Tuesday 24th January 2023

[refitman]

Morning all.

[frog222]

Afternoon refit

[frog222]

Having read this I now can't help thinking of Slithy Sunak as a 'schmoozer', it fits him so well .

He doesn't appear to have been a decision-maker on investments, so perhaps a salesman flogging 'opportunities' to individuals corporations and institutions ?

" when it comes to his CV, Sunak is strangely shtum.

Despite working for Goldman Sachs between 2001 and 2004, Sunak doesn't allude to his Goldman analyst years on his LinkedIn profile. Nor does he mention his subsequent career working for hedge fund TCI fund (The Children’s Investment Fund) or for Theleme Partners, an equity investment firm which he apparently founded himself. All that matters in Rishi's history is his time in parliament and as Chancellor of the Exchequer.

This might be because public service obliterates all else, or because his time at Goldman was a traumatic one. Sunak joined the class of 2001, which means he would have arrived shortly before September 11th. In 2001, Goldman's profits fell 25% as a result of the terrorist attack and in the following 12 months, the firm cut more than 2,800 jobs, 12% of its employees at that time. Even in late 2002, Goldman was considering cutting another 400 people and there were forecasts that up to 20% of its bankers could be cut.

For Rishi, who was reportedly very nice and very hard-working, the turbulence at Goldman may have been a spur to leave banking. In 2004 he went to Stanford Business School in California to study an MBA, but rather than staying in the US and working in tech, came back to London to work for TCI.

Aspersions have been cast upon what exactly Sunak did at TCI, where he only had C4 partner authorisation according to his FCA registration. Most other colleagues had CF30 customer facing registrations or CF26 trading registrations. The implication is that Sunak was more of a schmoozer or operations guy than a portfolio manager at the fund.

Even if Sunak himself wants to play down his history in finance, it's unlikely to go unforgotten by the British electorate, for whom his former career in banking and his immense wealth by marriage are likely to be sources of growing contention in an era of fiscal restraint.

Sunak could easily foster a new era of 'banker bashing' in the UK as the British public come to associate him with finance and with renewed austerity. For Goldman Sachs, it might therefore be a good thing that he hasn't fully completed his LinkedIn profile. But it could just be that he hasn't got around to it: the profile doesn't say that he's PM yet, either. "

https://www.efinancialcareers.fr/en/new ... dman-sachs

We really need a Dan Neidle to examine what some of them actually did in the few years they spent at various places, before they become PM .

Another example is Liz Truss being an 'accountant' at Shell, when she was a graduate management trainee and only qualified ACMA in 1999 before leaving for C&W the next year .

[AnatolyKasparov]

Tory leaders beefing up ther CVs goes back all the way to IDS at least.

[gilsey]

[gilsey]

[Sky'sGoneOut]

Some refined political discourse from the good old U.S of A.

[Sky'sGoneOut]

Wow, even the Spectator has published an article rubbishing the headlines in the Mail and Telegraph calling half the country feckless scroungers.

The problem with Britain’s benefits debate

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the ... ts-debate/

A report claiming a majority of us receive more in benefits than we stump up in tax made headlines yesterday. The analysis produced by the think tank Civitas contends that 36 million Britons, or 54 per cent, live in households that get more out than they put in. This finding may well appeal to those who reckon the country consists of lazy, feckless scroungers on the take from hard-working people like them.

At risk of spoiling the fun, the truth is a little more prosaic. For one, Civitas gets to its 54 per cent figure by counting not only pensions and welfare payments but ‘benefits in kind’, i.e. the ‘imputed value’ of the NHS treatment, state education and social care each household receives. Civitas volunteers this but most people do not consult the methodologies of think tank reports. Most people will give the word ‘benefits’ its commonly used construction: welfare payments to the unemployed, those unable to work for health reasons or families who struggle to meet housing or other costs.

Those kinds of benefits are part of the Civitas calculation but they are unhelpfully conflated with public services that the average person would not think of as a benefit. The other problem with including ‘benefits in kind’ is that, by implication, families who rely more heavily on healthcare or education than others are somehow living off largesse paid for by their neighbours. Under the terms of the report, one of the reasons older people are determined to receive more benefits is because they make more use of the NHS.

Speaking of pensioners, the data about this particular cohort have not grabbed quite so many headlines. The analysis finds that ‘the percentage of retired individuals receiving more in benefits than they pay in tax is high: 87.6 per cent’, reflecting the aforementioned NHS usage but also their triple-locked benefits in the form of the state pension, the most expensive item in welfare spending and second most expensive item in the entire UK budget. So much of the conversation about benefits in the UK is about desert – pensioners deserve their money, other benefit recipients don’t – and yet the public perception of spending on working-age benefits versus payments to retirees is starkly at odds with the actual figures.

This is before we get to some of the language employed in the report and its ideological underpinnings. What the authors characterise as ‘dependency’ can just as easily be termed redistribution or the provision of social security and public services. If you regard benefits as handouts, then you probably would deem receipt of greater monetary (or in-kind) value than has been contributed a dependency, but if you think of these transfers as social security, designed to meet material needs, alleviate poverty, and lessen inequalities, then you might well think this is the state functioning as it ought to.

The point about inequality is not mere socialist hand-wringing. As the report notes, the Gini coefficient measure of income inequality was lower in 2020/21 than in 14 of the previous 20 years of the 21st century. So when Civitas says the ‘net dependency ratio’ – the percentage of those benefiting more from state spending than they pay in taxes – is ‘the highest on record’, might that have something to do with the reduction in the Gini coefficient?

[frog222]

Prigozhin allowed by the Treasury to carry out SLAPP's against bellingcat .

Made the News At Ten .

Also the Oligarch's use of them against Catherine Belton author of 'Putin's People'.

About time that got more airing !

@Sky -- will read the Spectator one tomorrow, zzzz !

[AnatolyKasparov]

Old Holborn has passed away, so whatever the opposite of RIP is.

[Sky'sGoneOut]

I've loved Eva Green ever since seeing her in that dreadful 'Camelot' series on Ch4 and this just makes me love her more.

‘Evil’, ‘peasants’ and ‘vomit’ – Eva Green’s WhatsApp messages exude star quality

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2023/j ... ar-quality

The only thing I'd take issue with is this...

When her request was denied, she wrote to her agent stating that she would be “obliged to take [the producer’s] shitty peasant crew members from Hampshire”.

Having visited Hampshire a couple of times of late I'd have to say she's being a little over generous there. The denizens of Hampshire are, on the whole, small wiry creatures more akin to goblins than peasants. Any visitor taller than about 5 foot 5 inches will find themselves feeling like a freakish giant in some bizarre Swiftian fantasy. I myself witnessed some of them riding on dogs as if they were horses and watched helpless as a fully grown woman was carried screaming out to sea by a herring gull. However calling them shitty is a bit rude.

[Sky'sGoneOut]

Old Holborn has passed away, so whatever the opposite of RIP is.

I was always more of a Golden Virginia man.

There does seem to be a spate of right wing arseholes dying. My particular favourite comes from across the pond. 'Diamond' (of Diamond and Silk fame) died suddenly. They were Trump supporting antivax sisters who got kicked off Fox News (because Fox insisted everyone they employed was vaccinated). Her death certificate says she died of heart disease caused by chronic high blood pressure but at her memorial service her sister implied she must have secretly had the Covid vaccine which killed her and went on a rant about America being poisoned.

You've got to hand it to Silk, even at her own sister's funeral she never stopped grifting. That's dedication which, as Roy Castle and Norris McWhirter told us, is what you need.

[refitman]

Old Holborn has passed away, so whatever the opposite of RIP is.

I was always more of a Golden Virginia man.

There does seem to be a spate of right wing arseholes dying. My particular favourite comes from across the pond. 'Diamond' (of Diamond and Silk fame) died suddenly. They were Trump supporting antivax sisters who got kicked off Fox News (because Fox insisted everyone they employed was vaccinated). Her death certificate says she died of heart disease caused by chronic high blood pressure but at her memorial service her sister implied she must have secretly had the Covid vaccine which killed her and went on a rant about America being poisoned.

You've got to hand it to Silk, even at her own sister's funeral she never stopped grifting. That's dedication which, as Roy Castle and Norris McWhirter told us, is what you need.

There's a section on the Trump memorial appearance, on today's 'Internet Today'. Despite being asked to speak, he claimed not to know who she was

[Sky'sGoneOut]

There's a section on the Trump memorial appearance, on today's 'Internet Today'. Despite being asked to speak, he claimed not to know who she was.

No way, he recognised a picture of an elephant in his psych evaluation. Stable genius and all that.

But you're right.

Apparently he was less than curious about a double act of overweight black women to the point of thinking there was only one of them.

[Sky'sGoneOut]

From AK yesterday.

Not universally popular on here, but I basically agree with what Sky said about Covid at the close of the weekend thread.

Don't get me wrong in schools, hospitals, nursing homes we should be making an effort to protect people and it's not happening in any serious way. My point was about the rest of us and how we live our lives. Drinking alcohol fucks up your liver, kidneys, gallbladder...need I go on? We pick and choose the risks we take. If indeed you believe in free will. Which many a neuro scientist these days doesn't. We're slaves to our instincts no different to monkeys in trees. Time and again experiments show we react to things before our slow conscious brain even realises there's a problem. We're two people in the same body. One intent on survival and the other who likes paintings and music.

[Sky'sGoneOut]