Entrepreneur, I guess
Surrey and London
Joined January 2009
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Levanticus retweeted
Brilliant stuff from Tony Sewell in the @thetimes today. He’s absolutely right to say the people pushing reparations are political elites in these countries who want to blame Britain than fix problems in their own countries, with our useful-idiot activists over here egging them on.
If you haven’t read it, or don’t have a sub buy a copy. An essential read 👇
What the King should really tell Commonwealth leaders thetimes.com/comment/columni…
Levanticus retweeted
FIELDS MEDALIST TESTED IF HE'S OBSOLETE
timothy gowers took an open problem from a new paper on additive combinatorics and handed it to chatgpt 5.5 pro.
no fancy prompts. no setup. just the problem statement.
the model thought for 17 minutes. then wrote a complete latex preprint in two.
it took a bound that had been exponential for decades and brought it down to polynomial. the construction was something nobody had tried on this class of problems before.
gowers asked isaac rajagopal to review the work. rajagopal wrote the paper the model was improving on.
his verdict: the key idea is "completely original" and "quite ingenious." "the sort of idea i would be very proud to come up with after a week or two of pondering."
the model spent 17 minutes on it.
then gowers pushed further. gave it the harder generalized version. under an hour, a stronger result. exponential to polynomial again.
gowers on his own mathematical contribution to the whole thing: "zero. i didn't even do anything clever with the prompts."
the result is a solid chapter in a combinatorics phd. publishable mathematics that a graduate student would spend months producing.
a fields medalist. one of the best combinatorialists alive. sitting there copy-pasting prompts while a model does doctoral-level research in front of him.
his conclusion: "the lower bound for contributing to mathematics will now be to prove something that llms can't prove."
he gives the profession until 2029 before it's "transformed out of all recognition."
seventeen minutes. zero human math. a result that takes months by hand.
this was may 2026. five months ago. the model that did it is already outdated.
link to the paper in the comments
Levanticus retweeted
The changes to self-assessment taxation exemplify a system that's run for the convenience of the Treasury/HMRC, not the self-employed, sole traders and small businesses. That has to change.
Levanticus retweeted
The hidden tax measure in the Budget is huge for people paying tax under self-assessment - sole traders, partners, landlords, retired investors.
For 6th April 2028-29, you currently pay 50% of your income tax late in the tax year in question (in January 2029), 50% just after the year end (in July 2029) with any make-up payment in January 2030.
Under the new proposals you will pay your tax perhaps monthly or quarterly (TBC) from April 2029 onwards. A rough analysis suggests the impact is to draw about 50% of your tax bill forward, a huge cashflow boost to HMRC and a significant funding issue for the self-employed.
The Treasury recognises this, and expects to raise £1.3bn of additional tax in 29/30 as a result of this change.
The cashflow impact of the accelerated charge will send some businesses to the wall.
Levanticus retweeted
I wrote about my love for the film Master and Commander, in honour of Trafalgar Day this week spectator.com/article/in-pra…
Levanticus retweeted
My post about Hitler and the far right got millions of views. Clearly, it hit a nerve. So today I'm going to show you, step by step, why the notion of "far right" as it's used in France makes almost no sense. And why the people who wield it are usually the last ones who should be lecturing anyone.
Let's start with the only question that matters: what makes a political system work or fail? To a very large extent, it's the economy. A country that produces wealth, that lets its citizens create, trade and build, stays standing. A country that destroys that collapses, no matter how beautiful its slogans are.
And in economics, there are really only two worldviews.
The first is collectivism. The idea that the State knows better than you. That it must plan production, set prices, run companies, decide what you earn, what you buy, and eventually what you think. The individual is just a cog serving a grand collective project: the class, the nation, the race, the people.
The second is freedom. Capitalism, property, individual liberty, individual responsibility. The idea that millions of people creating value for one another produce infinitely more prosperity than an office of planners, however brilliant they may be.
Now look at the list of the great totalitarian regimes of the 20th century. Stalin: total planning, forced collectivization, millions dead. Mao: the Great Leap Forward and the deadliest famine in human history. Pol Pot: money abolished, cities emptied, nearly a quarter of Cambodia's population exterminated. Mussolini, the man who coined the word fascism: "Everything within the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State." And Hitler, leader of the National Socialist German Workers' Party, whose program proclaimed "the common good before individual good." He subjected the entire German economy to State plans: the Four-Year Plan, frozen prices and wages, unions dissolved into a single state labor front, industrialists producing whatever the regime decided.
Their flags were different. Their designated enemies were different. But the machinery was the same: the individual doesn't exist, only the collective matters, and the State decides everything.
Why does it always end in totalitarianism? Because collectivism doesn't work. And when a system doesn't work, it has only two options: admit failure or force people. They always choose force.
Ludwig von Mises proved it as early as 1920: without free prices, without a market, a planner simply cannot know what to produce, how much, or at what cost. He is flying blind. A planned economy isn't a less efficient version of the market. It's an impossibility.
Friedrich Hayek drew the political conclusion in 1944 in The Road to Serfdom, a book he dedicated "to the socialists of all parties." One chapter is titled "The Socialist Roots of Naziism." Another, "Why the Worst Get on Top." For Hayek, controlling the economy isn't controlling one sector among others. It is "the control of the means for all our ends." Whoever controls your bread controls your life. Then your speech. Then your thoughts.
Milton Friedman put it his own way: a society that puts equality before freedom ends up with neither.
So we know exactly what works. It's not an opinion. It's a century of real-world experiments. Listen to the Austrian school, Mises and Hayek, with Friedman from Chicago alongside them: economic freedom, limited government, individual responsibility.
And this is where we get to the great accusatory inversion. Part of the left-wing press spends its time screaming fascism. Why? Because the fascism fantasy is the best way to never talk about the track record of their own ideas. Deep down, they know: if their collectivist program were applied all the way, it wouldn't work, because a collective economy cannot work. And an economy that doesn't work always ends up having to coerce, surveil and ban. In other words, it becomes exactly what they claim to be fighting. The real heirs of totalitarian logic are not the ones being pointed at.
So who gets called "far right" in 2026? People who want safe cities. People who want to keep their culture. People who just want to live a peaceful life, raise their kids, and not have to board up their shop every weekend. People who want the law to apply to everyone.
If that's the far right, then the word no longer means anything. And maybe that was the point.
Levanticus retweeted
Yes, the monarchy was deeply implicated in the slave trade. But not the British monarchy.
The biggest African slavers were not pirates or bandits. They were kings. In the 1750s, King Tegbesu of Dahomey, in present-day Benin, was reported to be making £250,000 a year from selling slaves. That astronomical sum, equivalent to perhaps £45 million today, was vastly more than any British aristocrat
While Tegbesu was trafficking human beings, the future George III, who had recently become Prince of Wales, was becoming a convinced abolitionist. He wrote a monograph arguing that “slavery is equaly [sic] repugnant to the Civil Law as to the Law of Nature”. He went on, as King, to sign the abolition of the slave trade into law in 1807.
That act prompted incredulous rage among West African chiefs.
In the 1840s, King Ghezo of Dahomey, played by John Boyega in the 2022 film, The Woman King, fiercely resisted such pressure.
“The slave trade is the ruling principle of my people. It is the source and the glory of their wealth,” he complained.
Contrast his attitude with that of his British fellow-monarchs. Although Victoria, as Queen, was expected to refrain from expressing political opinions, her husband was under less constraint. Albert made his very first speech as Prince Consort to the Society for the Extinction of the Slave Trade and for the Civilization of Africa. His words are a reminder of how determined Britain was to ensure that ending the Atlantic slave trade did not simply push the commerce eastwards.
“I deeply regret that the benevolent and persevering exertions of England to abolish that atrocious traffic in human beings (at once the desolation of Africa and the blackest stain upon civilized Europe) have not as yet led to any satisfactory conclusion. But I sincerely trust that this great country will not relax in its efforts until it has finally, and for ever, put an end to a state of things so repugnant.”
The difference between the British Crown and contemporary African monarchies can be glimpsed in the story of Aina, a young Yoruba girl owned by King Ghezo of Dahomey.
In 1850, a naval captain called Frederick Forbes came to Dahomey to try to convince Ghezo to stop selling slaves. He was unsuccessful but, during his visit, he was offered Aina as a gift.
Forbes knew that such slaves were generally destined for human sacrifice, so he accepted the child, naming her Sara Forbes Bonetta. When Sara arrived in Britain, Queen Victoria became her godmother, paid for her education and arranged for her to marry a wealthy Yoruba businessman. Are the British really the baddies here?
Critics talk of telling our nation’s story “warts and all”; but they rarely get around to the “and all”. The “and all” surely includes the vast sums devoted to stamping out slavery, calculated by Chaim Kaufmann and Robert Pape as 1.8 per cent annually of GDP between 1808 and 1867, the most expensive moral foreign policy in human history. Even if there were a case for reparations in principle (which there is not) that sum alone – not counting the billions given in aid – would surely have covered any debt.
What we are seeing is not a debate about history, but an argument about contemporary politics. Critics want to convince us that Britain became rich through exploitation rather than, as was actually the case, through private property, free contracts and independent courts.
The easiest way to demonstrate the negative correlation between capitalism and slavery is to look at the places where human bondage is most prevalent today – in order, North Korea, Eritrea, Burundi, the Central African Republic and Mauritania. If William III owning shares in the Royal African Company bothers you more than the continuing abomination of slavery in those places, you need to ask yourself some hard questions about your motives.
Levanticus retweeted
You absolute midwit. Congrats on repeating the Wikipedia "Nazis were far-right, end of story" summary you absorbed between TikToks.
Yes, the Nazis crushed independent unions, jailed and murdered communists and social democrats, and Hitler liquidated the Strasserite "left" wing of his own party in the Night of the Long Knives. That part is not in dispute. They were not Marxist class-struggle socialists. They hated Bolshevism as a Jewish plot and treated international socialism as the main enemy. Fine.
What your middle-school history class skipped is that they still ran a National *Socialist* state: private property existed only as long as it served the Führer’s racial and war goals, wages and prices were controlled, industry was cartelized under state direction, profit was subordinated to the party, and the economy was planned for autarky and rearmament. That is not free-market capitalism, liberal conservatism, or classical right-wing economics. It is the same family of state-directed, anti-liberal, collectivist economics practiced by every other fascist and "national socialist" regime. The name was not a prank; the 25-point program and the early rhetoric were full of anti-capitalist planks precisely because they were competing with the actual socialists for working-class support.
Your North Korea comparison is the usual gotcha and it is only half-clever. Yes, names can lie. But the NSDAP did not merely call itself socialist while secretly running a Rothschild hedge fund. They nationalized, directed, rationed, and regimented. The difference from Soviet socialism was mainly that the Nazis kept the owners as managers under party orders instead of shooting them all and installing commissars. Both systems produced shortages, secret police, and mass graves; one just had better uniforms and Wagner.
Elon pointing out the obvious—that "National Socialist" is not an ironic branding exercise and that the regime was economically left of any classical liberal or conservative—does not make him a moron. It makes him less obedient to the post-1945 academic consensus that insists every totalitarian who isn’t a full Marxist must be filed under "far-right" so the left never has to share the body count. Money didn’t buy him a brain; it just bought him a platform where he doesn’t have to pretend your selective reading of 1930s Germany is the complete picture.
Keep yelling "far-right fascists" while ignoring the actual economic policies and the party’s own name. It is the historical equivalent of covering your ears and shouting.
Levanticus retweeted
Today in the Lords a Private Members Bill
British Sovereignty Protection (Chagos Islands) Bill
– Second Reading – Lord Weir of Ballyholme / this would ensure a referendum for the Chagossians on their wish to stay British @LordWeirDUP
Levanticus retweeted
🚨NEW: The Online Safety Act has been a failure, according to a new report from Ofcom.
Ofcom have found "no significant change" in children encountering harmful content since the law came into effect last July. This is despite the signifigant threats to free speech and privacy.
Levanticus retweeted
A word from me on TNT Sports presenter Rachel Casey.
Never mind her skills as a television presenter - which are top level of course - that was pure humanity from Rachel.
Her warmth, decency and kindness were exactly what was needed. Thank God she was on duty.
Mark Allen says his snooker career may be over in an emotional TNT Sports interview.
tntsports.co.uk/snooker/betv…
If you or someone else you know is struggling, call 116 123 right now for free support.
Levanticus retweeted
Ronnie O’Sullivan: “If Mark Selby is struggling mentally and I’m struggling mentally and John Higgins is struggling mentally then the other 124 players will 1 million percent be struggling.”
Levanticus retweeted
Imagine if the Britain they dreamed up after the war had actually got built.
Norway sold us 69% of the gas we imported last year, out of the same North Sea we sit on. France sent us 21.9 TWh of electricity down a cable, most of it nuclear. We opened the world's first commercial nuclear power station in 1956 and now rely on another country to run the tech for us.
Spent the morning thinking about what the modern version looks like. Edinburgh to London in about 1 hour 50, which is what you'd get running trains at Chinese speeds over 534km. It's 4 hours 10 at best right now. China built the Beijing to Shanghai line, 1,318km, in 3 years. HS2 is 225km, started digging in 2017 and might open in 2037 lol.
Factories back in the north building chips and robots instead of us importing them. Scotland doing military tech out of Glasgow and Rosyth. Enough nuclear that electricity stops being a topic, a grid that can actually carry it, and our own oil and gas paying for it all whilst we get there.
None of this is sci-fi either. Korea builds the same reactor over and over and it gets cheaper every time. We build one, take 20 years over it and it costs £48bn.
Levanticus retweeted
The NCSC is encouraging UK organisations to prepare for immediate updating of systems using PHP. Where immediate remediation is not feasible, organisations should consider taking the system offline until it can be fully mitigated.
For more⬇️
ncsc.gov.uk/news/critical-se…
