A capitalist system is built on the idea that holders of capital actually deploy that capital, rather than horde it.
If capital holders don’t actually deploy that capital and compete with each other, then you don’t have a capitalist system anymore. You have a feudal system, where asset holders extract resources through rents, rather than capital deployment and risk taking.
"Is the capital being deployed for rent seeking or for taking economically useful risks?" is a judgement call. You won't find it listed in a FRED time series.
When every industry is on a multi-decade streak of consolidation, when McDonalds is about land speculation rather than serving food, farming is about land ownership rather than growing food, airlines are about credit cards rather than transportation, it's not unreasonable to believe that a substantial amount of capital is being deployed towards rent-seeking rather than economically useful risk taking.
I don't think they were thinking of "no government", rather something like "government working in support of capital" (see 2008 financial crisis bank bail-outs; enforcing private ownership and protecting accumulated wealth).
How little imagination we have anymore! Its like you discover ice cream but for some reason only chocolate ice cream. Someone is like "chocolate is no good" and all you know to think is: "Oh so you guys just dont want ice cream at all?!"
Governments are fine. Any group of people large enough to not be a hivemind on everything has a government. Even if they don't formalize it, it will still emerge organically as they run into issues that require consensus on actions.
The crucial difference is between the governments actually run by the people, and the governments that claim to "represent" them.
I've been on Fastmail with my own domains for 4 years now, having been fully Gmail since 2004. The transition was seemless, the apps are solid and I can't imagine ever going back. The only option I'd consider would be full self-hosting, but I really can't justify the effort to maintain the one service where I need very high uptime.
I have just done the opposite - left London for the countryside and am currently very much enjoying it. As our toddler gets older it will interesting to see how we deal with the challenges of letting them find their own space.
There's two aspect of "country" relative to somewhere like London. There's an estate in various towns, where there's plenty of actual public space, playing fields and grounds, walk into town, to shops, bus/train to larger towns. Plenty of open space.
Then there's the real country, where there's very little public space - nowhere to ride a bike other than narrow country roads, you can walk but only in restrictive footpaths over fields - some of which are sabotaged by farmers (I file 2 or 3 complaints with the right-of-way office each year as footpaths get blocked, barbed wire put over stiles, etc). We have an open forest area, but it's a 2 mile walk.
There are 4 children in our village at the "local" primary school, across the 7 years. My youngest's nearest friend is 6 miles away - again via 60mph roads. That means having to be driven to places. There is a school bus (which for americans reading is relatively rare in the UK -- you get one upto age 11 if you live more than 2 miles from the nearest school, or 3 miles for 11-16), but that doesn't help for after school clubs.
A toddler isn't going to be independent with travel, so driving them places is fine. In a few years though, you want them to be able to travel and meet friends, go to the shop etc, independently. That's easy enough in a city or in a town, not in the country.
That said, just having that access doesn't mean they will use it. My 13 year old's main social interaction is via minecraft sessions where they have a group call and yell at each other, doesn't matter if someone lives nearby (which one of the group does), or 30 miles away (which another does).
(It's worth highlighting that UK suburbia is very different to US suburbia)
You're right. Personally, now that it's getting wet and cold, I'm getting kind of landlocked by mud. There's one tarmac road out in both directions, but only one of them leads to somewhere that somewhat resembles civilisation, or has pavement.
> There are 4 children in our village at the "local" primary school
Four?
How... What?
How does any of this actually work (you clearly live there, so it obviously does?) That seems like you're living somewhere that's just like ... empty? How do any services/infrastructure/... How many old people live in this village?
Is this the demographic collapse people are going on about?
That sounds like the village in which I spent my teens. Population of ~500, and for <18s there was myself, my sibling, and there was a "new" housing estate had a handful of kids around 5.
We didn't have nice paths, there was a (former) main road going through the middle of the village. As far as local infrastructure, there was the pub, a car mechanic, and every few years a corner shop would open up and last about 2-3 years before shutting down again.
If you needed groceries you went to the larger village (population ~1000) which was about a 40 minute walk along the main road (which only got dedicated pavements after I had moved out), or a 5 minute drive. For amenities that larger village had 2 bars, 2 churches, a takeaway, a supermarket, a primary school and a garden centre.
If you needed anything more than groceries, you needed to go to one of the nearby towns which were ~20-30 minutes by car and (according to google maps) ~2 hours walk.
That's about here, although the town is only a 10 minute drive.
And people moan that some kids get taxis to school, because the government has decided that it's not worth operating a school closer than 5 miles, but when you need to shift 2 people you don't put on a minibus.
There's only two primary schools within 10 miles which have fewer than 50 pupils on the (7 year) roll though, it's not an overly rural area. I suspect townies would have palpitations when they find out about state boarding schools, because if you live on Tresco you can't commute to the high school every day
"The least bad thing that Ofcom and the Government could do is to quietly let the matter drop whilst focusing on education."
This generalises very well for all Government. Shame we're a couple of generations into education being about producing pliant workers over independent, thinking human beings.
> education being about producing pliant workers over independent, thinking human beings.
You cant have things like computers and smart phones if you dont have millions of pliant workers mass producing them for you. If you want the technological world that we live in to be possible then you should accept that it requires this concept. If everybody is a creative independant free thinking individual, then nobody is a worker drone in a factory churning out phones, laptops, or the materials and components that go into them.
Mass education was formed to destroy local cultures and languages in the prussian empire and revolutionary french to make sure people were compliant and wouldn't revolt against the state's control, it has never had anything to do with making people thinkers. This is the stated purpose, and always has been.
Neither of these things happen, but even if either was miraculously true, should the onus be on the entirety of society to self-censor, or on the kids parents to parent properly (IE use parental controls and supervise screen time)?
Entire society to self censor. Individual parental level controls are ineffective. It’s like keeping your child from having a smart phone at school but then they just become a social pariah since everyone else has one. It only works if no kids are allowed to bring their smartphones to school.
I came to a similar conclusion when I was very very close to pushing the 'Buy' button on the original Palma. My main hope is for this to be successful enough to encourage some competitors who do the software / service side in a way I can get on board with.
As another product of the British 'education' system, this is all very familiar.
If you're interested in some content that really helped me understand why I hated school so completely, I recommend "Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling" by John Taylor Gatto, and "Free to Learn" by Peter Gray. Peter Gray also has a very nice blog called "Play Makes Us Human" at https://petergray.substack.com/
As a parent of a toddler, deciding on schooling options is one of the most serious decisions I'll have to make with my partner over the coming years and it terrifies me. Home schooling is a very attractive option from my perspective, but only due to lack of alternatives that offer the sort of nurturing and positive environment that I want my child to have.
> The remaining organisation was anything but a competent customer for IT implementations.
This is very much the standard in UK public procurement and has been for a large number of years. It's got a lot worse since Brexit when most civil servants with any skills or capability to deliver have moved on because they didn't want to deliver the 'will of the people' to have their cake and eat it.
Can you evidence that claim? The only major public sector procurement effort I can recall since Brexit was the COVID vaccine in which the UK procurement programme worked much better than the EU level one did, to the extent that at the height of the event the EU was seriously talking about seizing the factories manufacturing vaccines the UK had bought whilst the EU were still talking.
And they also bought far too much. Germany is now required by the EU treaties to buy so much vaccine supply that if it didn't expire it would last them until the 24th century.
After all that, there was an attempt at an investigation but it turned out the whole thing was negotiated in secret and key deals were made by Ursula von der Leyen using deleted SMS messages.
