Links - 24th May 2025 (2 - Climate Change)

Meme - Christina Amira Khalil @Christina4nJ: "I experienced my first earthquake in NJ. We never get earthquakes. The climate crisis is real. The weirdest experience ever."
Readers added context: "NJ sits on a fault line. Has nothing to do with climate change."

Wall Street Apes on X - "Amazon electric vehicles seen charging in the snow All these vehicles are being charged by a huge diesel generator. The generator is on, you can hear it running providing the power “Doesn’t that defeat the purpose when you literally have a diesel powered generator electrifying all of the electric vehicles?”  This is Democrat’s “Green Energy.”"

memetic_sisyphus on X - "Europe committed suicide in the 20th century and is no longer relevant. China promised to stop GROWING their emissions sometime in the future. India promised to make half of their energy non-fossil fuels, this is predicated on the west building the green tech for them. Russia promised to cut their greenhouse emissions to 1990s levels. This will be achieved by bringing trench warfare back to Europe and killing as many people as necessary for the reduction."

Meme - memetic_sisyphus @memeticsisyphus: "This might imply that every country is signing up to the same thing, but they aren’t. A developed western country like the U.S. might be asked to stop driving cars or heating our homes in the winter while a country like Liberia is asked to not dump quite so much trash into their water ways. There’s also a foreign aid component, where the U.S. would be required to funnels billions to countries like Liberia to help their efforts in not dumping raw sewage into their rivers.   So of course every third world country signed up for the free money accord, why wouldn’t they?"
ian bremmer @ianbremmer: "where the world stands on the paris climate agreement, as of today:"

Wilfred Reilly on X - "The one-sentence reason I am not panicked about climate change is that we have seen LITERALLY DOZENS of previous, recent predictions of apocalypse made - remember (1) N. Ferguson (2020) and (2) "The Hammer and the Dance" just as re COVID - and not one of them has ever come true.   Peak Oil 1-7, Global Cooling, the entire set of Club of Rome predictions, the Great Northerly Migration involving the famed killer bees, acid rain at scale, Y2K, the global Ozone Hole, the Population Bomb, the Western Heterosexual AIDS Epidemic, every one of Gore's predictions in 2000, and more than 10 others at the same scale all just......utterly failed to materialize.   This happened for one of three reasons: (1) we invented a technological fix for the issue (i.e. hormonal birth control for the "PB"), (2) we made annoying but simple sacrifices to solve it (big hair is, sadly, gone), or (3) the prediction itself relied on hyper-unlikely worst-case scenarios and was always just nuts.   The odds of one of these three occurring again, as re "We can't stop a 2* temperature increase over the next 125 years - We Are All Going To Die" - are 100.00%."

Dark Doldrums Overshadow Europe’s Energy Markets - The New York Times - "Europe is watching the skies for a gremlin that can roil its energy markets and stoke political tensions between neighboring countries. This weather phenomenon, known as the Dunkelflaute, has become a source of frustration to government ministers and a potential pitfall on their journey to cleaner energy.  A German term that translates to “dark doldrums,” Dunkelflaute refers to a spate of calm days when dense clouds descend over northern Europe. This weather pattern may occur two to 10 times a year, usually in the fall and winter, and lasts 24 hours or longer.  In the past, these spells of murky quiet would have made little difference to energy markets in Europe. But in recent years, as countries like Germany and Britain have spent billions to tackle climate change by shifting to cleaner sources of energy, the Dunkelflaute has gained notoriety. A generation ago, Europe relied on steady, predictable flows of energy from nuclear and fossil fuel plants. Now, much of the region’s power comes from solar arrays and wind farms, whose output varies with the whims of the weather... During the gloomy stillness of a Dunkelflaute, solar panels produce little power and wind turbines slow to a halt. Without these two mainstays of renewable energy, grid operators need to call on backup power plants like natural-gas-fired generators. The cost of running these power plants is higher, which drives up prices when renewable sources are falling behind, said Steve Moody, trading director at Conrad Energy, a power trading company in Abingdon, England, that supplies electricity to the grid through batteries and other sources. “You will see high prices in periods of scarcity,” he said.  During a stretch of low wind in mid-December, for instance, British power prices briefly jumped to 485 pounds per megawatt-hour, well above an average of about £70 over the last year, according to Drax Electric Insights, a website that tracks power.  And Germany has suffered a particularly gloomy fall and winter this year, with electricity production down more than 5 percent compared with the same time the previous year. A Dunkelflaute in mid-December caused electricity prices to jump to 14 times their average. Because a Dunkelflaute can blanket several countries at the same time, its effects can ripple through much of northern Europe, putting pressure on power systems. A Dunkelflaute in early November led to price surges in Denmark, the Netherlands and Belgium, as well as in Britain.  These weather systems often occur when the temperature is cold, testing the capacity of the power grid because affected countries may draw large volumes of gas. A Dunkelflaute, which can last several weeks, “can have potential impact on security of supply,” said an official of Britain’s National Energy System Operator during an industry webinar held this month to discuss their effects... high power prices in countries like Germany and Denmark can spill over into markets like Norway’s and Sweden’s, straining relationships between neighboring countries... When a power-hungry country like Germany sucks large volumes of electricity from its Scandinavian neighbors, this interconnected system can drive up the prices in the exporting countries, angering consumers. “When there is no wind, we get high electricity prices with this failed electricity system,” Ebba Busch, Sweden’s economy minister, wrote in a post on social media.  Ms. Busch also blamed insufficient electricity and resulting high prices in Germany on Berlin’s decision to shut off its nuclear reactors last year, despite an energy crunch in the country caused by Russia cutting off natural gas supplies as part of its dispute with the West over the war in Ukraine.  Some power-exporting countries are threatening to turn to protectionism to buffer their citizens. Politicians in Norway have cast doubt on continuing to operate cables that bring Norwegian hydropower to Denmark, while Sweden has postponed building a second cable to Germany. In France, officials of the far-right National Rally party have also proposed curbing electricity exports from the country’s fleet of nuclear power stations."
The New York Times is so ignorant. Don't they know that renewables are the cheapest form of energy because the cost per unit of installed capacity is what matters, not system costs?

The relationship between renewable energy and retail electricity prices: Panel evidence from OECD countries - "The centrality of electricity to everyday life is indisputable, and the price thereof can have significant implications. Literature is inconclusive over the effect of the renewable energy share in the energy mix on retail electricity prices as a country-specific regulatory policy has a significant impact on retail electricity prices. The purpose of this paper is to determine the effect of the increasing renewable electricity share on retail electricity prices for 34-OECD countries, considering the change in market structure for 23 EU countries. The results show that the influence of the renewable energy share in the energy mix on retail electricity prices is positive and statistically significant. Increasing renewable sources is inescapable in reaching SDG7, while increased awareness of true price signals should prompt private investment while phasing out support schemes in the long run. A sound regulatory framework is required to account for renewable intermittency as well as effective supply and demand matching. The positive impact on electricity prices should not deter policymakers from promoting renewable energy as the effect is marginal and is expected to decline in forthcoming years, improving energy security. The benefits of employing renewables far outweigh the environmental cost."
Damn greedy companies! Since renewable energy is cheaper, more of it must lead to lower power prices!
Too bad they had that awkward conclusion, but if not for it, the paper might not have been published

Walz’s Climate Policies Could Leave the Midwest in the Dark - WSJ - "Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz last year signed one of America’s most aggressive climate laws, mandating that 100% of the state’s electricity come from carbon-free sources by 2040. Even if he doesn’t ascend to national office, he may end up leaving not only Minnesota but other states in the dark. As we show in a new paper, politicians like Mr. Walz are destroying the electricity markets that are essential to economic success and even individual survival. We analyzed seven Great Lakes states with connected electricity grids—Illinois, Indiana, Minnesota, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. For decades, these states have bought and sold electricity in regional markets, benefiting from the abundance of reliable power generated from sources like coal, natural gas and nuclear. But through a combination of state mandates and utility company decisions, all of them are moving away from those reliable sources toward unreliable wind and solar power, in pursuit of net-zero greenhouse gas emissions. Where will states like Minnesota turn when the wind stops blowing and the sun stops shining, two inevitable daily occurrences? Mr. Walz and net-zero backers surely assumed they could buy backup power from across the region, but other states assumed the same thing. In a classic tragedy of the commons, Mr. Walz and other leaders act as if they don’t realize their neighbors are also on track to run short of power... When subzero temperatures sweep across the Great Lakes every January, states will increasingly ask each other for power that doesn’t exist. Ditto when heat waves crest in July and August. Factories will lose power—a death knell for competitiveness—while families will lose air conditioning or heat. In Michigan, we estimate that a wind-, solar- and battery-based grid will cause blackouts lasting as long as three days during extreme winter weather. People will die. This shouldn’t be surprising to Mr. Walz and his peers. Many of the grid operators responsible for balancing electricity between states have warned about what’s coming. The CEO of Midcontinent Independent Systems Operator, which oversees most of the Great Lakes region’s electric grid (including Minnesota), recently noted that the energy transition poses “material, adverse challenges to electric reliability,” and that wind and solar power “lack certain key reliability attributes that are needed to keep the grid reliable every hour of the year.” In other words, replacing traditional generation with wind and solar means an electricity grid that routinely fails. State leaders need to wake up, and soon. While there’s no chance Mr. Walz will abandon his signature climate policy during a national campaign, no state should endanger its economy and residents by pursuing net zero."

Better batteries won’t save the energy grid – Mackinac Center - "When it comes to utility-scale battery storage, unfortunately, doing so at scale encounters prohibitively high prices due in no small part to the inefficiency of the batteries and the relative scarcity of the minerals needed for the batteries. While it is true that the market works to improve prices and options, the fundamental issues of utility-scale storage remain: They store far too little at far too high a cost.  Energy analysis group Doomberg finds that battery storage is improving, but at a pace far below what we need:
'According to projections from industrial research firm Wood Mackenzie, the US is set to add 191.6 gigawatt hours (GWh) of battery backup systems across residential, non-residential, and grid-scale installations between 2022 and 2026. This sounds impressive until you realize the US produced 4,116,000 GWh of electricity on the grid in 2021 alone. By our math, the Wood Mackenzie projection amounts to a grand total of 24 minutes of total backup capacity added to the system over the quoted five-year period.'...
In addition, these batteries use critical minerals whose reliable extraction is increasingly costly and difficult. A report from the International Energy Agency (an organization very clear in its support of net zero) admits that "mineral demand for use in EVs and battery storage is a major force [of mineral demand increases], growing at least thirty times to 2040"
"A utility-scale storage system sufficient for [a] 100-MW wind farm would entail using at least 10,000 tons of Tesla-class batteries," according to a report from the Manhattan Institute. In another report, the Manhattan Institute notes, "Barely two hours of national electricity demand can be stored in all utility-scale batteries plus all batteries in one million electric cars in America."...
Weather conditions in 2023 reduced wind generation to less than 1% of its capacity on June 6th that year, a representative from Southwest Power Pool, the electric grid operator for the Great Plains region, told a U.S. House Subcommittee. The wind turbines in that grid are rated to generate up to 32,000 megawatts of electricity but produced only 110 megawatts – that is, wind production fell to about one-third of 1% of its capacity. (He talks about this at a little after the 35-minute mark on the video.) German utilities have experienced this frequently in their leap to wind and solar, calling it "dunkelflaute."  When this happens, to my knowledge, no battery system in existence has ever provided enough electricity to meet demand throughout the night. Despite all that we've built, battery backup lasts a matter of minutes, not the entire night. The battery backup lasts just long enough for natural gas plants to turn on and meet the supply that weather-dependent generation didn't meet.  Battery storage is improving over time, but it would require a quantum leap to become genuinely viable in meeting current demand, let alone the demand of a growing economy.
On the point of nuclear energy, we are most certainly in agreement. Small modular reactors are promising developments, but traditional fission plants often get a far worse reputation than is fair. "There were no acute radiation injuries or deaths among the workers or the public due to exposure to radiation resulting from the incident," wrote the World Health Organization in its Fukushima report. Had the Fukushima plant's backup generators not been built in at-risk, low-lying areas (which some scientists at the time opposed), there would never have even been a meltdown. Nuclear plants have been providing France with a majority of its power for decades — cleanly, reliably, cheaply, and with no disasters to speak of. The country is the world's largest net exporter of electricity. On natural gas, as well, we agree. No serious plans for America's energy future can exclude natural gas. It can ramp up quickly to meet surprise demand, it is energy-dense, it emits less carbon, and it is widely available at low prices. Natural gas is harder to transport than coal and vulnerable to supply chain issues, but policy changes can ameliorate these problems. The cost-benefit analysis shows natural gas to be a cornerstone of a reliable energy portfolio.  Even major innovations in batter technology would do little to mitigate the change to unreliable energy sources. The push to wind and solar is a shift from cheap, reliable, and energy-dense forms of power generation to subsidized, weather-dependent, less efficient forms of generation. Wind and solar do not work as advertised by politicians, bureaucrats, and activists. The replacement of traditional thermal generation with less-dense, less-reliable energy is driven not by market demand or technological reality but by orders from capitol buildings around the country. We get effectively nothing from this transition. The supply chains for wind and solar are dominated by China and other unfriendly nations. If the United States were able to achieve 100% renewable electricity generation and ban fossil fuels entirely, that would, using the IPCC's own MAGICC modeling, lower global average temperatures by nine-tenths of one tenth of one degree Celsius in 2100. The cost-benefit analysis shows we would end up crippling our grid for nothing."
Since greens claim that the 2018 MIT report on how batteries can't support the grid is outdated, here is something from 2024

Marc Nixon on X - "BREAKING: America’s new Secretary of Energy just exposed the entire climate scam “Media & politicians NEVER bothered to actually learn about climate change.” $2 TRILLION to lower fossil fuel use by 2% They’re not saving the planet—they’re robbing YOU"

How the humble heat pump pushed Germany to the far-Right - "On the face of it, it’s hard to get wound up by a heat pump. The eco-friendly heating unit sits there minding its own business, sucking warmth out of the air and transferring it to the inside of a house.  Yet in Germany – a country grappling with mass immigration, economic stagnation and war in Europe – heat pumps have become an unlikely lightning rod for public fury.  Plans by Olaf Scholz’s governing coalition to ban traditional gas and oil boilers and replace them with heat pumps have sparked mass protests as exasperated homeowners were faced with five-figure bills to install the units, which work best in newer, better-insulated homes.  The heating law – dreamt up in 2023 by Green politician and energy minister, Robert Habeck – would have meant an effective ban on new gas boilers in Germany from January 1 2024.  The backlash prompted policymakers to water down the legislation until it was almost unrecognisable. But the damage was done. Bild, Germany’s biggest-selling tabloid, branded the policy “the heat hammer”. Others have simply dubbed it “boilergeddon”... The heat pump issue has “played into the AfD’s hands”, he adds, but not as much as nuclear power. The party wants to bring nuclear back into Germany’s energy mix after former chancellor, Angela Merkel, shut down the nation’s remaining nuclear infrastructure in the wake of the Fukushima disaster... Habeck’s heating law supported the government’s wider push for a green energy revolution. The Green leader wanted to accelerate the shift to heat pumps, solar panels and hydrogen boilers, helping the country reach its ambitious target of carbon neutrality by 2045. Germany’s air quality and housing stock would have been improved along the way... The snag is that Germans will have to reach into their pockets to foot the bill. Heat pumps remain significantly more expensive than traditional heating systems, despite generous subsidies... Germans living in less energy-efficient properties realised they would have had to knock down and rebuild their homes in order to make a heat pump work well... “When you have heat pumps, you need solar power on the roofs. But we have many days when we have no sun, so it’s possible to have no heating... “The problem was that the Greens’ voter base was mostly urban and higher income,” he says. “So they hadn’t thought about the main problem, which is cost.  “In East Germany, many people own houses but are not rich. They don’t have a penny to pay to exchange their heating systems.  “Everything is getting more expensive, and now you’ll have to change your heating system. [The issue] will make waves in the election.” Polls suggest that energy has dropped down the list of voter priorities since 2021, replaced by immigration and security.  But according to a survey commissioned by the German newspaper, Die Zeit, as many as 70pc of Germans reject compulsory regulations on banning heating fired by oil or gas or paying for obligatory replacements for their heating systems."

Meme - "*Old, wrinkled Greta Thunberg*
2080 "THE EARTH HAS JUST 12 YEARS LEFT""

Meme - Bjorn Lomborg @BjornLomborg" "The cheap green lie  You are told that solar and wind are cheap  But cramming in more solar and wind just makes power more and more costly  because solar and wind are worthless when not sunny and windy  https://iea.org/data-and-statistics/data-product/energy-prices  WSJ: https://archive.ph/lZKbb"
"Expensive Solar and Wind. The elites tell you that solar and wind are cheap
Reality: The more solar and wind, the costlier it gets. That is because solar and wind are worthless when not sunny and windy. Data for 2022, but same result for 2019, just before Covid and Ukraine war
*Percent solar and wind in electricity vs Electricity price per kWh, industry and household, with more solar and wind correlated with higher electricity prices*"
The cope is that "corporate greed" explains this. Weird how green energy makes companies more greedy. When everyone "knows" that "green" energy is the cheapest form of energy, all sorts of interesting rationalisations follow

Green Electricity Costs a Bundle - WSJ - "The claim that green energy is cheaper relies on bogus math that measures the cost of electricity only when the sun is shining and the wind is blowing. Modern societies need around-the-clock power, requiring backup, often powered by fossil fuels. That means we’re paying for two power systems: renewables and backup. Moreover, as fossil fuels are used less, those power sources need to earn their capital costs back in fewer hours, leading to even more expensive power. This means the real energy costs of solar and wind are far higher than what green campaigners claim. One study shows that in China the real cost of solar power on average is twice as high as that of coal. Similarly, a peer-reviewed study of Germany and Texas shows that solar and wind are many times more expensive than fossil fuels. Germany, the U.K., Spain, and Denmark, all of which increasingly rely on solar and wind power, have some of the world’s most expensive electricity. The International Energy Agency’s latest data (from 2022) on solar and wind power generation costs and consumption across nearly 70 countries shows a clear correlation between more solar and wind and higher average household and industry energy prices. In a country with little or no solar and wind, the average electricity cost is about 12 cents a kilowatt-hour (in today’s money). For every 10% increase in solar and wind share, the electricity cost increases by more than 5 cents a kilowatt-hour. This isn’t an outlier; these results are substantially similar to 2019, before the effects of the pandemic and the war in Ukraine. Take Germany, where electricity costs 30 cents a kilowatt-hour—more than twice the U.S. cost and more than three times the Chinese price. Germany has installed so much solar and wind that, on sunny and windy days, renewable energy satisfies close to 70% of Germany’s needs—a fact the press eagerly reports. But the press hardly mentions dark and still days, when these renewables deliver almost nothing. Twice in the past two months, when it was cloudy and nearly windless, solar and wind delivered less than 4% of the daily power Germany needed. Current battery technology is insufficient. Germany’s entire battery storage runs out in about 20 minutes. That leaves more than 23 hours of energy powered mostly by fossil fuels. Last month, with cloudy skies and nearly no wind, Germany faced the highest power prices since the energy crisis caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, with wholesale prices reaching a staggering $1 a kilowatt-hour. At least climate-obsessed European governments are generally honest about solar and wind costs and raise electricity prices accordingly, making consumers bear the weight of green energy policies directly. In the U.S., by contrast, consumers pay solar and wind costs indirectly—through tax deductions and subsidies... Poor countries are especially hurt by the lie that green energy is cheap. Rich countries often refuse to help poor countries with fossil fuel projects. If solar and wind really were less expensive, the world’s poorer countries would easily leapfrog from today’s energy poverty to energy abundance. New energy infrastructure would all be solar and wind. But this happens only in rich countries where generous subsidies and existing fossil-fuel backup infrastructure make our solar and wind deception possible. In poorer countries, where electricity consumption rose almost 5% from 2022 to 2023, most of the additions came from fossil fuels, with coal contributing more than all solar and wind additions. China during that period added more new coal than new solar and wind. Bangladesh added 13 times as much coal as solar and wind. Despite India’s ambitious solar targets, it added three times as much coal as solar and wind.  This sets the backdrop for U.S. authorities’ recent bribery allegations against Indian billionaire Gautam Adani. Since most Indian states don’t want to “risk ‘intermittent’ renewables,” according to Reuters, he allegedly had to bribe government officials to get them to buy power from his $6 billion solar power project. Mr. Adani’s case confirms what the data already show: Solar and wind are bad business and make our power much more expensive."

The Procurement Files on X - "The UK taxpayer paid £499,649 to buy 15 Electric Porsches for the British Embassy in Tirana- to be donated to Albanian Prisons. ‘Part of a drive to net zero.. the required vehicles should be delivered at once’ Contract awarded to Porsche Albania by the FCDO @WokeWaste"

Latimer Alder on X - "This is Emma Pinchbeck She's the new boss of the Climate Change Committee.. a bunch of academics and green grifters who advise untekkie Miliband how to destroy UK for NetZero Yet I can't find her qualifications. The internet is remarkably coy about her background Anyone?"
Latimer Alder on X - "Thanks to those who discovered her degree is in 'Classics and English'. So a non-scientist is in charge of advising another non-scientist (Miliband) how to wreck our energy systems, bankrupt the country and have NO effect on either the climate or an uncaring indifferent world"

Wall Street Apes on X - "2 Part Video:
TODAY: Democrat Boston Governor Maura Healey says they have an energy crisis because it’s impossible to get natural gas
2022: Gov Healey brags about BLOCKING natural gas pipelines that would’ve solved their crisis
You can’t make this up"
Time to blame "greedy companies" instead of climate change hysteria

Wide Awake Media on X - "A coal power station in Sichuan, China. China's CO2 output now eclipses that of the entire developed world combined, rendering all the sacrifices you are being forced to make in the ludicrous pursuit of Net Zero utterly pointless."

Ontario says clean electricity regulations would add $35B in costs - "A new analysis by the Independent Electricity System Operator looking at upcoming regulations around restrictions on emissions from electricity generation found that Ontario would have to add twice as much new generation as it is already planning, which is "not feasible" in that time frame.  But if the province were to somehow do so, building enough new electricity generation to make up for restrictions on natural gas would add $35 billion in costs by 2050, increasing residential bills by $132 to $168 per year starting in 2033, the IESO said."
Everyone knows that green energy is the cheapest form of energy, so we can just blame greedy companies working hand in glove with conservative governments for price rises. Environmental groups' voodoo maths cannot be disputed

Amazon rainforest cut down to build highway for COP climate summit - "A new four-lane highway cutting through tens of thousands of acres of protected Amazon rainforest is being built for the COP30 climate summit in the Brazilian city of Belém.  It aims to ease traffic to the city, which will host more than 50,000 people - including world leaders - at the conference in November.  The state government touts the highway's "sustainable" credentials, but some locals and conservationists are outraged at the environmental impact... Claudio Verequete lives about 200m from where the road will be. He used to make an income from harvesting açaí berries from trees that once occupied the space.  "Everything was destroyed," he says, gesturing at the clearing.  "Our harvest has already been cut down. We no longer have that income to support our family."  He says he has received no compensation from the state government and is currently relying on savings.  He worries the construction of this road will lead to more deforestation in the future, now that the area is more accessible for businesses... His community won't be connected to the road, given its walls on either side.  "For us who live on the side of the highway, there will be no benefits. There will be benefits for the trucks that will pass through. If someone gets sick, and needs to go to the centre of Belém, we won't be able to use it."... The Brazilian president and environment minister say this will be a historic summit because it is "a COP in the Amazon, not a COP about the Amazon".  The president says the meeting will provide an opportunity to focus on the needs of the Amazon, show the forest to the world, and present what the federal government has done to protect it.  But Prof Sardinha says that while these conversations will happen "at a very high level, among business people and government officials", those living in the Amazon are "not being heard"."

Trans Bikini Narcissism / Trans Women are... / Knitted Penises for Toddlers

stacycay: "Btw trans women started this trend of layering bikinis and now major brands are selling one bikini that looks like two. So when u see a babe wearing this, remember she's trying to look like me"

There's no narcissism like trans narcissism

"Trans women are men. Trans men are women. Non binary is fake shit. Trans rights are not my fucking problem"

pagliacci the hated 🌝 @Slatzism: "A knitted penis for extremely small girls to wear in their pants if their parents believe them to be transgender. It is intended for girls so young, they demonstrate the product in a diaper."
"Bity Bug Soft Packer"

Links - 24th May 2025 (1 - Left Wing Economics)

t 🗽🌐🏗️🛢️@turkishliberal.bsky.social on X - "Believing in free markets doesn't require you to believe free markets are perfect, private companies all virtuous, or pursuing profit always optimal. It only means that, whatever flaws free markets have, you believe non intervention is generally preferable to state intervention."

Free markets will lead to better outcomes than mixed or socialist economies, even if they are not flawless : r/austrian_economics - "How can anyone blame regulatory capture on markets without realizing how braindead that sounds? So you're telling me that massive and powerful regulatory agencies imposing regulations on the market which protect incumbent institutions and increase barriers to entry are... The fault of the fucking market? How exactly are government laws the fault of markets? It doesn't even make sense on its face.  This is actually a microcosm of how broken the progressive mindset is. You pass a ton of regulations and brag about how you're "protecting the poor", or whatever stupid ass claim. Then, the regulations harm the market and lead to less choice. So, you respond by blaming the market itself, and demand to... Pass even more regulations to make the problem worse. And the cycle continues until the market is quasi state run and almost entirely non functional. At that point, you talk about how this market simply needs to be nationalized because it's probably "too important to leave to greedy businesses."  It's all such a played out trope. Insane that you guys never put it together.  By the way, those rich people you're afraid of literally gain monopoly power in their industries via the various regulatory agencies. That's literally how those monopolies form. You talk about hating the rich while simultaneously supporting every policy that makes it easier for them to exploit you on "the market". And you call me a shill for not wanting a criminal institution to continually distort the markets that I use to buy and sell goods? Fucking braindead."

Meme - Commie (with Pride bracelet, pimply face, vape and Red Hammer and Sickle Beret) to guy with yellow hard hat and overalls: "Maybe you feel alienated because you don't own the means of production?"
*Mosque, withered tree, car on fire, black niqab clad women and drab apartment building*

Meme - Commie (with Pride bracelet, pimply face, vape and Red Hammer and Sickle Beret) to guy with yellow hard hat and overalls: "Maybe you feel alienated because you don't own the means of production?"
*Plane flying trans rights banner, drab apartment building flying Pride flags with Black Lives Matter banner, femboy (?), commie in pink shirt and black beret, squatting crying soyjak with Communist tee, colourful pants and mask with something on fire behind him, mosque with angry fat feminists protesting in front, with one wearing "I love male tears" shirt and with one pink haired person, people protesting in front of withered tree with picket signs*

Meme - Bernie Sanders @BernieSanders: "Billionaires in the U.S. are .0005% of the population, yet accounted for 18% of 2024 electoral spending. Just 150 billionaire families spent nearly $2 billion. This is not democracy. It is oligarchy. Time to overturn Citizens United and move to public funding of elections."
"You notice he doesn't include millionaires in his rant, because he is one."
"You wouldn't be saying that if the democrats had won the election"
"start with your own party aka Harris spending $1,000,000,000 in 3 months"
"Didn't seem to bother you until @elonmusk stepped up for conservatives."
"You aren't exactly broke yourself"
"Why did you stop barking at millionaires, Bernie?"

Richard Hanania on X - "Washington DC is suing Amazon for not delivering fast enough to low-income neighborhoods.  You can't make this stuff up. Amazon is an oppressor that destroys communities. It is also an oppressor of people of color if it doesn't provide them enough Amazon services. Why not let them be free of the horrors of two-day shipping?  The problem was that Amazon used its own drivers for wealthier areas, but relied on the post office for poorer areas. They oppressed local communities by forcing them to use government services!  Amazon notes that they stopped sending their own drivers to certain neighborhoods because they are too dangerous.  This is what parasitic government looks like. Let crime be out of control. Have terrible services. A corporation comes along that nonetheless through a miracle of logistics bring goods to the doorstops of a community that government has failed in every way, sue it for not being fast enough relative to some other community without the same problems.  What a disgrace."

Wilfred Reilly on X - "An interesting thing about at least street-level left-wing thought is that it rests on two directly opposed propositions.
(1) "You should be in 100% un-influenced control of every decision you ever make." This is why a >>>0% of young people genuinely feel that it is abusive for your partner to have any sexual or financial expectations of you at all.
But...
(2) "You have a human right to food, shelter, health care, collegiate education, and all other basic necessities."
Combined, what these positions break down to is: you have an absolute right to expect other people to support you in reasonable comfort, and they have no right to expect you to do anything at all.   This is the life philosophy of a tape-worm."

Meme - "Obligatory reminder that this is the clown definition of "capitalism" that most socialists operate by. To socialists, capitalism is when rich people do bad things against non-rich people."
"Well, that's because capitalism inevitably leads to fascism."
"Is it capitalism when large landowners violate peoples' property rights by expropriating their farms to make more profits?"
"Yes. Corporate Capitalism is still capitalism."
"Is it capitalism when Adolf Hitler exterminates so-called "untermenschens" for profit?"
"Yes. It was, late stage capitalism. Which without fail turns to fascism."

Meme - Robert Reich @RBReich: "Wall Street and corporations have stood by Donald Trump and his enablers, all for tax breaks, bailouts and deregulation. Don't think for a second that they have any real allegiance to American democracy. Their allegiance is to profit."
"Robert Reich Makes 36% More Than Average CEO and Gets $40k for a One- hour Talk Vs. Average Worker Pay of $46k/year"

Unhappy Returns: A Preliminary Estimate of Taxpayers Responsiveness to the 2016 Top Tax Rate Hike - "The top 1 percent of earners reacted strongly to the federal tax hike on high earners 2016, according to a new report from the C.D. Howe Institute. In “Unhappy Returns: A Preliminary Estimate of Taxpayers Responsiveness to the 2016 Top Tax Rate Hike,” author Alexandre Laurin finds the underlying behavioural response of taxpayers resulted in $1.2 billion in fresh revenue for the federal government but cost provincial treasuries about $1.3 billion in lost tax revenues."
Left wingers want to "tax" the "rich" not primarily to raise money but make the "rich" suffer, after all

People thinking "eat the rich " means millionaires / well off families : r/PetPeeves - "Reminded me from another post but this drives me insane.  Happens in people who get mad at the term or some people even using the term  Eat the rich does NOT mean. The 3 generation of drs family, it does mean the guy whose dad invented magical purple toilet paper that changed the industry  Eat the rich refers to billionaires with masses amounts of wealth they can only get through slave labour, exploitation of human beings . That's what the term means  There's so much hate towards well off families like JESSICA THEYRE NOT THE PROBLEM GO USE THAT ANGER TOWARDS ANYTHING ELSE.  Eat the rich DOES NOT MEAN WELL OFF FAMILES THEYRE NOT THE PROBLEM  Makes people like me look stupid cos they're stupid and don't even know the enemy."
"I was told I was included in "eat the rich" when our household income was a little under $100k a few years ago lol"
People thinking "eat the rich " means millionaires / well off families : r/PetPeeves - "I remember being 18, bagging groceries at the supermarket for $6.50/hr. I thought the front end supervisor was part of that privileged class, they probably weren't even making $10/hr."
People thinking "eat the rich " means millionaires / well off families : r/PetPeeves - "That's the Martha's Vineyard defense.  It's what privileged people tell themselves so they, too, can play the victim card.  If you're making $150k annually, you are rich. Period, full stop. The fact that there are even richer people does not change that reality."
People thinking "eat the rich " means millionaires / well off families : r/PetPeeves - "Most people define rich as "makes more money than me!"
People thinking "eat the rich " means millionaires / well off families : r/PetPeeves - "If you can have a cleaning lady and go on holiday with the family twice a year in today’s economy - yes your f’ing loaded - eat the rich is definitely talking about you."
So many left wingers sprung out to refute this ridiculous claim

People thinking "eat the rich " means millionaires / well off families : r/PetPeeves - "I think you give too much credit to the human race. I've seen plenty of people exhibiting this "eat the rich" hate towards people who were, by no means, billionaires. Heck, not even millionaires. Just richer than them.  Maybe Reddit gathers the majority of frustrated people, but 2 particular posts come to mind: one was of a woman who was asking for advice on how to confront the maid she suspected of stealing some items; another was a guy posting he found his brand new expensive car scratched in a parking lot. The vast majority of comments were "haha, you deserved it", "stop bitching, you have money to replace/fix that".  There was another post, a guy was asking for recommendations for a reliable private detective, because his neighbour was changing cars every 5 years and taking his family for holiday to a nearby ski resort couple of times a year. And surely this neighbour was doing smth shady to afford all that. This guy, who clearly wasn't swimming in money by being frustrated at someone taking domestic trips couple of times a year, was willing to spend out of whatever he had, just to meddle in his neighbour's life. And he got plenty of advice, some unorthodox, on how to fuck with the more well-off neighbour.  I remember all the posts post-Titan implosion, and comments after comments from people cheering that those rich people died. I think you have to be a special kind of person to find joy in the death of another human being, especially since one of the victims was a 19 year old, especially since those rich people, unethical as they were, were not some dictatorial tyrants that committed genocide.  I find it terribly hypocritical of those people to "eat the rich" with such hate, since I would bet an arm that, given the circumstances and opportunities, they would jump at getting rich, irrespective of what bodies they'd have to walk on. Surely they'd find a way to justify it."
People thinking "eat the rich " means millionaires / well off families : r/PetPeeves - "Yes, but the reality is that when governments implement policies to “tax the rich” it is never Bezos or Musk who suffer. The reality is that it is ALWAYS the surgeon, partner at a law firm, medium family business etc that end up paying more."

People thinking "eat the rich " means millionaires / well off families : r/PetPeeves - "Eat the Rich means the people sitting on more money than god..... abd instead of using it to better anything, they use it to squeeze out even more money from poor people. And then keep sitting on the rest.  It's stupid a doctor or something wouldn't understand the divide.  But I gotta say I really hate "billionaire apologists".  Dude, Elon isn't a car or spaceship inventor, he's the heir to a South African emrald fortune who bought companies, and cheats extra out by cutting corners, taking government money without making good in what's being developed, buying politicians so he pays less in taxes across these adventures, etc. Ironically, he's not even as objectively "talented" as other Sociopath CEOs when it comes to grinding humans into increased profits, he just has so much money at this point he can buy "mulligans" when he dicks up.  Millionaires and corporations could be forced to heel by government regulations and taxation tactics (would you rather pay us 41% in taxes or 20%? Cool, the 20% requires you to pay your hourly non-exempt people $XX an hour minimum, follow these other regulations on Exempt non-officer positions with these other restrictions, plus these Healthcare mandates and environmental sanctions.....)  Billionaires only exist because the government has failed at everything except taking bribes and dividing people. And because Billionaires exist, it's mathematically impossible for large swaths of the population to have a reasonable quality of life with food, shelter, and financial security."
More evidence of the zero sum mentality of the left - someone cannot be well off without making someone else worse off

People thinking "eat the rich " means millionaires / well off families : r/PetPeeves - "The best way to put it is: “would your death impact the economy?” If yes, you are rich that should be eaten. If no, stay calm and carry on.:
This is revealing. Left wingers want to destroy the economy

People thinking "eat the rich " means millionaires / well off families : r/PetPeeves - "Your story about that particular "mega-penny" person really shows the financial chasm between rich and poor.  I cannot even envision wasting that kind of money."
Weird. I thought the left prided themselves on their "empathy"

Evangelicals oppose removal of tax status in Canadian proposal
Bid to remove charitable status from religious groups draws ire of Evangelicals in Canada : r/canada - "The Evangelical Fellowship of Canada has raised concerns about recommendations presented to the Canadian government calling for the removal of charitable status to religious charities and anti-abortion organizations. The potential negative impact not only on the religious sector but the many people it serves would be immense, the group warns."
The thread was full of left wingers who just wanted to spite evangelicals and who didn't understand what a non-profit was
Of course, pro-abortion groups are fine. Political lobbying is good when it serves the left wing agenda

Douglas Carswell🇬🇧🇺🇸 on X - "Home Depot is worth more than all the European start ups created in the past 50 years combined. Home Depot."a>
Clearly, there wasn't enough regulation

Meme - Emil Kirkegaard @KirkegaardEmil: "Why does USA suck so bad at science? Is it because the taxes in the other NW European countries are so bad, that talented people rather try out their fortunes in science than business?"
"Scientific productivity by region / country
Academic publications per 1M residents"

Tony Blair tells Brits to stop self-diagnosing with depression as 'UK can't afford spiralling mental health benefits bill' : r/unitedkingdom
Of course, the left wingers were very upset, because they think it's everyone's human right to live off the state

Dave Bondy on X - "🚨 New Michigan Law: Starting February, workers can no-call, no-show for 3 days, and employers can’t discipline them—fines apply! 😮📅"
Billy Binion on X - "I had to research this bc it sounded too absurd to be real. It is real. Laws like this are truly psychotic. I don't care what your political persuasion is. It is not "pro-worker" to bar employers from disciplining negligent employees, whom they are paying to WORK. Beyond parody."

Angelo Plume on X - "Do Jews tell their kids to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and work at a fast food joint?"
Andrew Fleischman on X - "We should run an experiment where we take millions of Jews, strip them of all their wealth, send the survivors to the ends of the earth and see if they're still wildly successful. Oh wait."

Over 10,000 millionaires left the UK in the past year - only China has greater exodus of wealthy residents : r/uknews
Naturally, the left wingers were mocking them and cheering their departure

Meme - "The fact the catchphrase is "tax the rich" and not "help the poor" is telling."
"That's because it's an ideology premised on envy and resentment tone, the altruism is merely performative"

Meme - Tribunus Plebis: "It doesn't have to be this way, billionaires, if you just wound back the greed enough to make a society where no one went homeless and without... But you won't. The pitchforks will eventually come if you stay on the path you're on."
David Milner @DaveMilbo: "People keep saying we only need to eat one of the billionaires and the rest will fall in line, and that's probably true, but I think it's also worth remembering we COULD eat them all"
Cal @callum6052: "Nah you gotta eat 3. The first is a one-off. The second, a coincidence. The third, a message."
Matthew Yochim: "Psst. If you took ALL the wealth from ALL the billionaires... .not their yearly income, 100% of everything they have, you wouldn't even have enough money to fund the federal government for a single year. What are you gonna do once all the rich have been "eaten?* What are you going to do when there's no jobs, no paychecks, no tax base, and no functioning government? Communism makes on lot of sense when you're stupid."
Left wingers just hate the rich, besides being ignorant (assuming they truly believe that billionaires' wealth can truly solve all the problems of the world, even though governments spending more somehow cannot)

Billionaires Aren't All Bad, Taxing Them More May Backfire: Experts - Business Insider - "Jessica Flanigan, the Richard L. Morril Chair in Ethics and Democratic Values at the University of Richmond, and Chris Freiman, a business professor at West Virginia University, are the authors of "Wealth Without Limits: in Defense of Billionaires."  In the essay, published in the academic journal "Ethical Theory and Moral Practice," they argued that billionaires are often more accountable to the public and better placed to tackle global problems than government officials. They made the case that raising their taxes could result in less money flowing toward reducing poverty... billionaires often improve the world — and enrich whole ecosystems of customers, workers, suppliers, and investors — while building their vast fortunes... Market-made billionaires get rich by offering people goods and services. Often, they become successful because they invented a cool new product or they found a way to make a more affordable product. In other words, people become billionaires by making the rest of us better off, not worse off. The economy isn't a pie of fixed size —market-made billionaires make their billions by "baking more pie." We also think people hold billionaires to higher moral standards than powerful public officials. There's a widespread belief that governments should tax billionaires primarily and spend that money on public goods and anti-poverty programs. That is not how public officials spend most tax revenue, though, whereas billionaire philanthropy often focuses on providing public goods and helping the poorest people on Earth, not just people who live in their country... it's important to notice the double standards. There are politicians who have amassed way more power and influence than most citizens ever will, but whether we think that's unfair depends on how they got that power and what they do with it. In both cases, the bare fact of inequality isn't itself a reason to call a distribution unfair... Market-made billionaires don't need to redeem themselves, though, because being a billionaire isn't morally wrong. There is also an important question about whether giving away their money rather than keeping it in productive investments does the most long-term good. Billionaires who invest their money benefit their fellow citizens, too... Wealth inequality, as such, is not morally objectionable. What's objectionable about the gap between rich and poor is the poverty, not the gap. After all, there's a gap between multimillionaires and billionaires, but that's not something to worry about. The US government doesn't allocate much tax revenue to alleviating poverty; — much more goes to middle-class retirees. So this isn't a strong argument for taxing billionaires. Moreover, increasing taxes may slow economic growth, which harms those in poverty over the long term."

Meme - Mask: "Capitalism has failed"
Behind the Mask: "I don't have as much money as people I envy do"

Meme - Russell T. Warne 🇺🇸🇨🇱🇮🇱 @Russwarne: "The poor in the U.S. have better living conditions than the middle class in Europe."
"Living Space: American and European Housing
Square Feet per Dwelling. Square Feet per Person
United States: All Households 2005. 2,171. 845
United States: Poor Households 2005. 1,400. 515
European Average (Unweighted). 857. 363 "

Leo Kearse - on YouTube & GB News on X - "After seeing a sick crow being given food, other crows also pretended they were sick, and inadvertently created the British welfare state"
wanye on X - "Leftists will tell you with a straight face that poor people aren’t capable of thinking through incentives as well as birds"

FischerKing on X - "Welfare makes it possible to be a single mother, so you get more of it.  Social Security/Medicare means old people don’t need their kids as much - meaning they don’t care as much, don’t treat them as well, or consider them in their wills - they don’t work to leave them as much.   Paying for all this falls on young people, who then feel cash-strapped and have fewer kids.  So then you have a birthrate decline which exacerbates all the fiscal problems, on top of government intervention damaging basic bonds among families.  It’s all straightforward and obvious - but we’re so deep into this mess that getting out is borderline impossible. If we ever get out, hopefully we remember and avoid it in future."
The left will just screech about "empathy" and accuse everyone who disagrees with being horrible people

Meme - ArcArts @Arcs_Arts: "you ever watch star trek? that's what the left is actually offering if only ya could actually see the forest for the fucking trees. instead of just constantly fishing for excuses for to avoid having to actually have compassion and grow as a person."
Left wingers are unable to distinguish between fiction and reality. No wonder Marx is so seductive

Globe editorial: The red alarm creeping cost of federal red tape - The Globe and Mail - "A recent Statistics Canada study measured the scope and pace of regulatory creep at the federal level. That pace is relentless. The number of regulations rose almost every year between 2006 and 2021. The business of making regulations is a steady one.  It’s also a booming business. There were 234,200 federal regulations in 2006. By 2021, that tally had swollen to 320,900 – 86,700 new regulations. That growth is a bipartisan sin: the rollout rate of additional regulations was roughly the same during the Harper and Trudeau governments. All of those rules come at a steep economic cost, on top of the direct compliance expenses. The Statistics Canada study estimates that the growth in regulations over those 15 years – not including the 234,200 regulations already in place in 2006 – reduced gross domestic product by 1.7 per cent. (Based on November’s GDP figures, that’s just over $38-billion.)  Employment growth was 1.3 per cent lower due to the additional regulations over that time span, the study estimates. And the increase in regulations meant that business investment was 9 per cent lower in 2021 than it would have otherwise been. Imagine the political storm if Ottawa enacted a tax hike that blew a recession-sized hole in GDP, killed jobs and depressed business investment. But that considerable cost comes from tens of thousands of decisions, making the damage harder to discern. And the full bill is certainly higher, since the Statscan analysis doesn’t include the effect of provincial and municipal regulations. The most pernicious effect of the growth in federal regulations that Statscan identifies is the decline in business dynamism. Both entry and exit rates for businesses are pushed down by the weight of red tape. Faced with a growing regulatory burden, fewer entrepreneurs are willing to launch new businesses.  And without the pressure from such innovative new entrants, uncompetitive firms are able to stick around.  That is a formula for stagnating productivity, exactly the predicament in which Canada currently finds itself. Beyond the economic costs measured by the Statscan study, there are also strategic distractions for corporations. The greater the growth in regulations, the more incentive there is for large firms to build up an infrastructure to minimize those costs – the legal and accounting departments – and to push government for favourable treatment through lobbying. Playing the system rather than winning in the marketplace becomes a key to success."
Of course, left wingers love regulation because they want the government to control everything. They love government and hate the private sector
Comment: "First Nations are building their towers at the south end of Burrard Bridge in Vancouver is record time. The reason, no government bureaucracy in the way. In Vancouver and many other locals in BC, re-zoning application takes over 2 years simply due to red tape."

Links - 23rd May 2025 (2 - Get Woke, Go Broke: Concord/Rings of Power)

Meme - "Concord. 697. all-time peak 4 months ago
Marvel Rivals. 444,286. all-time peak 2 hours ago
*Unattractive characters in Concord vs attractive characters in Marvel Rivals*" Meme *Female characters with shapely butts*
"Marvel Rivals is so popular... why?"
"such an assortment" 'Marvel Rivals' Seattle Team Laid Off By NetEase: 'Lazy, Entitled, Slow and Woke' - "Fans have been concerned with it learned that Chinese company NetEase, the company behind the popular smash hit Marvel Rivals video game, has laid off its staff based in Seattle and is closing its U.S. support division. However, according to reports there is nothing to worry about as the Seattle game developers were not the creative team behind Marvel Rivals, which is based in China.  The Seattle team is said to have been developers that worked on budgets and staff — again NOT creative developers... the reason NetEase is getting rid of a majority of its studios is because the Western developers are “lazy, entitled, slow and woke.” “Netease isn’t just laying of the 6 person Marvel Rivals team,” tweeted Grummz. “Netease is also pulling funding from Western (and potentially Japanese) gaming studios. The CEO is said to be very unsatisfied with Western developers, calling them ‘lazy, entitled, slow and woke’ according to a source I spoke with.”  Grummz continued with a list of studios adding, “These are huge investments by Netease, founded by top veterans from AAA gaming, and mostly made during the high-flying game demand driven by Covid boredom. A demand which has since contracted.”" Meme - Vee @not__vee: "They do not know how to draw feminine features. These are just men with wigs wtf lol"
LearningTheLaw @Mangalawyer: "Concord official artist creating Evangelion vs. Shift-Up (Stellar Blade, Goddess of Victory: Nikke) art.  Which way, normal man?"
*American artists* *Korean artists* Meme - Yin Imashime: "This could have saved Concord *Daw [fat brown person]* *Hot black woman in one piece swimsuit*" Meme - Nara Kerbos @kerbos76: "because Concord went for a realistic style and they for some reason gave the morbidly obese character a jawline which makes 0 sense, it looks like the head of another character forced onto his body"
El Capitano @CapitanCrowds: "how is it possible that between 2 overweight characters, the one who is fatter and with less clothes looks infinitely better than the other one? 8 years of development to make Concord and that was the best they could do? *Daw from Concord, Roadhog from Overwatch*" Leaked Concord Dev Message: '[We're] going through an extremely difficult time'... - "Amanda Kiefer, Sr. Concept Artist for Firewalk Studios catastrophe of Concord, wants you to feel bad for them now... The toxic culture at Firewalk Studios continues to unravel as (another) woke employee, Amanda Kiefer, Senior Concept Artist, had some protected tweets leaked out... I previously covered Amanda Kiefer prior to the game coming out, known online as @ImagineAmanda on X (now protected mode)... But here's a quick TLDR on her to catch you up in case you don't want to rehash that entire article: She does not like gamers. While undeniably talented in her craft, Kiefer has developed a reputation for vehemently attacking those who criticize upcoming games, such as the Silent Hill 2 remake, and has even gone so far as to label dissenters as malicious. Her online persona paints a picture of a professional more interested in defending her ideologies than fostering an inclusive and welcoming gaming community.  Before a whistleblower reached out to me with insider information about the disaster internally at Firewalk Studios, Amanda had already preemptively blocked me on Twitter, raising some questions about her transparency (and willingness) to face any accountability (shocker). This suggested a desire to silence critics and try her best to maintain control over the narrative surrounding her and Firewalk. It was a telling sign of the defensive and insular culture that had permeated the studio. Firewalk is knee-deep in a toxic environment, characterized by extreme political correctness and a left-leaning agenda that stifles diverse viewpoints. Employees like Amanda Kiefer seemed to wield significant influence, promoting a "culture that prioritized ideological conformity over creative freedom. The whole situation was reminiscent of previous reports involving other industry figures, such as Lisa Brown, who allegedly blacklisted employees for not adhering to her preferred titles, further contributing to the hostile workplace atmosphere. While Amanda is undoubtedly skilled with some of her art designs outside of the game, their approach to handling any criticism has been anything but that. The focus on including certain 'progressive' elements, such as diverse body types and pronouns in Concord appears less about genuine inclusion and more about virtue signaling. Gamers have been increasingly pushing back against these perceived forced political narratives, arguing that they detract from the core gaming experience... But Sony and Firewalk refused to listen..." Meme - 🅂🅄🄿🄴🅁🄲🄷🄰🄼🄿🅉 🢃🢇🢀 🦶 Steam @SuperChampzLive: "She doesn't even have Concord in her bio. She knows the game is a huge flop and can damage her career. she feels ashamed of her own game"
Pirat_Nation 🔴 @Pirat_Nation: "Concord's lead artist:  “Pretty soon these weirdos will have no games to buy at all...”"
Amanda Kiefer @imagineamanda: "Pretty soon these weirdos will have no games to buy at all..." Concord Developer Firewalk Studios Shut Down By Sony

Meme - "JigglesBunny. Prophet of Truth. Avenger. Lots of incredibly talented people just lost their jobs and years of their hard work and effort is gone forever because a bunch of lame dorks couldn't get over characters with pronouns and iffy, boring designs. Great industry we have here. Great community."
So much to unpack here. They were so talented and worked for so long, but they came up with iffy, boring designs. Their target audience is "a bunch of lame dorks" - good luck when you insult the customers (and if they're a bunch of lame dorks, why target them?) As usual the woke complain a lot but don't put their money where their mouth is - the modern audience is nowhere to be found again Meme - Lotr fans: "Why are you shitting on my plate?"
Lotr tv show: "How do you know its Shit? It isnt even out yet"
Lotr fans: "Now I can clearly see it is shit"
Lotr tv show: "No, you're just racist" Meme - "ARAGORN, SON OF ARATHORN SAYS. WATCHING THE RINGS OF POWER WILL STRENGTHEN THE DARK LORD. ONLY THROUGH LOW VIEWING NUMBERS CAN WE DEFEAT THIS EVIL. YOU MUST NOT WATCH." The Mistake That 'The Rings of Power' Keeps Making - The Atlantic - "Viewers know how the tale ends, so the series is trying to manufacture suspense by dragging out the story... The show has condensed Tolkien’s nearly 4,000-year timeline of events down to a few decades so that all the key players in the saga of the One Ring can be on-screen at once, and the episodes manage to feel both overlong and cramped. So much has been added to pad out the show’s trajectory and provide tonal suspense to an epic that fundamentally doesn’t need it. Sauron, in particular, seems like the true victim of this narrative stretching, as the show keeps spinning the once and future dark lord in confusing new directions. Is he supposed to be relatable? Is he supposed to be an antihero? Is the audience being steered toward empathy for his point of view, so the show can “surprise” us later by revealing that he’s been evil this whole time?... The main impetus behind The Rings of Power seems to be: How can we keep this going? With five seasons planned for a series that has a shockingly hefty price tag (rumored to be about $1 billion already), Amazon Prime Video would naturally want one of its biggest marquee assets to last. That’s the problem with premium television in the streaming era. It’s all so fabulously expensive that it must keep making a case for itself to continue beyond the usual allotment of two or three seasons" Meme - "We need Elrond to pass a brooch to Galadriel so she can get free from the orc camp, how?"
"Kiss her forehead or cheek"
"Hug her"
"Kiss her mouth, who cares if he marries her daughter, orcs are sensitive creatures and will blush away from elves kissing"
"prime video Employee of the month. Vice president." 'The Rings Of Power' Showrunners Defend Decision To Humanize Orcs: "We Feel Like This Goes Straight Back To Tolkien" - "As seen in the series’ third (and currently latest) episode, The Eagle and The Sceptre, rather than being portrayed as the cruel species depicted by J.R.R. Tolkien himself – “[The Orcs] hated everybody and everything, and particularly the orderly and prosperous,” wrote the author in The Hobbit” – the Orcs in The Rings of Power are instead shown as brutal but oppressed foot soldiers, their lives concerned not just with war and pillaging, but also achieving a future where their families can exist as more than tools for Lord Sauron to use in service of his ambitions." ‘The Rings Of Power’ Season 2 Premiere Review: A Dreadful, Jumbled Mockery Of Tolkien’s ‘The Lord Of The Rings’ - "I have somehow made it through the first three episodes of The Rings Of Power Season 2 on Prime Video, though the show’s sophomore effort did not make this either pleasant or easy for me. The trappings of a decent epic fantasy are here. It looks good (except for when it looks like a movie set) and it sounds very nice (though Bear McCreary’s score is not particularly memorable compared to many of his better works) but that’s about it. Season 2 is, if anything, worse than Season 1, or at least messier.   Sure, it picks up the action a bit, but somehow the soulless Season 1 feels downright poignant compared to whatever this second season brings to the table. I’m astonished both by its lack of coherent storytelling and its utter absence of anything like heart, no matter how many times the characters say Very Deep Things to one another as music swells dramatically—and loudly—to instruct us how to feel... Perhaps because of all the liberties taken in the first season, Season 2 is a jumbled mess... We need Conflict Between Main Characters, after all, even if it doesn’t really make sense. It’s all very strange... So much is happening in the first three episodes but so little of it matters. One can’t help but think these guys bit off far, far more than they could chew. There are so few human moments, so few bits where you laugh or grow fond of any of these characters, that it’s mostly like watching a series of events transpire (though not in any semblance or order) rather than watching a story unfold. The only saving grace—and it’s not much—is that we get less of bossgirl Galadriel this season. Her role is greatly diminished (thankfully) but nothing very compelling takes its place, and we’re left without a very strong sense of who this story is supposed to be about. There are too many stories crammed into one show, too many timelines condensed into one timeline, for any of it to really matter... Honestly, I found the first three episodes of Season 2 exhausting in general. It’s all over the place. Things are constantly Very Serious but without any sort of emotional hook to make us care. This show suffers from the common problems so many prequels face, amplified by the bad writing and two-dimensional characters that leave Rings Of Power feeling so shallow despite all its pretensions and big budget affect. It all feels (and looks and sounds) wildly generic. Fantasy should be imaginative and distinct, but so much of what we get these days bends ever toward this devoutly generic aesthetic.   And I haven’t even mentioned the Baby Gandalf storyline, which takes us into Rhûn with Nori and a surprise appearance by Poppy who, it turns out, is an intrepid explorer who easily follows her friend and not-Gandalf through the desert and brings with her both biscuits and maps, effectively saving the day because that makes sense. Or what about this new evil wizard hunting the ISTAR (he says this many times, ISTAR, to let us know—wink wink, nudge nudge—that the Stranger is totally Gandalf, actually) and some masked dudes that look like they sprang directly out of Star Wars or Mad Max because sure, that fits the aesthetic we’re going for with Lord of the Rings... There is so much superfluous nonsense in this show. In fact, when you really shake the branches it’s hard to see if anything that falls to the ground isn’t superfluous. Is there an actual story here or are we just following lots of different characters as they do stuff, mostly separate from one another, and magically solve problems that don’t really matter to begin with? I’ve also forgotten to mention the coup in Númenor, which is frankly one of the most bizarre sequences I’ve ever seen, with a great eagle—of all things—effectively confirming the outcome as our various heroes—Elendil, mostly—stand around looking as confused as I felt... Honestly, this version of Stories From Middle-earth makes me want to root for Sauron. That’s a problem.  This isn’t Lord of the Rings in any way shape or form. It’s just Amazon buying the rights to little fragments of it, and jampacking and piecemealing it into a form that apes, badly, hideously, carelessly, Tolkien’s legendarium." Very Bad News For ‘Rings Of Power’ Season 3, As Season 2 Viewership Plummets - "The cheaper the show, the more likely it is to survive lower ratings. This is why cheap reality shows are so popular with networks and streamers: They cost very little but draw lots of eyeballs. It’s a lot harder for big-budget, premiere television to break even. Now we have some very bad news for Amazon’s massively expensive Rings Of Power, a prequel to The Lord Of The Rings that tells a condensed and altered version of Tolkien’s Second Age of Middle-earth. Deadline reports that Samba TV, which tracks streaming numbers, has noted a massive decline in viewership from Season 1 to Season 2. According to Samba TV data, 1.8 million U.S. households watched the first episode of Season 1 within three days of it landing on Prime Video. Season 2 is half of that, with just 902,000 U.S. households tuning in for the first episode within four days its streaming debut... The first season was incredibly bad television that not only tinkered with the source material in disastrous ways, but was filled with all manner of plot-holes, cringey dialogue and bad writing that made characters we hoped to love, like Galadriel, more jarring than likeable. Season 2 continues to have most of the same problems as Season 1, though it remains a very nice show to look at with a sweeping score by Bear McCreary. It has all the trappings of a good epic fantasy with none of the heart or soul. And it’s boring... If I were Jeff Bezos, I would be looking for new showrunners and new writers at this point. But it’s too late. The many changes to lore and the many bizarre decisions that have been made up to this point will make any kind of narrative comeback all but impossible. If I were in charge, I would cancel the show after Season 2 and start over with more experienced showrunners, the best writers money can buy, and a team of Tolkien experts dedicated to getting the lore right within the confines of the rights. Obviously some changes have to be made with any adaptation, but skilled showrunners and writers, willing to take experts seriously and eager not to “make it their own” but do the best job possible adapting the source material, ought to be able to come up with a really compelling series about the Second Age—instead of this tepid, generic fan-fic we’ve had foisted upon us. This is why I don’t trust Rotten Tomatoes scores. The critics are all-but-unanimous in singing this show’s praises, but audiences aren’t sticking around. This is in stark contrast to Game Of Thrones, which built up every season... Variety reports that Rings Of Power was #2 in streaming over the weekend per Luminate. Luminate reports that the show saw an estimated 553.5 million minutes of watch-time, translating into roughly 2.7 million views. Now compare this to data from Season 1, which also opened over Labor Day weekend two years ago. That brought in 1.2 billion minutes, or about 8.9 million estimated views with just two episodes available in contrast to Season 2’s three episodes. Variety describes this as a “slightly slower start” but 2.7 is 30% of Season 1’s 8.9 million views—far less than half."
Weird. I thought it was normal for a show to lose viewers as it went along, but GoT went up every season, from 9.3 million to 46 million There’s Only One Good Thing About ‘The Rings Of Power’ Season 2 So Far - "Hopkinson’s ‘Gandalf Roasts’ videos kept me (mostly) sane throughout the first season. He’s done some great videos about various Star Wars shows as well, but you can’t beat Gandalf, baby Elrond and a rather ditzy Boromir, all of whom appear in these videos thanks to Hopkinson’s remarkable impressionist skills and some very goofy deepfakes. But what really makes these videos so much fun is just how clever and witty the banter is, and how Hopkinson is able to really poke fun at the series in a way that isn’t mean-spirited but is nevertheless incredibly on-point. Perhaps the best line in this latest Gandalf Roasts video—the first of Season 2—is when Gandalf replies to Boromir’s suggestion that Celebrimbor just make new, uncorrupted rings with the line: “If you insist on bringing relentless logic to this show, Boromir, you’re gonna have a bad time.”... My favorite part in this roast is when Boromir asks if Sauron’s death and subsequent transformation into a black, venomous mass is how Tolkien wrote the story in his texts." Meme - "The dwarves are coming! Look to the north!"
Game of Thrones Director: "We kinda forgot the sun rises in the east" High King Fëanor - Alpha Chad of Middle-earth on X - "Just want to reiterate something concerning Galadriel.  Canonically: Her grandfather was killed by Morgoth.  One of her uncles was slain by balrogs.  Another uncle was killed by Morgoth.  Eight of her eleven cousins were killed in combat.  One of her three brothers was killed by a werewolf.  Her other two brothers were burned alive.  Her daughter was tortured by orcs and ended up abandoning Middle-earth due to torment and sailed into the West.  Also, she was separated from her mother and father for over seven thousand years after she came to Middle-earth.  Not once did she pick up a sword and go on a revenge quest, nor did she behave like an insufferable twat. Had the people working on Rings of Stupid actually read the source material instead of using it as kindling, they might've been able to portray her just a bit more accurately.   Art by YidanYuan" Rings of Power Galadriel Actress Morfydd Clark Cries About Criticism From Male Lord Of The Rings Fans As Rings Of Power Season 2 Premiers - "Rings of Power season 2 is out on Amazon Prime Video, and they are already beginning the typical victim press tour for shows that don’t live up to their original I.P. and, therefore, upset fans. Actress Morfydd Clark, who plays Galadriel in the show, is now complaining about the fans. It seems that public relations firms for entertainment companies have one move when they develop a new TV show or movie for “modern audiences,” and they inevitably fall flat among viewers—to play victim over identity politics. Disney most poignantly capitalized on this strategy with their failed films Star Wars: The Last Jedi and the MCU’s Captain Marvel, but it’s become much more standard as of late.   When ramping up for the recent series of Doctor Who, showrunner Russell T. Davies gave several interviews about how the new iteration would “upset fans,” while Ncuti Gatwa went from media outlet to media outlet complaining about racism. This resulted in his infamous “touch grass” statement, in which he told viewers not to watch the show. This resulted in some of the lowest-rated episodes in Doctor Who’s history. Since then, Amandla Stenberg of Star Wars: The Acolyte has made a ridiculous music video called “Discourse” in which she rants about the alleged racists who don’t like what Leslye Headland and company did with the property. Lord of the Rings: Rings of Power has followed the same trajectory as these other programs with their strange, diversity casting choices and bastardization of J.R.R. Tolkien’s elegant lore. Between having a black elf where they poignantly feature a white man calling him “knife ears” (which sounds a lot like a different word that starts with N), and every segment seems to have the same skin color makeup to present diversity, it’s created an unbelievable world and rings fake among fans.   During a recent press tour, actor Ismael Cruz Cordova leaned into the racial elements of his role with Entertainment Weekly, saying he’s proud he created “a big controversy of me being the first elf that wasn't white. I loved the nerve that I pinched. I really do. I was so excited to create something new.” Upsetting fans by trying to stoke racial divisions hardly seems something to be proud of. It’s odd how these actors rarely talk about their hard work in the role or the scripts being something special. As Rings Of Power Season 2’s trailer was ratio’d by fans with thousands of dislikes when it was revealed after San Diego Comic-Con, it seems these actors are aware the production is sub-par, and so they are left with one defensive marketing gimmick to try to stir up political backing for their show.   Morfydd Clark is following the same narrative for Galadriel, a character who looks and acts nothing like the sorceress elf in The Lord Of The Rings but has now been made into the generic 120-pound strong female lead warrior princess who beats up fully grown battle-hardened men because she can. In an interview with Elle, she started the victim narrative around her being a female lead: “I was just totally unprepared when season 1 came out. I’ve seen a really dark side of what it means to be someone who [anyone] can write a message to on Instagram, and a really lovely side.” In case anyone wasn’t clear that she was crying sexism because of Lord of the Rings fans disliking the bad characterization of Galadriel, she added that the criticisms come from “primarily from men.”  As the male demographic is most interested in a sweeping epic fantasy like Lord of the Rings, it seems strange that she would attack the people watching the show rather than aiming to make it better." 'The Rings of Power' Season 2 review: Beautiful but empty - "Season 1 of the outrageously expensive Amazon Prime series had a lot going for it. The sets, the costumes and the effects are gorgeous. You can tell and respect how much work it took to bring this series to life. The story also had a lot of opportunity to go in almost any direction... Unfortunately, all that promise has been utterly wasted on the confusing, directionless and emotionally bankrupt second season of "Rings of Power" (streaming Thursdays, ★½ out of four). If Season 1 was a leisurely stroll through Middle-earth, Season 2 gallops away, leaving many of the important details, character developments and stakes behind. If you can possibly remember what happened in the first season − and I was still vaguely confused even after watching a recap video, which is a mark against the series because homework should not be required − you'll know things are looking grim in Middle-earth... the new episodes are far more interested in the big-picture plot twists and mythology than any of the characters. There are no magnetic heroes to ground the story from its many locations. The producers expect to scare us with monsters and villains but give us no one to love. Much hangs on the shoulders of the young cast, especially Aramayo and Clark, but mostly they lack the talent or depth to add gravitas to the story. The series cycles through the storylines in perfunctory fashion. The relationships often don't make sense, and it's hard to keep track of who is related to whom, let alone their names and motivations. And that's a problem, because you can have the most beautiful sets and the most daring plot of any TV show around, but the essence of story is characters. Audiences are drawn to people, even if they're dressed up as dwarves or Harfoots. When dwarf prince Durin IV (Owain Arthur) fights with his father, Durin III (Peter Mullan), it's hard to care, even if you can remember what they were fighting about in Season 1 (the writers feel no need to remind the audience). It's heartbreaking to see a story with so much potential, so much work behind it, and with such beloved source material crumble the way "Rings of Power" has. Certainly, Hollywood has proved that no production is too big to fail, no matter how much money is thrown at it."
Clearly, they need even more money Rings of Power: No Themes, No Meaning, No Point - YouTube Rings Of Power - The Ultimate Insult To Tolkien - YouTube Meme - Juicy Tolkien memes: "Hey Tolkien fans. The Rings of Power-cast have something they want to tell you. *showing middle fingers*" ‘The Rings Of Power’ Season 2 Debuts To Truly Shocking Review Scores On Rotten Tomatoes - "I’m not sure what to think about the glowing reviews of Amazon’s The Rings Of Power Season 2 but I’m tempted to say that the critics must be crazy. I’ve said it before and Eru knows I’ll say it again. With just 39 critic reviews in at the time of this writing—prior to the first three episodes dropping this Thursday, August 29th—the show is at a startling 85% Fresh, 2 percentage points above Season 1’s 83% (with 491 critic reviews). From what I’ve gathered, some critics have watched just the first three episodes while others have seen the entire season. It’s less clear why this is the case. In Season 1, critics were given just two episodes (which I initially enjoyed, before losing faith as the season wore on). It’s not enough to judge an entire season of television by, and I wish Rotten Tomatoes would not offer up seasonal scores until the entire season was out and reviewed...   Suffice to say, I do not trust this score, though I am open to being wrong in my skepticism. I do not trust the critical consensus when it comes to shows like this or The Acolyte (I don’t think it deserves 78%) or Netflix’s bizarrely praised Hit Man or the dreadful True Detective: Night Country. There’s something odd about all these mediocre offerings receiving such gushing praise over and over again. Do we no longer have standards? The broader culture never has, but shouldn’t critics? What happened? Then there is the question of bias. Screeners only went out to some outlets. Was Amazon being selective about who received these early screeners, hoping to ensure a better Rotten Tomatoes score before the premiere? This sort of thing happens all the time. It’s not at all unusual. Consumers should be appropriately suspect of early reviews, especially when it comes to TV shows. Despite admitting that the trailers have looked pretty good, I just don’t buy it. Like this season’s villain, Annatar, trailers can be deceiving... Of course, I haven’t asked the sea whether Season 2 will be an improvement over the first (not in and of itself a particularly challenging feat). I probably should. After all, the sea is always right. I’ll go to the sea and say: “Give me the meat and give it to me raw!” and the sea will say “Do you know why a ship floats but a rock sinks?” and I will say “Morrrrdor!” and we will all have a good laugh; the meat, the sea and I.   To be fair, there were some good moments in the first season and even some good lines interspersed among all the bad. The orcs were really cool, with the best makeup and design of any orcs on TV or in movies. And some turns of phrase really turned nicely. “There can be no trust between hammer and rock” is a pretty good line.  But many of the better lines are just bits from The Lord of the Rings twisted and shoved into these characters’ mouths. “No matter the sorrow, no matter the cost, not all those who wonder or wander are lost” is hardly original, dear Harfoots. Most of the “deep” lines in the series are just kind of silly—phrases that are trying so very hard to sound deep, but are almost nonsensical on closer examination. “Sometimes, to find the light, we must first touch darkness” is one such line. After all, if you’re trying to find the light we must assume that darkness is already upon us. That’s why you’re trying to find the light in the first place!   There are many similar examples. And many, many more problems with the show both in terms of its fast-and-loose affiliation with Tolkien’s lore and worldbuilding, and its messy storytelling. It was pretty, no doubt, but the costumes looked like costumes and the world felt fake in all the wrong ways." Sean D Knight on X - "I don't care how the writers contrived Elrond kissing Galadriel. This fanfiction is disgusting. The writers and fans are weirdos. Amazon’s #TheRingsofPower Is An Expensive Lesson In Bad Writing"
High King Fëanor - Alpha Chad of Middle-earth on X - "I genuinely want to throw up right now. Canonically, Galadriel is Elrond's mother in law. Rings of Stupid is gross. It is a gross show. And I just cannot wait to see all the clapping seal freaks, the Tolkien tourists, come out and try and defend this. Go on! Give me an excuse." Embracer Reports 10% Drop in Entertainment Sales Blaming Tolkien IP - "Embracer has reported disappointing results for the second quarter of 2024, reporting a large drop in net sales of 21% across the gaming group to SEK 8.6 billion ($782 million), with net sales of its entertainment and services also dropping by 10%...   In its entertainment and services division, which also includes comic book publisher Dark Horse Media, Embracer reported a 14% drop in organic growth, which it put down to “lower activity and tough comparison figures year on year” within subsidiary Middle-earth Enterprises, the holding company for “Lord of the Rings.”"

The Costs of Mass Migration (in the UK and Elsewhere)

The economic case for mass immigration is COLLAPSING
It shouldn't be controversial to suggest immigration is making us poorer

Listen to the expert class and they’ll tell you mass immigration is good for Western economies. It’s driving growth, making us more productive, making our societies more prosperous and improving living standards. But this is a myth.

Mass immigration —as a growing pile of evidence across Europe now shows— is not good for Western economies. On the contrary, if you look past the pro-immigration zealots masquerading as serious economists on Twitter and engage with the actual evidence then you’ll soon realise that much of the immigration flooding into the West is hollowing out our economies, taking more out of them than it’s putting in.

Look at the UK. A couple of weeks ago, the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) released a new report on the country’s fiscal risks, concluding that the country’s finances are on an unsustainable path. Over the next half-century, because of the UK’s ageing society and climate risks, public spending is forecast to rise from 45% to over 60% of GDP, with debt as a percentage of GDP soaring to an eye-watering 274% in the coming decades. In short, we’re heading for disaster unless something changes.

But what was also interesting about this report is that, unlike what usually happens, it did not point to mass immigration as the answer to these problems. Why? Because even the technocrats at the OBR have finally realised that the current model of mass immigration that we are pursuing in the UK is weakening, not strengthening, the economy. In short, the very kind of immigration that our hapless political elites on both the Left and the Right have been encouraging since Brexit—low skill, low wage, non-selective immigration from outside Europe— is the most economically damaging.

For a start, the OBR quietly notes that mass immigration is contributing to what is known as ‘capital dilution’, or what I call ‘the population trap’. This is what happens when populations expand so quickly that the sheer scale and speed of this population change exceeds the capacity of the state to provide its own citizens with functioning public services —such as a functioning NHS and education system— as well as things like affordable and available housing and safe neighbourhoods. Mass immigration, in short, is managed decline because it’s putting enormous pressure on a state that is already struggling to provide public services for its existing population.

This is what the Canadians, the Swedes, and many others are now finally realising —that the sheer scale of demographic change over the last twenty years or so has been so great that the state is now simply unable to perform its most basic functions. And this is what is now happening in the UK —even if much of the elite class ignore it.

Since 1997, net migration added nearly 6 million people to the country, with close to 4 million arriving since 2010 under Conservative-led governments, the most pro-immigration governments in history. In 2022 and 2023 alone, more than 2.4 million people migrated into the UK. But at the same time growth has remained low, productivity and wage growth have stagnated, and the country has recorded the worst GDP-per-capita figures since the 1970s. Where is the booming, dynamic, innovative, prosperous economy that the pro-immigration lobby promised us would arrive?

Look around at the NHS, our education system, and infrastructure and it’s already crystal clear to many that these changes are imposing other costs. As the OBR notes in typically technocratic lingo, the sheer scale of this migration is diluting what it calls ‘the public capital stock per person’. In other words, the British people and their children are now being pushed by incompetent elites into a big debt, big state, big spending, big tax society that will increasingly be defined by masses of immigration from outside Europe and even worse public services than we have now.

Some of these costs have already been tracked. One think-tank, Oxford Economics, estimates that the very kind of mass immigration from outside Europe that the old parties are now imposing on the rest of us has cost the UK economy somewhere around £9 billion. In housing, too, we already know that mass immigration is driving up house prices and rents, requiring the UK, which built only 180,000 homes last year, to build some 550,000 homes each year if it is to keep up with the demand from immigration, in turn making it harder for British families, workers, and young people to get onto the housing ladder. As I’ve said before, you can have available and affordable housing for British families or mass immigration. You can’t have both.

Then come the less visible but still significant costs to the public purse —like the fact nearly 2 million state school pupils do not speak English as their first language, that immigrants made 7 million new GP registrations between 2010 and 2022, that our broken asylum system cost us at least £7 billion a year, and that immigrants are disproportionately more likely to be arrested —all costs that you are not supposed to discuss or mention in polite society but which you, the taxpayer, are still forced to pay each year while being told this model of mass immigration is actually good for you.

But surely the economic contribution that immigration is making outstrips these costs, right? Nope. As I’ve been arguing for years, the OBR has finally looked at the fiscal impact of different types of immigration into Britain and concluded that the very kind of low-skill, low-wage migration that our hapless politicians in Westminster are now encouraging is a net fiscal cost, not benefit, to the economy and taxpayers.

As the OBR analysis finds, an average low-wage migrant costs the taxpayer about £150,000 by the time they reach 60, about £465,000 by the time they reach their 80s and about £1 million if they live to 100. The OBR also find that tweaking different kinds of migration makes little difference to our country’s growing debt problem. In short, mass immigration is simply not the panacea the expert class want you to think it is.

And the OBR find this while suffering from big problems. They make some truly bizarre calculations, like assuming immigrants have no children and dependents and while completely disregarding things like the fiscal cost of immigration on housing, education, and crime —which have been shown to be significant.

And here’s something else that many people in Westminster don’t want you to know —it’s the same story in other economies across the West. Just as evidence in the UK is starting to show, many studies in Europe, which are based on MUCH more granular data than we have in the UK, are finding that mass immigration is undermining, not strengthening, economic prosperity in the West.

One massive problem in the UK —which I’ve been talking about in recent months— is that while we know in broad terms that mass immigration is now making us poorer we also do not have the very granular data on things like welfare claims, taxation, and criminality by nationality and immigration status that are available in other countries and would allow us to paint an even more detailed picture of what’s going on.

Why? Because the state and civil servants very clearly want to keep this data hidden from you, the taxpayer, or they are so incompetent they are not collecting it in the first place. You’re being forced, in other words, to pay for the costs of this political project while the state simultaneously refuses to show you data on the impact immigration is having on your economy, welfare state, NHS, prison sentence, and more, and then being called a racist or misinformed lemming if you ask questions. It’s unbelievable.

But other countries HAVE been collecting and crunching this data and they find a very consistent and alarming story. In recent years, research in Denmark, Sweden, Germany and other countries that we’ll come to has converged on the same point: mass immigration, though especially low-wage, low-skill, and non-European migration from the Middle East and Northern Africa —precisely the kind that’s now flooding into Europe and the UK—is a net fiscal cost to economies in Europe. It’s hollowing them out from the inside and eroding their welfare states.

One of the most detailed studies, the Borderless Welfare State, at the University of Amsterdam, paints a striking and bleak picture. It’s based on incredibly detailed and reliable data on individuals in the population. What did it find? It found clear and overwhelming evidence that much of the immigration that’s flooding into the country is undermining the welfare state and imposing big costs on the economy.

Why? Because much of the immigration into the Netherlands, like much of the immigration into the UK, is being driven by less well educated immigrants who cling to the welfare state and take more out of it than they put in.

As Jan van der Beek’s research shows, the share of poorly educated people in the 25-65 age group among non-European immigrants (34%) is twice as high as among the native Dutch (17%). And because the poorly-educated are more likely to rely on welfare this is increasing the proportion of net recipients in the population, upsetting the balance. This is exactly why Milton Friedman said: ‘You cannot simultaneously have free immigration and a welfare state’. It’s also why other scholars warn mass immigration erodes social trust and support for welfare —not least as the native population begin to realise they are merely subsidising outsiders from very different cultures who often hate who they are and are a net fiscal drain on the economy.

As Jan van der Beek also finds, while poorly-educated immigrants are a net fiscal cost on Western economies, so too are migrants who are moving into the West to join family members, study, or seek asylum (as many in the UK are doing). In the UK, for example, while people often assume that international students are affluent PhD students from Chile the reality is quite different. More than 40% of graduate visa holders in the UK earn less than £15,000 a year, with many ending up servicing the low-wage, low-skill Deliveroo economy. Only migrants who are moving for work make a net contribution although even then the pattern is mixed. As van der Beek finds, whereas labour migrants from North America, Oceania and Japan bring a net fiscal gain to the economy of some £670,000, asylum migrants from Africa, like many of those arriving in the UK, cost the Dutch a net cost of £685,000 per migrant.

Family and asylum migration is especially costly (which has also been found in Belgium). In fact, in the Netherlands it’s estimated that granting one asylum request to one migrant costs Dutch taxpayers about £1.1 million —to cover the asylum-seeking migrant, their family members, and the impact of the second generation.

There are also enormous differences according to where migrant workers come from. On average, migrant workers from Africa, the Middle east, and Central and Eastern Europe are a net fiscal drain. Their education and income is low, making them, on average, net recipients of the welfare state. This is aggravated by higher rates of family-related migration that come with labour migration, which doubles the cost.

One example are low-skilled, guest-worker migrants from Morocco and Turkey who have grown from 55,000 in the 1970s to 935,000 since. In 2016, in the Netherlands, these guest-workers and their descendants were net fiscal recipients of an astonishing £8 billion –equivalent to 2.5% of all government spending—which is even more striking given they tend to be younger and in theory should be net contributors.

The most costly forms of migration are asylum-seekers from the Middle East and Northern Africa. This is in line with findings from the Danish Ministry of Finance, who also single out the so-called ‘MENAPT’ region (Middle East, North Africa, Pakistan and Turkey) as the region that is associated with the biggest fiscal costs to Western economies and brings the biggest problems with integration.

Research in Finland, too, also shows that immigrants from “the greater Middle East” - a region that includes the Middle East, Central Asia, Pakistan, North Africa and countries such as Sudan and Somalia - have by far the greatest negative fiscal impact in Finland. Calculations for Belgium, likewise, confirm this.

In other words, while the costs of mass immigration to the UK are finally starting to emerge in the research, if you look at far more detailed and reliable studies elsewhere in Europe they tell a consistent and worrying story. It is exactly the kind of low-wage, low-skill, low-educated, and non-European forms of immigration that the UK is now welcoming with open arms, much of it from places like the Middle East and Northern Africa, that is precisely the most financially costly and most likely to erode rather than bolster our national prosperity.

Ordinarily, were we living in some other galaxy, then you might expect our politicians and policymakers to know all this and act accordingly, perhaps by completely changing gear and delivering the kind of high-skill and lower levels of immigration they promised the British people during Brexit referendum and its aftermath.

But, instead, they appear to have their fingers in their ears, screaming at anybody who dares to point all this out while leading us all into managed decline. And there are very good reasons to expect this to get a lot worse. Just look at how the UK’s population is forecast to grow in the years and decades ahead.

Our already rapidly expanding population is forecast to surge by another 6.5 million people by the year 2036, equivalent to adding another city three-quarters the size of London to the country, and by another 14 million by the year 2074, equivalent to about twelve cities the size of Birmingham. And almost all of this will be driven by immigration —with much of it being low-skill, low-wage, family-related, and student migration from outside the European Union. If the state can barely manage to cope with the current record levels of immigration then what is going to happen over the next fifty years, as these kinds of more costly migration continue to soar?

Increasingly, in other words, our politicians and the morally righteous new elite are pushing us into managed decline by embracing the very model of low-wage, low-skill, non-European immigration that is bad economics and has consistently been shown to be the most likely model of immigration to leave us all worse off. The economic case for the kind of mass immigration that we are currently encouraging is now visibly falling apart around us while the elite class put their fingers in their ears, berating anybody who dares point this out as a misinformed bigot. But, actually, it is they who are misinformed. And as usual, it will be the British taxpayer and their children who will be forced pay the price for their failures of their hapless and incompetent elites.