR and Payroll) Dynamics 365 platform (Finance and ERP) SalesForce platform (Marketing and CRM) Google AI Studio and Microsoft Co-Pilot (End user productivity tooling)
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  19. Were they wrong though? To Brexiteers it wasn't about the economy, it was about taking control of laws.
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  20. Keep in mind that most people who work in a medium sized business and everyone in a large cap business will have private healthcare via work. In actuality, there are more working people with private health cover than those without.
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  21. This needed saying. I'm of the view that if those farmers can't afford to run their operations and pay IHT, then they need to sell up. There are plenty of industrial scale big-agri businesses that will gladly buy them out. Big-agri can probably run the farms far more efficiently too and can afford to invest in automation. I think these farmers who argue "traditions" are holding back the automation in agri. We also need to rethink farming and embrace vertical farming now that renewable energy is cheap. Why farm an acre of land when you can stack 10 acres on the same land.
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  22. Businesses will still need to pay employees competitively, or employees will find better offers, and there always are better offers (it's a global jobs market now, you can even stay in the UK and be employed by a business in another country now quite easily).
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  23. Why?
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  24. Considering the City trades commodities and energy, if those traders stopped, alarm bells would go off around the world. We would know pretty sharpish.
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  25. Richard, could you do a follow up video please to answer the obvious question this begs: So, then why doesn't the government just print £1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 and give it to everyone?
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  26. If you voted for change, then you are still getting change. Labour did not campaign on radical change, just change in terms of making the system more effective, not throwing out policies and frameworks altogether.
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  27. I don't have a problem with regarded as an "economic unit", because that is what I am when I am working. I exchange my economic output in return for monetary payment. That doesn't mean this is all that I am. We can be an economic unit and be other things as well. When I'm not being an economic unit, I am being a consumer, a creator, an innovator, a helper, a volunteer, etc. - none of this is degraded by my by being an economic unit as well.
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  28.  @markwelch3564  The "customers" are counter parties to transactions. The value is to the beholder/payer as the OP said.
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  29. BP's change in direction will be good for pensioners. Every pension fund (bar the ESG ones) hold positions in BP and BP pays a good dividend. BP and its peers exist because there is a demand for their products and services. You're asking a company to cease to do the thing it exists to do. That's a ridiculous position. Your argument should be with governments, not a business serving it's consumers.
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  30. Net zero does not mean no fossil fuels. Net zero is a mix of fuels with *net* emissions.
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  31. There are a million vacancies in STEM related fields. Problem is people in the UK are not training or re-skilling for these jobs. Hence why we in business are having to import workers from China and India where they understand the education priorities (STEM).
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  32. ​ @benjaminford9932  My reply seems to have been deleted. Companies do invest, but in the people they already have so as not to lose existing organisational knowledge. Outside, it's the tech companies that are partnering with unis to provide upskilling, or directly providing online learning resources.
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  33. I know what they are about. It was explained in the manifesto.
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  34. Scientists never said when the ice age would come, they only said it would cause one. They were talking in the timeframes of ecological disasters.
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  35. Because there is no need for competing ideologies. The world has settled on capitalism (even China has settled on it). So all of our challenges need to be resolved through capitalism.
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  36. Negative.
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  37. We DO have a fundamental shortage of housing. Yes, people are "housed" - but many are living at home with parents for far too long into their 20s, and some into their 30s because of housing shortage.
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  38. The same as UK and Europe. Central bank (the US Federal Reserve) creates the money, government spends it, taxes to take it back out of circulation to balance the books with the central bank.
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  39. Nailed it. It's not the austerity on public services that is the problem, it was the austerity in infrastructure investment that is at the heart of the economic stagnation. International businesses are desperate to invest in UK, not even demanding tax incentives, they just want the foundational infrastructure to be in place before they invest.
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  40. They pay high income taxes in the UK as their pay is processed by the UK arm of the businesses.
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  41. No one (refugee or not) is valuable unless they contribute to society.
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  42. Which is no bad thing because the "working class" are also not merely labourers anymore. Most of the modern working class are knowledge workers.
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  43. The NI increase on employERs is more about gradually getting businesses to be more involved in society. In the old days businesses did things like build homes for their workers. Businesses today are only interested in extracting profit. We need businesses to get back to being part of society.
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  44. Starmer is a unionist so will never permit a independence referendum for Scotland, not while he is the PM.
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  45. Why FTSE100 is up is no mystery: it's constituents are global players, they are all good value stocks, and interest rates are falling so people are investing in index funds over cash savings. The FTSE100 is recovering back to where it would be now anyway had it not been for the pandemic.
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  46.  @Serpsss  Easier said than done. How are you going to achieve global consensus on that? Because it cannot be done with international cooperation.
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  47. Private yachts and jets are far and few. Would raise much money. When you hear that a rich person us using a private jet, it's usually a private charter.
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  48. Open sourcing puts the power of LLMs in the hands of everyone. What the DeepSeek team did was more impressive than just a better LLM than OpenAI's LLM. They showed the world that you don't need ultra expensive GPUs to do the model training. America export bans Nvidia's best GPUs. But DeepSeek software engineers used a generation older Nvidia GPU, and wrote custom code in, essentially, the GPU's native machine code, to boost the performance of the older generation GPUs. The real pay off with DeepSeek is China showing the world its impressive software engineering talent. One of their engineers turned down $10 million from another Chinese tech company (Xiaomi) to work for DeepSeek. They know their worth. The US tech majors will still win from the open sourcing of LLMs. LLMs in themselves do not add value to anything, they are an academic exercise. It's when LLMs are added to software and hardware products, then value is unlocked. More so, when LLMs are successfully integrated into workflows and processes. And that is where the profits exist, in the software platforms that businesses use. Microsoft, Google, Amazon, SalesForce, ServiceNow are the big winners. (Microsoft and ServiceNow are big players in public sector, including software for government departments and administrations.) Open sourced LLMs lower the barrier to even small tech startups to get in on the game. This week's US tech stock market dip will be a blip in the mid-long term (and, yes I bought Nvidia shares on the dip at $117). It was a knee jerk reaction to DeepSeek LLM going mainstream. Already Alibaba (another Chinese tech major) has a distilled LLM that is performing even better, and is also open source. By the way, it's pronounced "en-vi-dia", not "na-vi-dia".
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  49. So the stricter capital ratios that banks must maintain since 2008 are in the central bank reserve account? Also, would be interested to hear what you think the Chancellor will do in October. Do you think Rachel Reeves will raid people's savings?
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  50. Including ordinary retail investors. That's not a bad thing.
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